Thirty-three years ago, an eon in contemporary art terms, artists Stephen Prina and Mike Kelley and choreographer Anita Pace collectively conceived a unique and gruelling performance. Beat of the Traps involved two drummers hammering their kits at excessive volume, while an actor shouted Kelley’s confrontational text and two dancers moved to the rhythms. Well received in Vienna and Los Angeles in 1992, it has never been seen again – until now. The piece is central to ‘Stephen Prina: A Lick and a Promise’, the Museum of Modern Art’s first-ever survey devoted to an artist’s performance work.

Prina and Pace, as well as the two original drummers, reconvened in Los Angeles last month to rehearse a fresh version of that now legendary event, to be presented in New York on 19 September 2025. Kelley had taken his own life in 2012, in part due to depression and alcohol, the vodka that is a part of this work's text. Since the recent rehearsal was in the Geffen building of the Museum of Contemporary Art, an early supporter of the artists, it was an emotional moment for the old friends who were reliving its original creation.

Prina, with his cropped beard and trim black suit, recalled his friend: ‘Mike was very self-critical. This has been a little difficult, actually. I'm getting emotional because it's brought my Mike to the fore. The actor in the play is basically a double for me in the performance but also for Mike. And so I hear Mike's voice.’

Pace agreed. ‘It is a little bittersweet because Mike’s not here so I’m performing a lot of what he would have been doing. It’s kind of like, “What would Mike do here?”’ I want to keep true to where that first bonding of the three of us came together to make this work. It’s been amazing.’

Though music, composition and staging have long been components of Prina’s visual art, they take on greater complexity when presented independently, and not as part of a sculpture, installation or film. MoMA curator Stuart Comer thinks that Prina’s way of borrowing from pop, classical and modern music is ‘a model of appropriation unique in a field more rooted in photography, moving images, and sculpture’.

The artist excels at connecting unlikely points of historic, cultural and social relevance. Evolving as a post-conceptualist during the 1980s, he extended the idea of appropriation to music to amplify those references.

The performances at MoMA will have an additional and important historical benefit. Comer points out, ‘Stephen, and often Kelley, refused recording of their performances at that time so there is little documentation. He still prefers not to do video, but now there will be audio documentation, so it will be on the record and that will be an important contribution for posterity.’ The performances combine classical and rock music with Prina’s own compositions and, at times, singing and guitar playing.

The original Beat of the Traps was the first time Prina had performed in a decade. He had played in rock bands in high school in the small town of Galesburg, Illinois – even performing at a supper club with a group called Jeannie and the Aladdins – but left it all behind after graduating from music school at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb in 1977. ‘I’ve grown out of that,’ he thought. ‘Now, I'm going to be a serious composer, and I'm going to write on paper.’

Prina went to graduate school at CalArts outside LA to study with sly pioneers of Conceptual Art like John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler, whose approach was both serious and droll. ‘I've always been drawn to the things that challenge me. I'm not interested so much in art that congratulates me on my received ideas,’ he quips.

‘I have a project-based practice. What is the best way to apply this? I really didn't think of visual art and music being separate. I thought that, well, visual art is multiple to begin with, so there are all these different genres. Photography, painting, and music is just another component of that.’

Prina later brought that perspective to teaching at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena – where he gained notoriety for teaching a class using the acting of Keanu Reeves and the writing of Nietzsche – and then at Harvard, before retiring last spring.

The experience of working with Kelley on Beat of the Traps led Prina two years later to the creation of Sonic Dan, a performance blending the seemingly incompatible tunes of Sonic Youth and Steely Dan. They had recorded the same number of albums by 1994, alongside a recording of Anton Webern’s complete string quartets.

That show at Luna Park in West Hollywood brought an impressive audience, including Mayo Thompson from the band Red Crayola, who then asked Prina to play on his first release on Drag City Records. ‘When the album came out, I was listed as a member of the band,’ he explains. He continued to perform with them for the next decade.

Yet, just as many of his performances are rooted in the classics, such as the Mozart-derived String Quartet for Six Players (1976), involving a roll of the dice to select which musician plays which section to expand the four-piece, an element of chance and mathematics that evokes the techniques of John Cage. Nonetheless, Prina remains better known for his visual art in galleries and museums. Several such works are being shown at MoMA, including an ideal choice being shown for the first time: The Top Thirteen Singles from Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles Chart for the Week Ending September 11, 1993. At the top of each hour, a large clock chimes a musical hit of the past.

‘Whoomp, there it is,’ a rap dance tune by Tag Team, will be bouncing off the white walls of the galleries. Comer says, ‘It shows how things change over time, how the canon, once written by MoMA, can be played with. It “contaminates” the institution with popular cultures.’

Prina titled his prestigious show after a phrase used by his mother, who, like his father, was an Italian immigrant. ‘I grew up in a household that was bleached and boiled. If company was visiting, and my mother didn't have time to totally go over the house, she would give what she would describe as “a lick and a promise” to make it look presentable. So I've always loved that phrase and I do take delight in the double entendre.’ It is also the title of his newest composition, to be performed in November, while the show concludes on 13 December with the Push Comes to Love Fest. Prina will perform with others, ranging from classical pianist Ursula Oppens to Red Crayola’s guitarist David Grubbs.

Despite previous surveys and shows, his moment at MoMA carries a lot of weight. ‘I would like to think that I'm a critically engaged artist and I'm always, you know, self-critically being self-reflexive. But this places a different kind of pressure on that. That is where the emotional punch comes in. I think, “Well, what have I decided to do with my work, with my production, with my life?” You know?’

'Stephen Prina: A Lick and a Promise', from 12 September – 13 December 2025 at The Museum of Modern Art, moma.org

Almost 7,000 miles apart yet increasingly in dialogue, Seoul and New York have just tightened their cultural axis with the arrival of the MoMA Bookstore at Hyundai Card. The new outpost marks the Museum of Modern Art’s first bookstore of its kind (beyond book sections as part of its Design Stores) and extends its two-decade collaboration with the Hyundai Motor Company-owned credit card issuer, which began in 2006 when MoMA’s online store was made available in South Korea.

Introducing MoMA Bookstore at Hyundai Card, Seoul

The partnership has since evolved into a robust cultural exchange. In 2010, MoMA introduced membership benefits for Hyundai Card holders, which later supported headline exhibitions such as ‘Haegue Yang: Handles’ (2019) and ‘Sung Hwan Kim: Temper Clay’ (2021). Most recently, the Hyundai Card Curatorial Exchange Programme (2024) was inaugurated to foster cross-continental dialogue between Korean and American art communities, while the Hyundai Card MoMA Digital Wall (2025) commissions site-specific works by contemporary artists, displayed in real time both at MoMA New York and at Hyundai Card’s Yeouido HQ.

Set in the leafy enclave of Dosan Park, the bookstore aligns itself with Hyundai Card’s constellation of cultural spaces, such as the Cooking Library, Iron & Wood and Red11. The elongated interior unfurls in two acts: a pared-back library of over 1,100 titles – including MoMA’s own catalogues and more than 200 books spanning contemporary art, photography, architecture, and design – and a boldly hued retail chamber in shades of orange and yellow. Here, shelves brim with the museum’s cult merchandise: the ubiquitous tote, New Era caps, varsity-style sweaters, and limited-edition design objects.

Anchoring the book selection are heavyweight tomes. Wallpaper* recommends Judd, offering an incisive study of American artist Donald Judd’s practice, or a retrospective on photographer and photojournalist, Walker Evans.

The MoMA Bookstore at Hyundai Card is located at 18-10 Dosan-daero 45-gil, Gangnam District, Seoul, South Korea.

Ruth Asawa might be best known for her captivating, biomorphic looped wire sculptures and her legacy at Black Mountain college as a student – and then colleague – of Josef Albers, Merce Cunningham and R Buckminster Fuller. But many outside of Northern California don’t know that over the course of a six-decade career living, working and raising six children in San Francisco, Asawa also had a dynamic public art practice with more than a dozen pieces, including fountains, murals and memorials, that were intimately tied to her community and her arts activism.

The current ‘Ruth Asawa: Retrospective’ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), on view through 2 September 2025, is a thrilling, poetic exhibition featuring more than 300 pieces, a testament to a prolific artist who worked in a variety of mediums.

The show, which will open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this October, also features images and ephemera of a few public commissions. Asawa’s 1973 San Francisco Fountain, for instance, is an homage to the city she loved that was originally rendered in her favourite baker's clay, a dough made of flour, water, and salt, a recipe she often made with her own children. The final work includes baker's clay sculptural contributions from 250 residents aged three to 88 that were later cast in bronze.

Then there’s the 1968 Andrea fountain in Ghirardelli square, which at the time stirred controversy for its depiction of a nursing mermaid and an aesthetic that drew the ire of critics who called it 'corny' and 'high camp'.

Asawa responded, 'This is what I want to do.'

In their exhibition catalogue essay 'What Cannot Be Produced Alone: Ruth Asawa’s Public Art', Marci Kwon, an associate professor of art history at Stanford University, and Jennie Yoon, an art history PhD candidate at Stanford, recount this Andrea fountain anecdote and other histories as they examine the collaborative nature of Asawa’s public commissions.

'These works are extremely well known and beloved in San Francisco. People have childhood and shared memories of them. They’re part of the fabric of everyday life,' says Kwon. 'They are more than the product of an individual genius, but her presence and community advocacy are palpable.'

In 1990, Asawa began working on one of her most personal commissions, the Japanese American Internment Memorial, acknowledging the incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent during the Second World War by the United States Government after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. The city of San Jose, about an hour south of San Francisco, engaged her to create a series of bronze panels portraying universal narratives of immigration, community and agricultural life, as well as incarceration camps, barbed wire and armed soldiers. This was also the first time Asawa depicted her own incarceration history, one that even her children didn’t know completely.

Asawa’s daughter Addie Lanier points out that the Trump administration’s immigration policies are reminiscent of what her mother’s family suffered. 'She was very much part of her time in America,' Lanier says. 'With the rise of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movements, her ways of engaging with issues was through public art.'

Lanier collaborated with her mother on the San Jose memorial, conducting historical and personal family research. Asawa’s artist friend Nancy Thomspon, and son Paul Lanier, also an artist, worked with Asawa to sculpt the panels using her beloved baker's clay that were later cast in bronze.

Asawa was born outside Los Angeles in 1926 to a farming family. Two months after Pearl Harbor, her father was abducted and imprisoned by the FBI. Later, her mother, Asawa and five siblings were sent to a temporary detention site at the Santa Anita Racetrack, where they lived in two horse stalls. Eventually, they were sent to Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.

While Asawa’s artistic ethos is often associated with the experimental, Bauhaus-influenced Black Mountain College, she always credited the importance of the arts education she received at the Santa Anita detention centre, where Disney animation artists Tom Okamoto, Chris Ishii and James Tanaka taught the children art.

'She was very explicit about their impact on her and that she took art classes in the camps at age 16. It was there that she learned that being an artist might be a life that was possible for her,' says Yoon.

The best way to experience Asawa’s public commissions is to visit them for yourself. Fortunately, her family (Asawa died in 2013) has compiled a self-guided public art tour replete with maps, images and audio accompaniment from Asawa and other collaborators and friends

Janet Bishop, SFMOMA chief curator, who co-curated the Asawa retrospective with MoMA curator Cara Manes, says, 'When people ask me what impact San Francisco had on Ruth Asawa, I say the better question is, what impact did Ruth Asawa have on San Francisco?'

Design has long derived inspiration from nature, but one of the most eccentric and captivating examples took the form of a 13-storey skyscraper in Tokyo composed of 140 prefabricated, 100 sq ft pods jigsawed around a concrete-and-steel structure. The Nakagin Capsule Tower, completed by the Metabolist architect Kishō Kurokawa in 1972, was meant to grow, adapt and evolve – just like a living organism.

‘If you replace the capsules every 25 years, it could last 200 years,’ Kurokawa said in a 2007 interview. ‘It’s recyclable. I designed it as sustainable architecture.’ Until 2022, when it was demolished, the tower’s distinctive interlocking grey cubes with porthole windows were iconic elements of the local skyline, drawing architecture buffs and Instagrammers alike to admire its form.

Now, the tower is the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Organised by assistant curator Evangelos Kotsioris and curatorial associate Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, ‘The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower’ (until July 2026) celebrates the building’s inventive design and the impact it had on the people who lived in it. It is an exhibition about innovative ideas as well as post-occupancy. It includes a fully restored pod, an original display model, architectural drawings, archival marketing materials, films and photographs of residents showing how they inhabited their pods, as well as an interactive virtual tour of the building, showing the state of the structure in the twilight of its life.

‘We knew about the history of the project, but the more the two of us looked into the specifics, the reality of how things unfolded was a much more interesting story to tell than just the intentions of the architect,’ Kotsioris says.

Kurokawa’s building represented a new form of urban living during a time of rapid cultural, technological and economic change in Japan. As Kotsioris writes in a book accompanying the show, Kurokawa ‘envisioned the tower as the habitat of Homo movens, the modern individual in an increasingly mobile society’.

While the project was built over 50 years ago, the ideas still feel resonant for today. Cities around the world are contending with a worsening housing shortage and are struggling to build units that meet their changing demographics, including a rising rate of single people. Kurokawa’s idea anticipated the micro apartment, a type of building that today’s architects are exploring to solve the crisis.

The Nakagin Capsule Tower was originally billed as a pied-à-terre for businessmen who commuted to Tokyo for work and whose families lived elsewhere. The tiny pods, measuring just 8ft x 13ft, featured a bed; a wall unit with a built-in desk, television, closet and sink; and a bathroom. ‘In a way, it's also a showcase of Japanese technology: a Sony TV, Pioneer headphones, a Sharp calculator, a Sanyo refrigerator,’ Kostriosis says. ‘So it was this kind of combination between a device and a product and an architectural enclosure.’

The experience is ship-like efficiency. Nobuo Abe, an architect in Kurokawa’s firm who led the design and construction of the capsules, was also a sailor and came up with the idea to have all the furniture on the periphery.

Because the building was the first of its kind, Kurokawa also took great care in how it was positioned in the real estate market. The Nakagin company, with support from the firm, created pamphlets and instruction manuals that borrowed from automotive sales and even offered ‘deluxe’ versions of the pods that featured optional amenities, like a stereo system.

‘The capsule being a single-occupancy space was really meant to reinforce your personal perspective, which in the Japanese societal context was seen as an aberration,’ Kotsioris says. ‘They use language and graphics to construct a lifestyle; it’s not just about a building in the conventional sense.’ The curators digitised this ephemera so that visitors to the exhibition can flip through.

The tower is ‘a product of its time’, Vilaplana de Miguel adds. ‘When consumerism, TV and commercials started to circulate more widely, architects like Kurokawa decided to be part of it. He was a great businessman himself and he really embraced the commercial aspect.’

When the building’s units hit the market in 1972, they sold out in two days. Initially, businessmen moved in. Then in the 1980s, when Japan’s economy crashed, the prices plummeted and younger residents, students and artists moved in. Later, when the building’s demolition seemed imminent, it attracted people who were fans of the building and Kurokawa’s work. ‘All kinds of quirky people start to move in and become obsessed with actually preserving its memory or legacy or afterlife,’ Kotsioris says. ‘And it’s thanks to them that we, and other institutions, have fragments of its history.’ (The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama also acquired pods.)

Some recent residents included an anime cosplay DJ, who used her pod as a streaming booth for her shows; Kurokawa's own son, Mikio, who transformed one into a library; and an interior designer who renovated his space to have an industrial, Steampunk aesthetic. And, naturally, the last cohort who lived there included preservationists who restored units to Kurokawa’s original vision, down to the light switches. These various shifts reflect the core idea of the building: it can be refashioned again and again.

‘Metabolists have this idea of buildings evolving over time and reshaping as society changes,’ Vilaplana de Miguel explains. ‘Kurokawa based his project on Buddhist and Zen philosophies of cycles of life.’

Sadly, the building deteriorated. Kurokawa envisioned replacing the pods every 25 years, which did not occur. Their flat roofs collected water, making the units vulnerable to leaks and moisture damage. The bright pink and orange stairwells in the tower (which informed the hues of the exhibition’s gallery walls) were eventually painted over in grey. And there were asbestos concerns. It would have been cost-prohibitive to try to fully restore the building due to the deferred maintenance. But the residents who rallied for its preservation managed to save 23 capsules and fully restore 14 of them.

Normally, when a building is demolished, especially one with as rich a history as the Nakagin Capsule Tower, it is perceived as a tragic loss. But Kotsioris notes that the dismantling of the pods, their distribution to museums around the world, and reincarnation as the subject of exhibitions, aligns with the lifecycle concept that Kurokawa imagined for his tower – even if he didn’t predict its eventual outcome. In a 1972 promotional film for the tower that screens in the gallery, we see a pod loaded onto a ship with the narrator explaining a vision the architect had in which the pod’s resident could remove their unit from the building and have it travel with them.

Twelve of the tower’s former residents journeyed to MoMA to celebrate the exhibition’s opening last week. In remarks, Tatsuyuki Maeda, a former resident who led preservation efforts, said that he was ‘very grateful to everyone involved for allowing us to exhibit our beloved capsule’.

That Kurokawa was able to create a building that so many people cherished and felt deep personal connections to is perhaps his most enduring achievement, and one that will live on indefinitely.

‘The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower’ is on view at MoMA through 12 July 2026.

moma.org

MoMA, like the Guggenheim and Tate Modern, is a master at making modern art a desirable brand, expending as much effort into tie-ins and collaborations, presentation and image as it does into displaying the actual collection. The Museum of Modern Art’s newest collaboration has more pop-cultural credibility than most, for the humble Polaroid has found its way into the practice of many an artist over the years.

The camera of choice for the partnership is Polaroid’s Now Generation 3 (not the recently announced Polaroid Flip). Finished in a rich blue (not quite as dark as that equated with Yves Klein), the camera comes with a limited-edition pack of i-Type film, eight shots with a set of frames taken from 12 designs – some shown here – featuring quotes or logos.

It's surprising how the addition of a bon mot from Meret Oppenheim, Milton Glaser or even Vincent van Gogh can elevate your humble snapshot into a one-off treasure, but that’s the intended spirit. Described as an homage to artists past, present and future, the Polaroid x MoMA camera also comes with three interchangeable MoMa-branded straps.

With artists like David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Nancy Burson, Robert Frank and Ansel Adams all making use of the Polaroid format at some point or another in their careers, the revitalised camera manufacturer is keen to reassert its role in artistic culture. The sample pics shown here have been taken by a group of contemporary photographers, all of whom relished the chance to explore the unique aesthetic of Polaroid and the new limited-edition film.

The Polaroid Now Generation 3 Instant Camera is the company’s most straightforward device, a pleasing physical and visual throwback with the added benefit of USB-C charging and use of Polaroid’s widely available i-Type film.

Polaroid Now Generation 3 - MoMA Edition, $129,99 / €139,99 / £129,99; Polaroid i-Type Color Film - MoMA Edition, $21,99 / €21,99 / £20,99, available from Polaroid.com and Store.MoMa.org, @Polaroid

Jerry Lorenzo, the creative force behind Los Angeles-based label Fear of God, describes his approach as one of honesty: ‘clothing that allows people to be the best versions of who they are’. Running with the tagline ‘American Luxury’, the 2013-founded Fear of God – alongside its offshoot ‘Essentials’ – imbues quotidian garments, from hoodies and sweatpants to wool overcoats, blazers and denim jeans, with a mood of pared-back elegance, influenced by the dress codes of Lorenzo’s native California. In doing so, he continues the traditions of American sportswear: a continuum which includes Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, both touchpoints for the designer.

Two looks by Lorenzo feature in ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’, the latest Costume Institute exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the opening of which is heralded by the Met Gala. Taking place yesterday evening, the starry event – often deemed the ‘Oscars of Fashion‘ – saw Lorenzo gather a table of cultural luminaries spanning the worlds of art, film and fashion, each of which echoes his all-in approach to creation (‘we pour all of ourselves into our work’). These included Sinners director Ryan Coogler and his wife, producer Zinzi Coogler; artists Arthur Jafa, Amy Sherald and Lauren Halsey; fashion designer Andre Walker; actress Yara Shahidi; footballer DeAndre Hopkins; and Lorenzo’s wife, Desiree Manuel, who he has previously called his ultimate muse. (Lorenzo also dressed Adrien Brody and Spike Lee for the event.)

Here, in his own words, Lorenzo speaks on curating the perfect Met Gala table, the ‘elegance of honesty’ on and off the red carpet, and how he reinterpreted the figure of the Black dandy at the heart of the ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’. ‘It’s about communicating dignity: that’s what the dandy was trying to do, he was using his clothes to fight for dignity, to be seen as equal,’ he says. ‘That’s the spirit behind what we’re doing with our guests.’

Fear of God’s Jerry Lorenzo on curating the perfect Met Gala table and the ‘elegance of honesty’

‘With the Met Gala, everyone is mostly just interested in the arrivals [on the red carpet], even though it’s kicking off an exhibition. So I think the majority of the people who go are those who love to be seen – they go out, and they get a chance to be seen by the world. But I feel like the people on our table don’t subscribe to that.

‘It was more important for me to honour friends of mine, people that I’m close with, who approach their work in the same way that I do mine. You know, rewriting our narrative, the way our culture is seen, and creating an honest picture of that. Honesty is where there’s beauty: Amy [Sherald] does that through her work, Ryan [Coogler] does that through his work... Arthur Jafa, too. Andre Walker has also been doing that for a very long time.

‘Mostly, these people are just friends. Someone like Ryan, he’s my guy, and with his success [with Sinners], everything just feels as if it's ordained or in alignment. Regardless of whether he had a movie out or not, he'd be coming with me, because I have so much respect for him. I know him on a deep level, and we're very similar in the way that we just pour all of ourselves into our work.

‘I think the intention of what I'm trying to do through Fear of God is to create pieces that'll allow people to be the best versions of who they are. They don't have to live in pretentiousness or wear an outfit that says something that they’re not. I’m designing something honest to who people are. That’s the elegance of honesty: you're just yourself. If you look like you are trying too hard, or trying to be what you‘re not, you don't look as sophisticated as someone who is comfortable.

‘So for my guests, I'm putting them in what I believe is a look that transcends the carpet. Of course I believe they'll be elegant, beautiful for the carpet, but they would look just as good if they wanted to go on a date and never even hit the Met Gala. I think it’s easy for me to do this because I know myself, who I am and what I'm here to say, it just anchors me in every decision I make. I just want them to be elegant, effortless, [ready] for whatever a day might bring.

‘In terms of the theme, it’s based on a specific character [the Black dandy], but the story of getting dressed within Black culture transcends that. I’m more looking at what the spirit of that is, and designing into that, not necessarily following a specific aesthetic. It’s about communicating dignity: that’s what a dandy was trying to do, he was using his clothes to fight for dignity, to be seen as equal. That’s the spirit behind what we’re doing with our guests.

‘All the looks are custom, with a few of the women’s looks adapted from our first womenswear collection, which comes out later this year. Seeing people wearing Fear of God is really the gift that gives back: anytime that someone comes up to you and says, man, I love the way I feel in this, that’s what I’m designing for. This intangible emotion – to help someone feel better, closer to the best part of themselves.’

‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ runs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute from May 10 2025 – October 2025. It is supported by Louis Vuitton.

metmuseum.org

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has announced that it is promoting curator Christophe Cherix to be its new director.

The announcement follows a six-month international search after the museum’s current director, Glenn Lowery, announced that he would step down from MoMA’s top post after leading the museum for three decades.

Cherix joined MoMA—one of the world’s most powerful arts institutions— in 2007 after serving as curator of the prints at the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2013, he was named MoMA’s Robert Lehman Foundation chief curator of drawings and prints. During his 18-year tenure at MoMA, the Swiss-born curator has overseen important acquisitions and mounted exhibitions including last year’s critically-acclaimed ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, as well shows on the work of Betye Saar, Adrian Piper, Marcel Broodthaers, Yoko Ono and Jasper Johns.

MoMA’s board unanimously confirmed Cherix’s appointment, which was announced to staff today, according to the New York Times.

‘Christophe’s brilliant curatorial leadership in modern and contemporary art, deep insight and passion for MoMA’s collection, and reputation for steady stewardship stood out as indispensable qualities to meet the moment as the museum’s next director,’ board chair Marie-Josée Kravis said in a press release.

The directorship will mark Cherix’s first time leading an arts institution. He will officially start as director in September, the month Lowry planned to step down.

‘MoMA has long been a leader in embracing new forms of expression, amplifying the voices of artists from around the globe, and engaging the broadest audiences onsite and online,’ Cherix said in a statement.

‘As the museum approaches its centennial, my highest priority is to support its exceptional staff and ensure that their unique ability to navigate the ever-evolving present continues to thrive.’

The acclaimed British fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner has applied her creative eye to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of its ongoing Artist’s Choice series. Entitled ‘Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner – Spirit Movers’, Wales Bonner’s curation gathers together 50 works that focus on Black cultural and aesthetic practices inspired by the styles, experiences, forms, and sounds of the African diaspora. 

‘Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner – Spirit Movers’ at MoMA

Housed in the museum’s street-level galleries, the succinct yet powerful grouping of works exudes an energetic, aural and visual vibration that transcends a range of mediums and scales. From Terry Adkins’ soaring ‘Last Trumpet’, an ensemble of four 18-foot-long horns which double as sculptures and musical instruments and represents his quest ‘to make music as physical as sculpture might be and sculpture as ethereal as music is’, to David Hammons’ ‘Afro Asian Eclipse (or Black China)’ (1978), which will be on view for the first time at MoMA, and combines a makeshift scroll with geometric patterns formed from tufts of hair that the artist collected from barbershop floors, the works in the show speaks to Wales Bonner’s exploration of ritual and devotional customs. They are presented not as static objects or images, but as dynamic entities deeply connected to performance, music, bodies, and communion.

‘In this exhibition, ”Spirit Movers”, I was thinking a lot about what becomes embedded into artworks and materials,’ Wales Bonner says. ‘I was thinking a lot about materials that have some kind of past life or the passing of time being evident in artworks. One of the things that has always been fascinating to me is how sound can be captured through different forms. For example, Terry Adkins’ work has always inspired me, and thinking about “Last Trumpet”, which is something that’s both sculpture but used for performance as well I was also interested in how objects and artworks can transform and become something else, or how certain materials can be reinvented and repurposed to have a new life to them.’

She adds, ‘Also, this idea of gesture and devotion, a rhythmic way of making that’s embedded in the artwork, whether it's a painting that’s created in a repetitive sequence or the amalgamation of materials that have been gathered together and placed in a very specific and dedicated way. These are some of the themes that I was interested in exploring how this practice becomes captured in the work itself. In thinking about materials that could have some kind of spiritual and magical potential, I also wanted to include some artworks with a relationship to sound and music, as a potential for performance to happen at any moment or for a performance from the past to have a resurgence. There’s also this passing of time that becomes evident in the materials and the patina of the materials and the way they’ve been transformed.’

In addition to several works in the museum’s collection that are being shown for the first time, Wales Bonner also brought in Edgar Arceneaux’s ‘Failed Attempt at Crystallization III’ (2003), the only work on loan from the show, which shows sugar crystals partially forming over a copy of Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’. Some of the works are also displayed on specially commissioned wooden plinths by Peter Mabeo, a designer from Botswana who crafted them by hand, in an intentionally rhythmic way that continues the spirit of the exhibition.

The Artist’s Choice series, now in its 16th instalment, invites a contemporary artist to curate an exhibition of works drawn from the museum’s collection and has previously included visionaries such as Yto Barrada (2021), Amy Sillman (2019), Peter Fischli (2018), David Hammons (2017), Trisha Donnelly (2012) and the architects Herzog & de Meuron (2006).

To celebrate Wales Bonner’s edition, the museum has published an artist’s book, ‘Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm – Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection’, assembled by Wales Bonner as ‘an archive of soulful expression.’ Through a selection of nearly 80 works from the Museum’s collection and archives, the tome draws multisensory connections between pictures and poems, music and performance, hearing and touch, gestures and vibrations, and bodies in motion, with texts by Black authors from the past century, including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Robin Coste Lewis, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, Jean Toomer, Quincy Troupe, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

‘Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers’ is on view from November 18, 2023 until April 7, 2024 at MoMA, New York.

moma.org

In some ways, the exhibition 'Life Cycles: The Materials Of Contemporary Design' has been in the making for a lifetime. Now open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 7 July 2024), it’s the culmination of a year-long effort – and a year in museum-time is a very quick clip. 

'You could say that I kind of crafted the exhibition a long time in advance,' says Paola Antonelli (a former Wallpaper* Design Awards judge), long beloved for her contributions at MoMA, where she’s the senior curator of Architecture and Design (and has been with the institution since 1994). 'I am pretty much responsible for all the acquisitions of the past 30 years.'

'Life Cycles: The Materials Of Contemporary Design'

Composed of some 80 objects from 40 design and art practitioners (and almost entirely pulled from MoMA’s collection), the show is both a prompt and a continuation of a thread. As the title itself lays out, it’s an exploration of materials and their lifespan - with time being of the literal essence. This go-around, it’s a consideration of how these materials function from extraction to use/re-use to disposal. Says Antonelli, 'It's about rereading [these works] in the context of today, in the context of the environmental crisis, and new ways to build and new ways to design.'

Out from the archive comes iconic pieces of design like Nendo’s Cabbage Chair, 2007, and Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny’s The Honeycomb Vase "Made by Bees," 2006, originally acquired for their novel materiality. The Cabbage Chair, made from by-product paper waste from Issey Miyake’s fabric pleating process, is a lesson in circularity; while The Honeycomb Vase, produced entirely from bees themselves, is the embodiment of zero-waste.

These well-known examples are framed beyond something novel or beautiful - though, 'the opposite of beautiful is not ugly, but it's lazy,' Antonelli is quick to point out. 'Formal intention and elegance are a means of communication. They're almost like a human right. First, who says that something has to be badly designed and sloppy to be serious? You know, this is such an old and formalistic view of the world.'

And that formalism has largely descended from Western-centric Platonic ideal, and so Antonelli was eager to include practitioners from the Global South who are incorporating indigenous and non-Western attitudes towards sustainability, such as Fernando Laposse’s corn-husk ‘Totomoxtle’ and Adhi Nugraha, whose ‘Cow Dung’ lamp series from 2021, takes on contemporary aesthetic tastes but built from a most abundant natural materials.

'There's a lot that is happening in the non-Western/northern hemisphere that can be even more educational for us designers to learn how to deal with climate change, and so we need to do more,' she says. It’s also one reason Antonelli was so eager to commission Ghanaian-Filipina Mae-ling Lokko for a large-scale wall panel made of coconut shells and mycelium (mushroom), where the work’s manufacturing came from naturally available forms of energy and materials. Lokko’s work embodies progress and the next-era of design.

And doing more is ultimately what underscores this exhibition. It’s less a prescription than it is an aesthetic call-to-action. 'Politics is life in a society and in the world. And design is a vital part of it,' says Antonelli, who also co-founded Design Emergency with the equally lauded Alice Rawsthorn. 'Design is a very powerful force to be reckoned with, and a tool to change the way things work in the world by changing people's behaviours.' 

Persuading attitudes is perhaps one of the hardest arenas to inspire change, however: 'citizens are ready to pounce on being more responsible,' she says; and “Life Cycles” might just be the inspiration 'to concoct and a push to mix and compose and rethink the elements of contemporary life.' 

Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design is on view until 7 July 2024

The Museum of Modern Art
11 W 53rd St
New York, NY 10019

moma.org

Wolfgang Tillmans has shaped the world of photography as we know it. Over a prolific, 35-year career, the German photographer has infused an unvarnished intimacy and a playful sense of observation into his images. Today, his fascination with the everyday is emulated in so much of the imagery that envelopes us. The full extent of his wide-reaching influence is palpable when walking through his first major survey in New York, now taking over the entire sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art. Titled ‘To Look Without Fear’, the stunning retrospective brings together approximately 350 photography, video and multimedia works, displayed in a loose chronology for the first time. 

Curated by Roxana Marcoci, MoMA’s senior curator of photography, the exhibition is a profound and emotional look back on Tillmans’ career. Spread over 11 galleries, it charts the artist’s depictions of identity, sexuality and gender, his political and social engagement and activism, his fascination with astronomy, science and technological advancement, as well as his passion for music, instrumentation and composition. An accompanying catalogue and a separate tome of interviews and writings, titled A Reader, complete this deep dive into Tillmans’ multifaceted practice.

A culmination of eight years of work – including five devoted to shaping the show and over a year-long delay due to Covid-19 – ‘To Look Without Fear’ is intricate and multilayered. It begins in 1986 with early abstract experiments with a photocopier, including Tillmans’ first self-portrait, and soon gives way to images chronicling the development of his non-confrontational style, representing sexuality and gender in the mid-1990s. Among the notable bodies of work are his odes to club culture, as seen in Chemistry Squares (1992) a series of intimate close-ups taken on a single night at the weekly Chemistry party at London’s Soundshaft nightclub. Elsewhere, the artist’s obsession with Concorde is captured in a wall grid of 56 photographs from 1997, documenting the plane’s take-offs and landings. There is a beautiful tension in directing attention to the mundane – instead of elevating it, Tillmans recognises it for what it is.

‘That insistence on being honest was at the core of what I wanted to convey in the early 1990s,’ Tillmans says, a week before the opening. ‘To take an honest look at life and to take me and my generation seriously, not to look at us as a passing phase or as crazy young people, but to look at the seriousness of life, which now I say without fear. I felt all the joy and exuberance of partying, but I also felt the weight of existence. It’s hard to be alive and hard to bear that hardship. I guess that’s what sets [those pictures] apart. It’s not something one can claim, because it can’t be faked. I want to lay reality bare. Somehow, the pictures show reality and life in its complexity and its beauty, but it's also not embellished.’

This authenticity is especially pronounced in the way Tillmans has configured the exhibition, which he personally installed over 16 days with his studio team. In defiance of institutional conventions, the work oscillates between being taped, hung with bulldog clips and mounted in frames on the walls. There are also magazine pages and the artist’s collections of newspaper clippings that have been printed and exhibited with equal reverence. The scales and formats at which images have been printed and displayed are also specifically designed for MoMA, reflecting Tillmans’ push for creating a visual democracy. By ignoring institutional norms and signals, the installation reassigns values to the works on view.

‘I like the viewer to attribute value [to images in] the way they see things themselves, and not to guide them by a system [like] the biggest picture is the most important and the smaller ones are some flotsam or side dish,’ he says, while explaining how a small picture of a Shaker building in Maine (Shaker Rainbow, 1998) was actually presented as a 12-foot-tall print in another major museum exhibition. ‘It’s really a question of play; I wanted to retain a playfulness in the process of making this exhibition because that element has also led to other exhibitions which people loved, and only because I did those exhibitions, did I end up at MoMA. Not being burdened by the exceptionality of the setting was important.’

He adds, ‘When discussions first started, MoMA was still holding two concurrent exhibitions on the sixth floor. In 2019, that policy changed with the opening of the new building [by Diller Scofidio + Renfro], and since then they have occasionally opened solo shows on the entire floor. I feel incredibly lucky that I was taken forward as the first exhibition to reopen the sixth floor, [which] had been shut since the Donald Judd exhibition [in 2020].’

‘Now that I look at 35 years of work, it’s become justifiable for me to actually order it chronologically, which I normally don’t do in exhibitions,’ he continues. ‘A large part of the audience will not have been old enough, or even born, to have seen my exhibitions in the 1990s, so I wanted to give people this experience to see the work in the context of its own time, and to revisit its relevance.’

With so much of Tillmans’ past and present work focused on forging togetherness and human connections, there’s an added poignancy that comes with the retrospective opening after people have endured prolonged periods of isolation. The first rooms of the show and being met by a plethora of candid portraits and documentary images depicting youth subcultures, fashion and music from the late 1980s and early 1990s, revives the original subject matter with a deeper resonance, simply by capturing what we have been recently deprived of – revelry, spontaneity, physical contact.

‘The friendliness of people going out and sharing a safe space in a club is something quite spiritual,’ Tillmans reflects. ‘I’ve often felt that a loving club moment is not so dissimilar [to a spiritual experience] because there’s a sense of solidarity, which is the only thing we have. The word sounds kind of socialist, but solidarity is actually only putting yourself in the shoes or in the mind of someone else.’

Empathy is a grounding element in the artist’s work, even beyond Tillmans’ portraiture. His ‘Silver’ works from the 2000s, where photographic paper is fed through a developer that has purposefully not been cleaned, capture unpredictable chemical reactions, encounters and reflections, which are then enlarged, prompting introspective contemplations about existence and humanity. There are also new additions to Truth Study Center (2005-present), which features collections of photocopied news articles, printed online stories, photographs and other ephemera that mingle together collage-style on architectural display tables, and continue the artist’s interrogations of what we think of as truth. 

The survey also notably includes Tillmans’ first ever listening room, where his inaugural full-length album, Moon in Earthlight, primarily made during the pandemic, makes its debut. Each of the album’s 19 tracks is accompanied by a video work, ranging from footage of hermit crabs on the beach to strips of paper arranged on the bed of a photocopier, creating a full, sensorial experience that digs into the interpersonal, while articulating both the strength and fragility of relationships.  

‘Wolfgang’s interest in new forms of technology comes from his very early engagement with astronomy and his passion for understanding his own position [in] on a larger planetary context,’ says exhibition curator Roxana Marcoci. ‘You can truly appreciate how his work crosses genres and is about the intersections between nightlife and portraiture, cameraless abstractions and documents of the social.

Regardless of format or medium, Tillmans continues to bring authenticity and sincerity to his images, which is especially potent in an era where there is a camera in almost everyone’s hand.

‘As I look through the [MoMA] show, I can really say why something is where it is and what it signifies in this ongoing consideration of thinking [about] what pictures mean today, and what making pictures mean. When I started, I had no idea that photography would be so at the core of everyday life, and [that] the work [would] still have its own territory,’ he reflects. ‘I’ve always felt that I want my photographs to look like what it feels like to look through my eyes.’

INFORMATION

‘To Look Without Fear’ is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York from 12 September –1 January 2023, moma.org; tillmans.co.uk 

Niki de Saint Phalle enjoyed blowing things up, whether it was the plaster sculptures she filled with paint and then shot with a .22 rifle to create her Tirs series in the 1960s, or the life-size bull she once exploded with dynamite in honour of Salvador Dalí. 

She certainly detonated gender norms as the only female member of the Nouveau Réalisme movement – a French artistic group that included Yves Klein and Christo, among others – and obliterated artistic conventions through her audacious and often monumental artworks, which offered a radically feminist vision of the world.

As Saint Phalle herself put it: ‘I'm not the person who can change society except by offering some kind of vision of these happy, joyous, domineering women.’

Many will recognise ‘these women’ from Saint Phalle's signature Nanas series, sculptures of extravagantly voluptuous, joyfully dancing women that recall the ancient Venus of Willendorf, but reimagined for our modern world with a psychedelic colour scheme and colossal proportions. Most notable of all, however, is Saint Phalle’s remarkable Tarot Garden, an expansive sculpture park in Tuscany populated by awe-inspiring, mammoth female figures. 

Niki de Saint Phalle x La Prairie at MoMA PS1

The Niki de Saint Phalle retrospective currently on view for one more week at MoMA PS1 is a celebration of this explosive life, and work produced from the 1960s until the artist's death in 2002. 

It is supported by the Swiss skincare brand La Prairie, which has a history of patronising the arts. For years, the brand has commissioned artworks for Frieze and Art Basel, funded the Mondrian Conservation Project at Switzerland's Fondation Beyeler, and also supported the mentorship of ECAL students by Wallpaper* Designer of the Year 2020, Sabine Marcelis.  

La Prairie's decision to support the Niki de Saint Phalle exhibition is particularly notable, both because it reveals a little known aspect of the skincare brand’s history, and also opens up the discussion on a lesser examined branch of Saint Phalle’s work. 

Niki de Saint Phalle’s influence on the beauty industry 

Large-scale art needs funding, as La Prairie’s own patronages over the years attest, and at the apex of her career, Saint Phalle realised she would need an alternative source of income to support her monumental, architectural projects. One of her solutions was the creation of her eponymous perfume, Niki de Saint Phalle, a peculiar chypre floral fragrance that blended notes of carnation and patchouli, with artemisia, mint, leather and sandalwood. 

In 1980s New York, Saint Phalle was working on the fragrance in the same design studio as La Prairie's development team. It was in there that La Prairie first encountered the striking cobalt blue that Saint Phalle used for the packaging of her perfume, and which the brand eventually adopted as a signature shade of its own, most notably using it for the packaging of its Skin Caviar collection.  

Speaking about the hue, Saint Phalle said, ‘I chose blue for the colour of the perfume bottle because I love blue. First of all, it’s my favourite colour. It’s the colour of the sky. It’s the colour of joy; it’s a spiritual colour. And I feel like the Greeks do, that it brings good luck.' 

Although the fragrance did bring Saint Phalle some of the good fortune she needed to continue working on the Tarot Garden, she received criticism at the time for creating work with overtly commercial aims. 

Yet it's fair to say that Niki de Saint Phalle perfume is just an example of the artist's pioneering vision. In recent years, a number of high-profile visual artists have experimented with perfumery, with female artists, in particular, using scent as an alternative way to examine women's place within society.

When creating her perfume, Saint Phalle was open about the fact that she was trying to make money, but she also hit on an important, and increasingly more evident point – that perfumery has a unique ability to translate across disciplines and, ultimately, make art more accessible. A topic that many artists may continue to explore in her stead

Information

‘Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life’ is at MoMA PS1 until 6 September 2021

moma.org/ps1

laprairie.com

The luminosity of Neri Oxman – the MIT professor of media arts and sciences, who also comfortably straddles the realms of architecture, design and invention in her work – too often precedes her. Known for her groundbreaking research in materials, buildings and construction processes, the breadth of Oxman’s work has not been easy to quantify, that is until now.

‘Neri Oxman: Material Ecology’ at MoMA

Opening this week at the Museum of Modern Art, ‘Neri Oxman: Material Ecology’ is a compelling look back at the scientist’s 20-year career. Named after the term she coined to describe her approach of fusing organic design, material science and digital fabrication technology to produce new techniques and objects informed by nature, the exhibition highlights seven research projects that Oxman has created along with the Mediated Matter Group, which she founded and directs at MIT, to propose a new biotech future that is truly within our grasp.

Neri Oxman at the exhibition preview

‘Ecology is the science that defines relationships between organisms and other organisms, and/or organisms and the natural environment,’ Oxman explains. ‘Material ecology basically aims to place materials; things that are artificially made i.e, designed, in the context of natural ecology. And the hope is that in the future, we will design with natural ecology in mind, such that all things will relate, adapt, respond to the natural ecology. The vision, of course, is that in the future, one will not be able to differentiate or separate between the natural and the artificial, for good and for bad.’

She adds, ‘We are now at a very exciting moment where we can design nature herself. So with the appearance of tools, techniques and technologies associated with synthetic biology, we can basically re-envision, reimagine, augment, make better, heal the environment and nature as we know it. Where does design stand in this crossroads and what are the technological and ethical implications of this? I think my team and I stand in that crossroad physically, but also mentally challenging some of the questions that design and designers face at that intersection between biology and technology, nature and culture, and the melding and fusing of the two.’

The seven projects on display, which date from 2007 to the present, showcase several examples of Oxman’s line of inquiry. Inspired by the observations of sources such as the configurations of bark on birch trees, the characteristics of crustacean shells, and even the nature of melanin, each project makes a compelling case for the future of building and design on its own, but even more so when the viewer can envision them overlapping with each other.

‘Silk Pavilion II’

The most dramatic articulation of Oxman’s research is undoubtedly the show’s centrepiece, ‘Silk Pavilion II’ – a site-specific commission for the museum, which builds on her original fabrication of an architectural structure that harnesses silkworms’ ability to spin silk from 2013.

This new iteration throws kinetic manufacturing into the process - working over ten days, a swarm of 17,000 silkworms were deployed horizontally over a water soluble knit draped over a stainless steel frame. A rotating mandrel guided their spinning upwards as they progressed, while changes in light and heat helped to manipulate them into creating different degrees of density to suit the tension and form of the structure. Not only does the piece express the relationship between digital and biological fabrication at an architectural scale, it builds upon that by taking into account the natural behaviour of the silkworms, which further influences the architectural form, while also treating their metamorphic process in the most respectful and humane way possible.

Paola Antonelli on Neri Oxman's ‘Material Ecology’

‘There are seven projects for which these beautiful artefacts are demos,’ says MoMA’s senior curator of architecture and design, Paola Antonelli. ‘You see here a pavilion that might not have a precise function yet, but it’s function is to demonstrate how you can actually work with [thousands of] silkworms, have them lead a happy life, and do something together that is copacetic, not only with human beings, but with silkworms and nature.’

‘We have not included some of the final embodiments that people might perceive and better understand as the design object, which at this moment I so greatly appreciate and admire about Paola,' Oxman reflects, 'It was the right thing to do and I am very, very proud of bringing process to the level of product and allowing the visitor to appreciate and gain respect for how things are made and why they are important.’

INFORMATION

‘Neri Oxman: Material Ecology’ at MoMa 22 February - 25 May
oxman.com
moma.org

ADDRESS

11 W 53rd St
New York, NY
10019

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Philippe Parreno knows a thing or two about making an entrance. Since his memorable Anywhen commission for Tate Modern in 2016, the multi-disciplinary French artist has gone on to transform museum and exhibition spaces around the world into immersive, mystifying experiences that blend light, film and sound with a magical aplomb.

Parreno’s latest undertaking is a new site-specific work for the revamped Museum of Modern Art, which reopens on 21 October. Starting off beside the original entrance of the museum, and spanning the newly expanded lobby and walkway, which extends through to 54th Street, Parreno’s interactive piece, Echo heralds a new era for the institution.

‘When [museum director] Glenn Lowry approached me, he said he was interested in doing something throughout the lobby, to make it a real public space,’ explains Parreno. ‘I think the idea came after I did the commission at Tate Modern – something that was there like a ghostly presence, something that will be present and something that will not be present. I took that as the thread throughout the project.’

‘Normally I’m occupied with exhibition making,’ the artist adds. ‘An exhibition is a display where we have a timeline or an architecture, where you hang a series of objects. So you can say that an exhibition always has a beginning and an end – it’s time-based. I thought this could be a different approach. For the first time, I’m going to reorganise myself around that notion of manifestation. All that will appear without a timeline.’

From this starting point, Parreno worked with coders to programme some of his favoured motifs and objects – marquees, hanging lamps, mirrored shutters and a screen – to function continuously over the two-year duration of the commission, spanning both night and day. ‘[I thought] about the object as a kind of creature,’ he reflects. ‘It would wake up, move, behave and then sleep and dream. I was trying to get an auto-poetic system [where there] was a set of rules that could be reinvented by the system.’

The kinetic aspects of the installation are informed by gleaning data from the surrounding site. Seismometers that have been installed throughout the building, to measure factors including the varying tensions in its structure, the velocity and direction of the wind, sounds both outside and inside, along with the number of people visiting the museum. These variables are perceived by the installation (which Parreno calls ‘the creature’) and produce unpredictable movements that really occur by chance.

Parreno states, ‘I didn’t want to use any mathematical equations or algorithms, so everything is really linked to perception. It’s a creature that reflects what it perceives and when it perceives more than one thing, it produces another operation – the movement of a light or the strength of the light. It’s an echo, which is the title of the work.’

The aural component, a consistent element in Parreno’s work, was also taken a step further through the creation of a soundtrack that will never repeat itself. Parreno explains, ‘I worked with my sound designer Nicolas Becker, and we approached Venezuelan musician Arca to [perform] a song that Nicolas produced and the third layer was a start-up company based in London called Bronze, whose goal is to produce records that regenerate themselves when you play them, so the same concert will never be played twice. They take a granular approach; the sound particles can be redistributed according to the artist’s vision along with other factors. Altogether, we’ve produced two years worth of soundtrack and whispers.’

The final result is a subtle, moving piece that flickers and makes sounds in a haunting and otherworldly manner. MoMA director Glenn D Lowry adds, ‘Philippe's commissioned piece is remarkably well-suited not only to the architecture of the renovated and expanded lobby, but also to the ambitions and goals of the museum, as we endeavour to neither repeat ourselves nor remain static.’

INFORMATION

moma.org

Space has always been a rare commodity in New York City – something that the Museum of Modern Art, which occupies a piece of prime real estate right in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, knows well. Ever since the establishment of its permanent home, the Goodwin-Stone Building, which opened in 1939 and is still where the current museum is sited, the institution has grappled with finding enough room to house its impressive collection. 

Since then, the museum’s building has been added to multiple times. Philip Johnson contributed the museum’s iconic sculpture garden in 1953 and an expanded East-West Wing in 1964. Cesar Pelli added the Garden Hall and Museum Tower, a mixed-use residential build that also added gallery space to the museum in 1984, and Yoshio Taniguchi’s most recent renovation and extension in 2004 saw the creation of the building’s airy second floor atrium, and its granite and glass façade, which the art-viewing public have come to know so well.

Joining this illustrious group and mélange of architecture is Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, which was bestowed the controversial task of transforming the museum’s acquisition of its neighbouring Folk Art Museum (designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects) that would ultimately yield a net increase in the museum’s gallery space by a third, bringing its total square footage to 165,000. Opening to the public on 21 October, the re-envisioned MoMA not only boasts a new Creativity Lab, a state-of-the-art Studio and a bounty of much-needed gallery space, but a flagship museum store on the lower ground level, reconfigured circulation and a new café along with an outdoor terrace on the sixth floor as well. 

‘We tried to see past the controversy because times change and we were looking at the big picture at how MoMA could improve,’ explains Liz Diller. ‘We set out from the beginning to not only do the expansion galleries but help MoMA realise this program which is a big shift for them to show that much more of their collection across all disciplines.’

‘Beyond that we also wanted to have a much better interface with the public and bring art closer to the street,' she adds. ‘Things like bringing a little bit more intuition to the circulation and to provide beyond the galleries that MoMA had asked some new potential galleries that were not really foreseen. We had a lot to do and working through the noise, there was just such a huge conversation happening inside MoMA about how things can happen that was part of the dialogue.’

Working within the material palette already present, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s design taps into the building’s historic DNA while bringing a contemporary sensibility with its abstraction of space, purity of material expression and the use of a sense of thinness throughout its remit. Starting at the new museum entrance, which now sees ticketing and coat check located off the building’s central axis and welcomes visitors with into a double-height space and custom entry canopy, the building exhibits a much more spacious feel, which also allows it to host new site-specific installations, like Philippe Parreno’s specially commissioned ‘Echo (Danny the Street)’, comprised of a series of interconnected objects which splays out through the lobby. 

Veering west from here, a new flagship store on the lower level maintains the new visual connection between museum and street. Located under an intricate, millwork ceiling, flanked by an eye-catching double height book wall, the store is easily accessed via an elegant staircase as well as a circular, glass-encased elevator, and perfectly placed beside a connecting lounge area that leads to the new gallery spaces on the ground floor and above. 

The new galleries located in the expanded building, now named the David Geffen Wing and Jerry Speyer and Katherine Farley Building, are a dynamic interplay of glass, wood and Gypsum board, which makes up the galleries’ walls. Adding about 11,500 sq ft per floor, the fluid and adaptable gallery spaces, which can be reconfigured according to the exhibition on view, are armed with a feeling of intimacy, thanks to the vertically interlocking concept that they are backed by. Some spaces are naturally lit, while others are technically equipped for performance and film. As visitors walk through interstitial spaces, often enclosed in glass, they are able to look into other galleries below or towards the street, thus underscoring the interconnectedness that Diller Scofidio + Renfro sought to bring to the fore. 

The new spaces’ verticality is held together by the ‘blade' stair – a sculptural element, that demonstrates a material lightness for an ultimately monumental presence – which runs through the height of the expanded building. Composed of glass balustrades that are cantilevered and held in place by pins and a six-inch thin vertical spine that hangs from the roof structure to support the steps and landings, the staircase is a gesture that references the museum’s original Bauhaus stair, while bringing its own contemporary and futuristic flavour that’s set to distinguish the expansion for the years to come.

INFORMATION

dsrny.com; gensler.com

New York's Museum of Modern Art has just had a major injection of architectural mastery courtesy of a donation from Herzog & de Meuron. The Swiss firm has gifted a tranche of design drawings, photographs, models and other materials to the museum, bolstering MoMA's holding of archive material relating to the studio and its architecture collection in general.

Later this year a project to expand the design display space within MoMA will complete, and some of the 23 new works donated by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron's charitable foundation will go on public display.

In total, the museum now has an extensive physical record of nine key Herzog & de Meuron projects spanning the period 1988 to 2015, from the Domus Winery in Napa Valley, to the concrete complex at 1111 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.

The donated materials include original sketches, working models, presentation models, CAD sets, renders, movies and artworks, all charting the evolution and working practices of one of the most compelling studios at work today. The multi-award winning firm was set up in 1978 and has a long-standing connection with the US, completing a number of major cultural and residential projects across the country. 

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Museum of Modern Art website and the Herzog & de Meuron website

The vibrant, sensory universe of Toiletpaper hits the US with a splash this week. The art publication’s surrealistic dream world has taken over MoMA Design Store’s downtown New York City location with goods from its collaboration with Italian brand Seletti. The colourful New York pop-up store marks the first time that the wares have been available on American shores.

The snappily named ‘Seletti wears Toiletpaper’ collection, which is renowned for bringing Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari’s tongue-in-cheek flair to multiple aspects of the household, brims over with provocation and humour. Some of the highlights being brought in includes a retro, two-seater sofa covered in Toiletpaper’s iconic snake print, padded armchairs printed with surrealist iconography and a vase in its bright yellow polka dot ‘Shit’ pattern.

Running for the course of six weeks, the collection has been installed on the ground floor of the store’s Soho outpost. The brightly coloured display not only includes includes skateboard decks and ceramics, but tableware, mirrors of several sizes, rugs and coffee tables to fully convey the range and scale of the collection.

The launch also sees the international debut of two new cushion designs – one pattern features a pair of lemons on a bold black background while the other showcases parted, crimson red lips surrounded by colourful push pins. With a selection of products also available online, shaking things up around the house could not get much easier.

INFORMATION

‘Seletti wears Toiletpaper’ pop-up is at Moma Design Store. For more information, visit the Toiletpaper website

ADDRESS

81 Spring St
New York
NY 10012

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New York’s MoMA is looking across the pond for its tech inspiration, specifically to Paris. For New York Design Week, MoMA Retail has enlisted the help of La French Tech, an innovative public policy initiative that has fostered the booming French start-up community, to select the country’s most innovative new technology products, which it will stock in the MoMA Design Store.

Over the last five years, Paris’ 13th arrondissement has toppled London’s Old Street as Europe’s would-be Silicon Valley, with a vital and vibrant start-up network wiring its way into the fabric of the city. For the third year in a row, Paris was the most prolific city exhibitor at CES Las Vegas outside of the USA. Among the key players are Station F, the world’s biggest startup campus; the community-based VC firm The Hardware Club, and hardware start-up accelerators such as Usine IO and Cité de l’Objet Connecté. La French Tech, together with Business France – the agency supporting the international development of the French economy – are two key players that have championed the sector.

Stereocap headphones

‘In less than three years, start-ups have become such a strong label of what France is about: innovation, talent, and creativity,’ explains Pascal Cagni, chairman of the board of Business France. ‘The selection of products showcased by MoMA Design Store are beautifully designed and innovative, fitting perfectly into their offering.’

Products span the rapidly expanding worlds of the smart home, connected tech, and portable speakers; from drones to home telescopes to child-sleep companions. A particular favourite of ours is the assemble-it-yourself City Clock, which disguises binary technology inside 19th-century charm. Inside a miniature wooden house modeled on a Parisian Haussmannian building, the time is read based on the number of illuminated windows. ‘Finally, a clock for techies who are also poets,’ reads the MoMA product description. Rimbaud would be proud.

For MoMA Design Store, it’s the perfect time to get on board. In recent years, technology has become one of the Design Store’s largest and fastest growing product categories, with big ticket items launched with tech titans like Sony and Samsung. But, as this new collaboration with French start-ups solidifies, MoMA is equally as committed to discovering new and exciting products on platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. ‘In my travels to scout the best products from around the globe, my team and I started to see an undeniable link back to France,’ explains Emmanuel Plat, MoMA Retail’s director of merchandising. ‘New York Design Week is the perfect opportunity to tell this story and introduce their products to a wider audience.’

And wider audience is right. Not only does New York Design Week attract hundreds of thousands of design aficionados from all over the world, the products will also be available to purchase from the MoMA Design Store website, helping to take France’s already important local tech network global.

INFORMATION

The La French Tech products will be available from 10 May. For more information, visit the MoMA Design Store website

With our future as a species uncertain, designers should look to the ancients to find solutions to reconnect us with nature and repair our world, says Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design and the first-ever director of research and development at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

To illustrate those possible design solutions for our species, Antonelli is preparing a show called entitled ‘Broken Nature’ which will premier at the XXII Triennale di Milano in Milan, her home town, next year.

It will address designers responses to issues of sustainability and how or if our species will survive, she told delegates to the Brainstorm Design conference in Singapore.

Citing the view of many scientists that we are living during an age of mass extinction, Antonelli posited that we can affect, through design, how long we may or may not have left.

‘Design can help us create a better ending and extend our time on earth, so at least the next species won’t think of us as morons,’ she said, eliciting laughter from the audience.

‘We have severed so many of our ties with nature, even our own human nature,’ she said.

The ancients, she said, used nature in how they designed their worlds.

She urged designers to think about design in a more organic way, and recognize that the solutions are multidisciplinary: ‘Science informs engineering which informs art which informs design.’

She said: ‘The challenge is how to integrate the needs of the future with the needs of the present. Our future might reside in past practices, in how the ancients built but did not consume as we do.’

Restorative and repair design are also being rediscovered, she said. ‘In New York City, where I live, people throw away a coffee pot as soon as it breaks. There are movements to change this.’ She said it involves nothing less than a change of culture.

Following her own philosophy, she called on everyone to submit ideas that illustrate solutions to her for inclusion in Broken Nature, as the exhibition is still a work in progress.

In closing, Antonelli appealed to the Brainstorm Design audience to ‘share with us the different ways that we can repair our world.’

The Brainstorm Design conference is jointly organised by Fortune, TIME and Wallpaper*, bringing together more than 300 top speakers and delegates from 33 countries. See more here

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Brainstorm design website

‘Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-1989’ assembles an eclectic array of artworks and equipment from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art that collectively documents the naissance of the digital age. Such a dramatic technological shift led some to assume that traditional art forms were obsolete, however, if art has one tradition it is that of evolution, which is amply demonstrated in this New York exhibition.

Beryl Korot’s Text and Commentary (1976-77) consists of drawings, loom weavings and five video monitors that document their manufacture. Interested in the historic marginalisation of of women’s creativity into textile production Korot recognised parallels in digital technology, describing the loom as ‘the first computer on the face of the earth.’

Another political perspective is provided by Lee Friedlander, whose series of photographs record the ambivalent expressions of the predominantly female workers engaged in tiresome work on computer terminals in the Midwest, in the mid-1980s.

Other women in the emerging computer industry appeared to have had more fun. Plotted graph paper drawings by Susan Kare describe, in pixels, a skull and bones, creeping bugs and a leaping frog: early, unrealised designs for computer screen icons. Meanwhile, some artists in the exhibition used actual computers as tools such as Stan Vanderbeek who, working with programmer Ken Knowlton, produced five minutes of pixelated psychedelia with the film Poemfield No. 1 (1967).

The exhibition is punctuated by impressive hardware including a rather ungainly CM-2 Supercomputer produced by Thinking Machines Corporation in 1987 that appears as a cross between a minimalist sculpture by John McCracken and a Knight Industries Two Thousand (the fictional KITT from the concurrent Knight Rider TV series). More elegant machines include Mario Bellini’s Olivetti ‘Programma 101’ desktop computer from 1965 and early Apple models (the Macintosh XL and 128K Home Computers), the latter reminding us of the technology giant’s pioneering designs.

INFORMATION

‘Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-1989’ is on view until 8 April. For more information, visit the MoMA website

ADDRESS

MoMA
11 W 53rd Street
New York

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‘Being Modern: MoMA in Paris’ is an extraordinary exhibition to the extent that some 200 works have been transplanted from the Museum of Modern Art to the Fondation Louis Vuitton while the New York institution undergoes an expansion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Masterpieces including Hope II (1908), by Klimt; The Studio (1928) by Picasso; de Kooning’s Women I (1952); Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913); and Rothko’s No 10 (1950) arrived to Frank Gehry’s permanently anchored ark in dozens of shipments in accordance with restrictions such as how much value could be loaded onto a plane. The MoMA’s variation of Constantin Brâncuși’s Bird in Space (1923) has landed in Paris for the first time, as has Andy Warhol’s painted Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962).

But this exhibition is also extraordinary for its presentation, which strongly demonstrates what makes the MoMA so unique. Nearly 90 years old, the museum boasts a world-renowned collection of European works – largely accumulated under the aegis of its founding members, its first director Alfred H Barr Jr, and a steady stream of wealthy donors in addition to a diverse inventory of American art that reflects the zeitgeist over time.

While the visit may seem chronological, it doesn’t take long to realise that the coexistence of different disciplines makes for an experience that is far more nuanced and unexpected, which is therefore sure to surprise the typical Parisian museumgoer (and by extension, the throngs of tourists). Even those who could map out the MoMA by heart will find themselves freshly engaged.

MoMA director Glenn D Lowry describes the approach – overseen by MoMA chief curator of photography Quentin Bajac – as ‘a chance to scramble what we normally do’. Indeed, visitors entering the exhibition are immediately greeted by Brâncuși’s bird and The Bather (c1885) by Cézanne – one of the museum’s top treasures – but then discover a series by Walker Evans to one side, and objects from the 1934 ‘Machine Art’ show (a self-aligning ball bearing and a flush valve) to the other.

‘That first room is like a microcosm of the museum,’ Lowry said, referring also to Hopper’s House by the Railroad (1925), one of the earliest additions to the permanent collection. As another example, Steamboat Willie, the iconic animated Walt Disney film featuring Mickey Mouse, plays on an adjacent wall to Magritte’s The False Mirror (1929) with its eye consumed by a cloud-filled sky. On the main floor, a cluster of works includes Ellsworth Kelly, a fragment of old curtain wall from the United Nations, Carl Andre’s lead tiles, and a maquette of Lever House; altogether, they add up to a remarkably fluid practice of minimalism. Romare Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt (1970) and Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Club Scene) (2013) weave a distinctly African-American experience into the fabric of the show, just as the Rainbow Flag, conceived by Gilbert Baker in 1978, sends a strong message about the MoMA’s mandate of inclusiveness – people, yes, but also how it defines art. 

Up near the terrace, a wall in one of the corridors boasts a trifecta of contemporary symbols: the @, the familiar red Google Maps pin, and The Power Symbol, which have become so ubiquitous in our daily lives that we rarely pause to consider their efficient, universal design. Arguably the most idiosyncratic juxtaposition consists of Shigetaka Kurita’s original emoji characters for NTT DOCOMO devices alongside a complete reconstruction of Lele Saveri’s The Newstand – transit system subway tiles, et al – plus Rirkrit Tiravanija’s newspaper collage that reads ‘The Days of this Society is Number,’ which draws from leftist French philosopher Guy Debord. Saveri, who flew from New York to acquaint museum assistants with the zines in his pop-up concession, summed up the context best: ‘It’s very strange; it’s not really explainable... I never expected the MoMA to eventually have it in their collection.’

For every gallery that overstimulates – Joseph Beuys near Yayoi Kusama near Bruce Nauman near Robert Smithson (incidentally, his drawing is called The Museum of the Void) – there are smaller galleries filled with a single work, such as Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1970-88), and this is where the show responds directly to the Fondation’s architecture. ‘Each of those rooms becomes a mini-chapel, and those become the counterpoints,’ Lowry pointed out. The Forty Part Motet, an audio installation by Janet Cardiff that produces an ethereal choir from as many individual, boxy black speakers, quite literally assumes this role; to some visitors, it might prove more transcendent than any of the highly-anticipated paintings.

But since many of those paintings have ties to Paris, and ended up in New York because so many patrons were following the waves of modern art emerging out of both cities, the exhibition feels, at various points, like a mirror being held up from the other side of the Atlantic. Or as Lowry noted, ‘We thought there was a symmetry to that gesture – the idea of a museum grows out of so many ideas here, and in Paris in particular during the 1920s. Ninety years later, one could flip it over and say, “Look what you’ve created, look what you’ve helped bring into being.”’

INFORMATION

‘Being Modern: MoMA in Paris’ is on view until 5 March 2018. For more information, visit the Fondation Louis Vuitton website

ADDRESS

Fondation Louis Vuitton
8 Avenue Mahatma Ghandi
75116 Paris

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In 1944, the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged its first fashion exhibition, ‘Are Clothes Modern?’. Put together by architect and curator Bernard Rudofsky, the show explored attitudes towards clothes at a time when soon-to-be-outmoded traditions still prevailed, from superfluous pockets and buttons to rigid female silhouettes.

Despite its forward-thinking provocations, MoMA has not devoted another exhibition to the field of fashion since. Until now, that is. This month, the museum presents ‘Items: Is Fashion Modern?’, a comprehensive exploration of fashion design that considers the effects specific garments and accessories have had on society. Curated by Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s senior curator in the department of architecture and design, and curatorial assistant Michelle Millar Fisher, the show brings together 111 iconic fashion typologies from the last century that have had a universal and lasting impact.

‘When I started at MoMA 23 years ago, I noticed that there was no fashion and I started asking around why,’ says Antonelli. ‘I got many explanations about the fact that modern design is timelessness and fashion is ephemeral, but it didn’t make too much sense to me. So I began keeping a running list that I called “garments that changed the  world”.’ About three years ago, MoMA director Glenn Lowry suggested Antonelli make a show out of that list.

‘Items’ brings together sartorial archetypes such as the biker jacket, the white T-shirt and the bikini. Some are represented by multiple examples to give a sense of evolution: there are little black dresses by Dior, Versace and Rick Owens, and suits by Armani and Thom Browne. Added to these are contemporary icons such as Adidas’ Superstar trainers, Levi’s 501 jeans and Yves Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking tuxedo, all chosen for their revolutionary impact. Antonelli’s anthropological approach considers each item’s cultural, technological, economic, political and aesthetic relevance.

On our sartorial stop-off, three particular pieces caught our eye. Firstly, a transparent, slim jacket by British fashion designer and artist Carlo Brandelli made under his former label Squire; it is a piece that forms part of his seminal ‘Unstructured Tailoring’ cannon. The other two are part of the 19 commissioned prototypes for the exhibition, which riff on the designs of their predecessors – an oversized take on the guayabera shirt by the New York-based designer Ryohei Kawanishi, and a swirling 3D interpretation of the utilitarian jumpsuit, by London-based Richard Malone.

Brandelli gained renown in the nineties for his skinny and lightweight interpretation of Savile Row suiting. At Squire, he deconstructed the blazer silhouette exhibited at MoMA to its basic external form, removing its conventional inner fabric and horse hair linings, to create an unstructured sheath-like garment without additional internal weight. His designs anticipated the skinny suiting that was the silhouette du jour on the men’s catwalks in the early noughties.

‘I was always thinking about form, silhouette and function,’ Brandelli says. ‘Suits had always been so heavy. The first steps at Squire were to eliminate details... a process of reduction and abstraction as a reaction to the baggy long tailoring that was only available. I’ve always fused ideas of art process into my work, and perhaps this is why such a significant design was developed.’

Flourishing fashion designer Richard Malone was made aware of the significance of his commissioned design when Paola Antonelli sent him a selection of essays about the symbolic importance of the jumpsuit. ‘The shape goes back to Constructivist Russia,’ the Central Saint Martins alumnus explains. ‘It was a non sexualised uniform for everyone, about covering your body in order to function.’

Malone has created a fantastical interpretation of a functional garment – a swirling jumpsuit in his signature optical illusory patterns, complete with a 3D body and sleeves, sculpted using coils of wire. The Irish designer grew up working on building sites in Wexford, where he became familiar with workwear garments. His design has a more expressive and architectural flair. Due to the intricate nature of the forms he creates, Malone doesn’t sketch his designs in the conventional sense, but creates swirling patterns on paper, some of which he sent onto Antonelli’s teams during the creation process of his commission. He then notes how his designs conform to the body, ‘you get more unusual solutions and surprising silhouettes’, he says. 

Another Central Saint Martins alumni, Ryohei Kawanishi’s take on the guayabera shirt – a Central American and Caribbean staple that has become a symbol of immigration in the US – is not only oversized, but also festooned with politically charged embroideries arranged in patterns inspired by Afghan war rugs, Vietnam War souvenir jackets and Cuban media. ‘The guayabera shirt is said to be Cuban, but as a stereotype image, I’ve seen it a lot in American war movies,’ says Kawanishi. ‘I tried to find a way to approach the political scene and create a dialogue with those issues.’

The pieces are examples of MoMA’s intention to spark a deeper understanding of ordinary items we see every day. ‘It’s really a design show in which objects give you a chance to not only think about aesthetics, style, politics and anthropology, but also just the way we live,’ Antonelli says.

A version of this article is featured in the October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*223)

INFORMATION

‘Items: Is Fashion Modern?’ is on view from 1 October until 28 January 2018. For more information, visit the MoMA website, the Carlo Brandelli website, the Richard Malone website and the Ryohei Kawanishi website

ADDRESS

MoMA
11 W 53rd Street
New York NY 10019

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Ask a well-seasoned chef to list his kitchen essentials, and you’re apt to learn about a few new tools; ask Danish brand Hay, and you’re bound to get a dose of eye-pleasing colour, play, and texture. You can expect that very combination of elements from the newly launched Hay Kitchen Market – an extensive collection of more than 200 wares produced in collaboration with Danish chef Frederik Bille Brahe.

The rising culinary talent behind the celebrated Copenhagen restaurant Atelier September (and younger brother to the fine jeweller Sophie Bille Brahe), Brahe first collaborated with Hay co-founder and accessories director Mette Hay on a pop-up café at last year’s Salone del Mobile, a project that inspired them to consider design items for the kitchen more deeply.

Launched exclusively with the MoMA Design Store this week and available throughout this year, the resulting products speak equally to a well-travelled, workaday gourmand as they do to a chic, no-fuss sensibility.

Curated with an eye for utility and visual intrigue, the everyday items include steel picnic containers inspired by Indian tiffins, hand-blown Moroccan glasses, an Italian hamburger press, and Japanese scourer sponges in metallic patterns and playful shapes, alongside selected items by designers George Sowden, Clara Von Zweigbergk, and others.

Designed (and priced) to be mixed and matched, the eclectic tabletop pieces feature enamelware in marbleised patterns and Hay’s signature for subdued, Memphis-inflected palette of bold and pastel hues; scallop-edged vases and tumblers; and cutlery in gold and silver tones.

Befitting the occasion, celebrants toasted the launch with a dinner fashioned by Brahe at the Nolita restaurant De Maria. The dishes, naturally, were served on the newly launched designs – surely a feast for the eyes as well as mouth.

INFORMATION

Select pieces are available from the MoMa Design Store website

ADDRESS

MoMa Design Store
81 Spring Street
New York 10012

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Although Frank Lloyd Wright died more than half a century ago (his 150th birthday would have been on 8 June), he remains the most famous architect in the world. It’s easy to see why when you explore the Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive’.

The sprawling show features almost 400 works by the American master, ranging from drawings, models, furniture and print media all the way to tableware and pieces of buildings. It was sparked by the herculean task of ushering the archive’s more than 55,000 drawings, 125,000 photos, and much more from Taliesen West to MoMA.

But much more than that, describes curator Barry Bergdoll, it’s about bringing in new voices to examine the work and impact of this most impactful of architects. Bergdoll invited more than a dozen scholars and conservators to unpack (as per the show’s title – a double entendre) varied themes around Wright’s work. What they’ve found reveals that the archive, as Bergdoll puts it, continues to ‘unfold new experiments’, and will continue to do so for generations.

Revelation comes regularly as you explore the 12 divided sections of the show – focusing on drawings and abstract representations over photographs –  from his well-documented experiments in ornament, structure, and building systems to his relatively unknown research in urbanism and farming. Other galleries touch on landscape, the Native American-inspired Nakoma Golf Club near Madison, Wicsonsin, and his proposed blade-like mile high tower for Chicago, meant to shore up his bonifides as he lobbied to take part in the city’s building boom.

As you chew on the seemingly endless themes, it’s impossible not to marvel at the skill and seduction of the drawings and artifacts, from a surprising neoclassical competition rendering for the Milwaukee Public Library in the 1890s to the space aged, dome and bubble concoctions of the 1950s. Everything is art: elaborate and colorful architectural sections and plans are just as much artwork as the intricate stained glass windows, hexagonal chairs, and concentric-sphere murals nearby. All is unified, wondrously held together through Wright’s organic ideals and his commitment to (whether his clients liked it or not) total design.

And while the architect was light years ahead of his time, exploring complex technological and formal systems that most around him couldn’t keep up with (which explains, to a point, all the cracks and leaks), he was able to create spaces, systems, and pieces that almost anyone could appreciate. Wright’s work is universal both in its ability to hold together in all its variation, and in its ability to seamlessly connect to the world at large.

This combination of complexity and accessibility, the show drives home, continues to mesmerise the general public. Perhaps even more than the architectural establishment. The show, says Bergdoll, is basically a billboard to encourage scholars and visitors alike to continue to tease out lessons from it all.

‘The goal here is to announce that the archive is here and open to new questions and new people,’ says Bergdoll. For Wright, the quintessential self-promoter, all this broadcasting, and yes, fame, would have been just fine.

INFORMATION

‘Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive’ is on view until 1 October. For more information, visit the MoMA website

ADDRESS

MoMA
11 W 53rd Street
New York

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The installation by the winners of this year’s MoMA Young Architects Program in Seoul has just been revealed. Shin Hyung-Chul’s Shinslab Architecture has launched the office’s spatial proposal for the coveted honour in one of the South Korean capital’s most important cultural institutions.

The structure, created in collaboration with the Seoul outpost of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) and entitled ‘Temp’L’, is cleverly designed from the recycled steel parts of an old ship.

Flagging up the beauty – and potential – of recycling, the piece also illustrates its creator’s fascination with vessels. Having spent his childhood in Europe, Shin was always inspired by large ships that appear to float ‘in and out of Venice’s exquisite buildings’. The architect took those images and combined them with Le Corbusier’s modernist teachings, that often drew parallels between modern architecture and ocean liners.

At the same time, the piece also represents industrialisation, with the ship as one of the 20th century’s largest structures and symbols of power and technology.

Inside, surfaces are rusty and rough, contrasted by the overall structure’s smooth, curved geometries, that hint to the hull of a ship. Conceived as an outdoor pavilion, featuring seating and planning, the installation will serve as a resting area for the museum’s visitors.

Offering an opportunity to young architecture offices to showcase their work to an international audience, MoMA’s Young Architects Program operates in Italy, Turkey, Chile and South Korea; 2016 is its third year in Seoul and its 17th worldwide edition. Temp’L will be on show in the museum courtyard of MMCA, Seoul until 3 October.

INFORMATION

Temp’L will be on view at MMCA Seoul until 6 October. For more information, visit MoMA's website.

ADDRESS

MMCA
30 Samcheong-ro, Sogyeok-dong,
Jongno-gu, Seoul 03062

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After three years of waiting, the time has arrived. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) is getting ready to kick open the doors to its ten-story expansion by the architecture firm Snøhetta on 14 May.

The Bay Area’s fog and water inspired the new edifice's sweeping and sinewy east facade, made with 700 uniquely molded, fibreglass-reinforced polymer panels. The silvery structure is a stark departure from the red brick-ensconced existing building, by Mario Botta.

'Buildings are like dancing partners,' says Snøhetta co-founder Craig Dykers. 'You don’t want to repeat what the other is doing because you’ll step on their toes.' The two structures are connected by a seismic joint that visitors can see through glass viewers, but the boundary doesn’t draw attention to itself, as the two buildings flow as one without obvious demarcations. Moving between the buildings, Dykers says, 'shouldn’t be a jarring experience, but the museum-goers will have some awareness'.

As opposed to the formally predictable symmetry of Botta’s design, for instance, the new building features more versatile exhibition spaces. (Check out the room in the new wing displaying Agnes Martin paintings, which curators configured to be an octagonal space.)

At 235,000 sq ft, the Snøhetta addition more than doubles the museum’s total space. But the new landmark weighs less than the old structure by employing materials like lightweight cement and sand from nearby Monterey Bay. On track to receive LEED Gold certification, the new gallery spaces use energy-saving ambient LED lighting tucked above undulating ceiling panels calibrated to avoid light scallops. 

Other notable features include six outdoor terraces, including the second-floor sculpture gallery that exhibits works by Alexander Calder against America’s largest public living wall by Habitat Horticulture, consisting of over 19,000 plants including 21 native Northern Californian species.

Spatial and metaphorical openness is among the most emphasised elements, with 43,000 sq ft earmarked for free access. Two entrances on different streets allow pedestrians to pass through the museum’s ground-floor spaces, including a glass-fronted gallery inaugurated with Richard Serra’s 235-ton sculpture Sequence. SFMoMA will soon be open, in every sense of the word.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Snøhetta's website

ADDRESS

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 3rd Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

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For its latest architecture exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has set its focus on a group of contemporary Japanese architects. The museum’s first-ever presentation dedicated entirely to practitioners from the country, the show – ‘A Japanese Constellation’, which opens this weekend – includes work from Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, SANAA, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata and Junya Ishigami.

The ‘constellation’ in the title is not there by any accident. For a profession that has become so preoccupied with ‘starchitects’, the exhibition aims to undo that narrow focus on individual genius. Instead, it casts a group of contemporaries not just as luminaries unto themselves, but also as peers who share in the same gravitational pull. So even though they all head offices that bear their names, they also engage in a unique way of co-operating. Take SANAA, for example. The show includes independent work from its two principals – Sejima and Nishizawa – but also those projects on which they worked as a partnership.

The exhibition begins with an unfolding of Ito’s work, and as the show demonstrates, all of the included architects have shared in his orbit. ‘When we started to conceptualise the show several years ago, we thought it would be a monographic show about Toyo Ito,’ explains MoMA director Glenn D Lowry. ‘But, as it turned out, Ito was more interested in this network of relationships he had with other architects.’ So, as Lowry put it during a walk-through, ‘the exhibition endeavors to trace this network’.

The show’s curator, Pedro Gadanho (now the director of Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology), finds in the work another through-line in addition to the collegiality catalysed by Ito. ‘All of them are pursuing an artistic endeavor,’ he explains. Even as he points out the complex engineering that each of the projects demanded, he reads the final outcome as something other than utilitarian buildings. ‘These architects work beyond the functionalist dogma that characterizes modernist architecture.’

‘A Japanese Constellation’ includes 44 projects, represented through models, photographs and drawings. An accompanying catalogue provides a robust treatment of those projects along with a series of essays. 

INFORMATION

’A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA and Beyond’ opens on 13 March and is on view until 4 July. For more details, please visit MoMA’s website

All images courtesy of the architects and MoMA

ADDRESS

MoMA
11 W 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019

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Arquine – the Mexican platform dedicated to the culture of architecture – has announced the winners of the 18th installment of its architecture competition, which aims to address issues of global importance and support ideas holding an applied relevance to society.

This year, Arquine called for participants to conceive of a design for the Mextrópoli pavilion, destined for the titular architecture festival held annually in Mexico City. The competition attracted over 400 submissions from 20 different countries; judges included Barry Bergdoll, curator of MoMA's architecture department and Dhyana Quintanar, general coordinator at the Authority of Public Space of Mexico City.

First prize was awarded to Alan David Orozco Martínez, a young architectural collective who devised a project titled ‘The boundaries of the space defined by the city. The table as a centripetal and centrifugal force’. The project, which addresses the notion that boundaries of space are defined by the cityscape, resembles a long ‘pre-cast concrete’ table, initiating an intimate space and provoking a sense of comfortable coexistence.

The pavilion was coined as a public space that could host dialogue and discussion during the events of the festival, while also adhering to the brief of being an ‘innovative and sustainable structure’ and a ‘buildable and recyclable project; an architectural event in itself’. It will now travel to future Mextrópoli festival locations, becoming a physical benchmark for citizenship and architectural relevance.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Mextrópoli’s website

Troels Holch Povlsen and husband and wife Rolf and Mette Hay founded Hay in 2002 with the idea of making well-designed products available and accessible at affordable price points. Since then, the Danish design firm, which offers everything from glassware to stationery, has attracted a global following. A year-and-a-half ago, they launched the first Hay Mini Market in Milan, garnering the attention of retailers like Le Bon Marché in Paris and Selfridges in London – which both hosted subsequent Hay Mini Markets of their own – before the platform went to Tokyo.

The pop-up caught the eye of Museum of Modern Art merchandising director Emmanuel Plat, who invited Hay to hold a Mini Market at the MoMA Design Store when he visited Copenhagen last February. 'I said, "Yeah let's do it right now!",' recalls Mette. 'And now we are here.'

The MoMA Design Store x Hay Mini Market, which launches this week, doubles as Hay's introduction to the American commercial scene, offering aisles filled with more than 230 items, 42 of which are totally new. 'Most of the products are new here in New York, but there's a new clock in our collection, which is in retail for the first time here,' says Mette. 'We have some bedspreads, and a pinboard by Inga Sempé, and then there's a lot of the small things which are new.'

Other items at the store include bright graphic tote bags that Hay collaborated on with Memphis Group member Nathalie Du Pasquier, illustrator Jody Barton and fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm; the angular Volet Hook by Dimitri Bähler; a deck of cards; and paper fans, perfect for cooling off in the unbearable New York summer heat.

'To be here at the MoMA Design Store is very special because it's the best place that we could open here in New York,' concludes Mette. 'It's a very good beginning.'

ADDRESS

MoMA Design Store
81 Spring Street
New York, 10012

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Started in the autumn of 2013, last month saw the close of MoMA's Design and Violence project - an 18 month-long online exhibition organised by Paola Antonelli, MoMA's senior curator at the Department of Architecture, and design critic and director of the graduate program in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design, Jamer Hunt

Started in the autumn of 2013, last month saw the close of MoMA's 18 month-long experimental project, Design and Violence; an online exhibition that examines the inextricable relationship between these familiar yet uneasy bedfellows.

Organised by Paola Antonelli, MoMA's senior curator at the Department of Architecture, and design critic and director of the graduate program in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design, Jamer Hunt, the website functions as a showcase for violence-related design objects (ranging from the lethal injection compound to the stiletto heel,) and also houses provocative essays by experts and thought leaders in response to the objects, which inevitably have sparked furious debate in the comments section. 'By making feedback a permanent and central part of the project, we gained some of our greatest insights,' notes Antonelli. 'We had two (two!) comments on the post on death penalty design and over 100 on the post regarding the design of the slaughterhouse. The death of animals galvanises more than the death of humans, and that was a surprise.'

Offline the project was fortified by a series of live-streamed panel discussions and an installation in the MoMA galleries. 'The online format was the best means, in the end, to begin this project,' reflects Hunt. 'Starting as an “online curatorial experiment” allowed us to be very nimble, and approach themes, authors, projects, and ideas that larger, well-known institutions aren’t always comfortable tackling, especially via design.'

Although covering all different scales of violence in design, the digital project centred on the modern day with almost all the featured design objects, projects and concepts being conceived post-2001 - a year which the curators posit as a pivotal moment in history, heralding the beginning of a permanent War on Terror; a global shift from symmetrical to asymmetric warfare; the emergence of nation-building as an alternative to military supremacy; and the rise of the intangible and complex battlefield of cyberwarfare.

Although the platform will remain online for the forseeable future, the project has now been translated from pixels into print in the form of a hefty book of the same name. Chronicling the design objects alongside the expert commentary, 'Design and Violence' is an era-defining design tome that should be essential reading for those interested in fields as diverse as journalism and art and design to science, law, finance and criminal justice.

The experimental project brought together violence-related design objects, such as the world's first 3D-printed gun (pictured), with provocative essays by experts and thought leaders in response to the objects. 

Offline the project was fortified by a series of live-streamed panel discussions and an installation in the MoMA galleries

The digital project centred on the modern day with almost all the featured design objects, projects and concepts being conceived post-2001. 

Chronicling the design objects alongside the expert commentary, 'Design and Violence' is now available as an era-defining design tome.

IRRI scientists Peter R. Jennings and Henry “Hank” M. Beachell join IRRI director Robert Chandler, Philippine president Ferdinand E. Marcos, and U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson in a field of IR8 rice plants (left to right), Los Baños, Philippines. 1966.

For decades, conceptual and performance artist and experimental filmmaker Yoko Ono has led the pack when it comes to cutting-edge creativity.  And now the Museum of Modern Art is showcasing her early innovative endeavours with 'Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971'.

MoMA has always been a bit of a home base for Ono's early outside-the-box creations. Back in 1971, she announced her first one-woman show, which she rather irreverently titled 'Museum Of Modern (F)art'. Just outside the museum's front doors, a man touted a sign stating that Ono had released dozens of common houseflies inside and invited visions to witness those winged creatures. MoMA curators were aghast, not least because the show wasn't even prepared for them. That was at a time when MoMA championed virtually no female nor Asian artists.

For this new, comprehensive show, curators Christophe Cherix and the somewhat controversial Klaus Biesenbach - whose Bjork exhibition is still hotly contested by journalists - gathered together one hundred and twenty five of her early objects, installations, performances, audio recordings and films to feature alongside her rarely seen archival materials.

'Central to Ono’s work since the 1960s has been her unwavering devotion to revealing beauty in everyday encounters and promoting world peace,' notes Cherix. 'These ideas have remained remarkably current in contemporary art, politics, and society.' For her 1966 'Apple', she placed that solitary piece of fruit on a plexiglas pedestal. Then in 1967 'Half-a-Room' displayed a chair cut right down the middle. Museum goers can also listen to the artist and her Beatle rocker husband John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band.

'During the first decade of her career, Ono played a pioneering role in the international development of Fluxus, Conceptual art, experimental film, and performance art,' adds Cherix. Beyond elevating the ordinary to an art form, Yoko injected a daring participatory element into her groundbreaking work, 'Ono's earliest works were often based on instructions that Ono communicated to viewers in verbal or written form.' Simply consider her pivotal 1964 'Cut Piece' performance when she asked viewers to snip away her clothing while she sat quietly on stage. The film captures that then surprising experience.

For those hankering to take part in her interactive body of work, MoMA offers the perfect opportunity via Ono's 1966 'White Chess Set', where she sought to alter the very rules of that board game. In her version, players work together so that the game can progress.

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At Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on Monday night, a sleek crowd, including architect Richard Meier and former New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, gathered to fete French architect Jean Nouvel, whose tallest building to date is under construction next door at 53 West 53rd St.

Dubbed 53W53, the 1,050-feet-high residential skyscraper makes use of air rights purchased from MoMA and other nearby buildings to provide views of Central Park and the city's skyline. 'When you are inside, you will feel you are in the sky in New York City,' says Nouvel. Officially, the event at MoMA - during which Vanity Fair contributing editor and filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer interviewed the soft-spoken architect - marked the commencement of sales of the tower's 140 luxury units. Unofficially, the swanky affair that spilled out into MoMA's Sculpture Garden was the beginning of the PR machine surrounding the building, slated for completion in 2018.

The elegant tower, with its glass and exposed steel diagrid structure, will create one-of-a-kind floor plans in the condominiums, ranging from one-bedrooms to duplex penthouses and full-floor layouts. Each unit will have sloping windows and muscular, slanting columns, giving New York-based interior designer Thierry W. Despont a challenging set of parameters.

53W53, which joins Manhattan's new slew of supertalls, has weathered its own share of controversy since it was announced in 2007. Torquing at subtle, oblique angles ('like a snake,' says Nouvel) as it tapers to a sharp summit, the tower was originally slated to be 1,250 feet tall, but neighbours balked and the city asked the architect and developer Hines to lower it (Hines is partnering with Goldman Sachs and Singapore-based Pontiac Land Group on the development).

Then in January 2014, MoMA, who sold 53W53's 18,000-square-foot lot to Hines and Goldman Sachs in 2007, decided to raze the adjacent Folk Art Museum, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. A future museum expansion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro will link to three of 53W53's lower floors which will be accessed from and connected to MoMA. The replacement of the Folk Art Museum raised cries of protest from architects, critics and the public, who lauded its small galleries and faceted bronze façade. Nouvel, who said the Folk Art Museum was 'a very interesting building' and claimed to be shocked by its disappearance from the site next to his tower, said that keeping the Folk Art's façade and gutting the interior, as was once suggested, didn't make sense.

On Monday night, Tyrnauer showed a brief clip of a documentary he is making about Nouvel before interviewing the architect. When Tyrnauer asked Nouvel about his creative process, he replied that he has to spend some amount of time lying in bed with an eye mask on and earphones in, thinking about his work. 'I don't want to see the light,' he said, eliciting laughs from the crowd. 'The light is inside.'

In 1929, while lecturing in Buenos Aires, Le Corbusier deftly sketched some classical references - a broken pediment; orders Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian; an approximation of the Parthenon - and then crossed them out with a big red "X." 'Ceci n'est pas l'architecture,' he scrawled below, in downward sloping cursive. 'Ce sont les styles.'

That drawing, created in the same year as René Magritte's famous painterly protest of a pipe, is among the first works that visitors encounter in the Museum of Modern Art's invigorating and incisive survey of modern architecture in Latin America, and it acts as a kind of opening bell for a 25-year, 11-country (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico) bout of old versus new in which innovation, complexity and radical originality emerge on top.  

Corbusier's sketch does more than set the tone for a regional rethinking of academic tradition and the Beaux-Arts legacy of city planning, explains MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll. Bergdoll has organised the exhibition over the last seven years, with Patricio del Real, Jorge Francisco Liernur, and Carlos Eduardo Comas. 'It points to the fact that Le Corbusier had gone to South America in 1929 - he only visited North America for the first time in 1935 - and Frank Lloyd Wright in 1931, yet no Latin American buildings were included in that seminal defining [MoMA] show, The International Style, which was anything but international!'

This ambitious survey picks up where yet another landmark MoMA show - Latin American Architecture Since 1945 - left off. 'The 1955 exhibition was a photographic field report on contemporary architecture of the previous decade,' says Bergdoll. 'This is a historical inquiry into a quarter century that ended thirty-five years ago.'

Visitors are plunged into 'a region in motion', with the help of a seven-screen installation that plays 693 precisely coordinated excerpts of archival footage that reveal the rapidly changing rhythms of life in major cities such as Montevideo, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro amidst Latin America's spectacular post-1945 urbanisation. 'These archival films…allow a view of the work in human context of how a building is birthed, how it lives, and how it may even fade to dust,' notes Joey Forsyte, who researched and edited the mega-anthology.

A myriad of approaches to the ideal future city come into focus through approximately 500 original works, from newly commissioned large-scale models and a portfolio by Brazilian photographer Leonardo Finotti to original drawings and ephemera. Set against a vast yellow timeline wall of key historical events, thematic sections tackle topics such as campus design and the ciudad universitaria (university city), the modernist dream fulfilled of Brasília, and the global export of Latin American urban planning models. The result is a rich network of ideas, influences, and collaborators including Alexander Calder, whose 'acoustic clouds' float in the auditorium of Carlos Raúl Villanueva's Aula Magna at La Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas. Notable too is Louis Kahn, who tapped Luis Barragán for help on the decidedly non-tropical court of the Salk Institute in California.

If the density, pace and sheer range of such a show sounds like it could overwhelm, well, that's by design. Bergdoll expects visitors to leave surprised by 'the sheer quantity of excellent architecture, the breathtaking speed of urban transformations and the vast variety of innovations and explorations,' along with plenty of individual discoveries. 'A building like the Banco de Londres in Buenos Aires, or the Torres del Parque in Bogota should be as famous as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater or Guggenheim for example,' he adds, 'and Lina Bo Bardi's SESC Pompeii is a built utopia.

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The verdict on Björk’s multifaceted retrospective - which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City last Saturday - might still be out, but there is one aspect of the exhibition that is being unanimously well received. The showpiece of the retrospective is an immersive audio and video installation entitled ’Black Lake’.

Commissioned by the museum and designed by The Living, the architecture practice that won MoMA PS1’s Young Architect’s Program in 2014, the installation is a physical incarnation of the eponymous song which features on Björk’s latest album, Vulnicura.

Made up of an organic matrix of black felt cones, ’Black Lake’ is a sensual theatre-like environment that takes over the MoMA’s atrium. It’s the first time that the atrium space has ever been given over for an exhibition’s sake. The luscious installation incorporates two projection screens and conceals 44 loud speakers, making it the ideal acoustic setting to experience Black Lake’s spiralling orchestration and haunting video.

’The brief was to create an immersive physical environment for [the song],’ said David Benjamin, director of The Living, who worked with Björk and the video’s director Andrew Thomas Huang to create the installation. ’If you scan across the room from north to south, each inch corresponds to one second of the song. We created this effect by taking a spectral analysis of the song, projecting it onto the walls and the ceiling, and then using this map to dial in the size and location of each cone.’

Björk’s dark and despairing creation is a moving expression of personal heartbreak, and the song’s complexity is reflected in the 6,000 or more cones that adorn the walls of the cavernous space. Each cone was digitally designed and then stitched and assembled by hand.

’We honed in on the cone shape based on its ability to control sound and on the way we could use it to generate a large undulating landscape from small cells,’ explains Benjamin. ’We wanted to use a tactile, organic material with good acoustic-dampening properties, and we found that felt was perfect. In the end, the room is so dead that it makes you feel your own pulsing life. It conveys the right atmosphere and mood for the song.’

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Conceptual artist Christopher Williams’ first retrospective is now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York - but don’t tell him that. 'I’m uncomfortable with the term conceptual artist, but I’m equally uncomfortable with the idea that I’m a photographer,' he says. 'Also I was incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of a survey or retrospective.'

Coming from another artist, such statements could be taken as pure contrarianism, deployed to shield, wedge, distance, or simply whine, but for Williams they are a way to reset expectations and invite the viewer into the cross-disciplinary territory he has spent the last 35 years conquering. It is a terrain populated with photographic artifacts (cutaway cameras, Kodak color guides) and glossy ideals (apples, soap, attractive women) that are so slightly and precisely askew, vexing even as they delight. Out of analogue serial production he coaxes endless parallels.

At 58, Los Angeles-born Williams has the easygoing yet brainy charm of a teacher - and he is, at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he followed Bernd Becher into the role of professor of photography. He compares himself to the magnifying bubble on his iPhone. 'You can move that little bubble around to enlarge images and words, and I think that’s what I do,' he says. 'Instead of being locked behind the camera, I move around. I’m often beside the camera, never in front of the camera, sometimes behind the camera. And I’m as much a photographer as I am a picture editor and a graphic designer.'

The full range of Williams’ practice is represented at MoMA, where 100 photographs - hung low and spaced generously, as if to allow room for their unwieldy titles - are joined by video and film works as well as what the museum describes as 'architectural interventions'. Williams looked to that last category as a way to eschew the inherently backward-looking nature of a retrospective.

The exhibition begins with striking red graphics taken from the show’s previous incarnation at the Art Institute of Chicago. It follows with wall fragments from previous MoMA exhibitions (including the recent Magritte blockbuster, entitled 'The Mystery of the Ordinary'), and finishes by looking forward, via a cinderblock wall, to the retrospective’s spring 2015 outing at Whitechapel Gallery.

'This is an exhibition that redefines the idea of montage, both montage in space - as here photography has been expanded into architecture and as a form of installation art - but also a montage of so many ideas within a single picture frame,' says MoMA curator Roxana Marcoci, who describes Williams as 'a cinephilic artist with a Brechtian flair for quotation'.

For all of the layered complexity and bold non sequiturs of Williams’ work, there is plenty of pure enjoyment to be had in 'The Production Line of Happiness' (a title borrowed from a Jean-Luc Godard documentary) and in the accompanying catalogue-cum-artist’s book. A few steps away from the photo of a 1964 Renault balanced on its side there is a close-up of a pair of beetles (the insects, not the cars) flipped on their backs in surrender.

And when it comes to portraits, the human subjects are distinctively joyful. 'If you look at the work of many of my colleagues, nobody’s smiling. Photography and conceptual art is a very serious business,' says Williams. 'So I thought, I have to find a space to have a position - smiling is maybe the area I can work in.'

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MoMA
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In 1961 New York's Museum of Modern Art surveyed the art of assemblage in an exhibition that brought the fragmented work of Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner and Edward Kienholz to a wider audience. More than 50 years later, the museum has raided the archives for the finest examples of collage, a sister artform that layers, juxtaposes and remixes materials not just physically but conceptually.

'Cut 'n' Paste', curated by Pedro Gadanho and Phoebe Springstubb of MoMA's department of architecture and design, takes an oft overlooked technique and reveals it as an apt and meaningful commentator on our contemporary culture.

The show goes back to the early 20th century - to figures like Edward Steichen and Giorgio de Chirico - to explore a genre that's bridged the Cubist works of Picasso and Braque (the style, after all, takes its name from the French 'coller'). It takes a visual journey through Surrealism, Pop Art and Postmodernism. And it reveals how architects starting with Mies van der Rohe adopted the cut-and-paste technique to bring their work alive. The curators reverentially refer to this architectural overlap as 'collage city'; extensive layering brings a depth to these works that is almost immersive.

En route, this many-layered showcase gives a history of the past century, a lesson that goes beyond the crèche into a far higher realm.

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New York, NY 10019-5497

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The name Polaroid evokes memories of pulling faces and excited anticipation as images come into focus. Sadly its method of photography has faded along with those old photographs pinned to so many bulletin boards. But before the instant cameras there were Polaroid sunglasses, accessories that used the company's patented polarising material to diffuse white glare and increase visibility.

Polaroid's sunglasses have managed to survive the technological revolution - the brand was snapped up last year by the Italian eyewear conglomerate Safilo - and last night they celebrated 75 years with an event at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and a new line of 10 styles called Polaroid Plus, which will be available for purchase in Spring 2013.

The MoMA event featured local DJs the Misshapes and an accompanying exhibition celebrating some of the brand's most enduring styles - like the leather-sided aviator glasses that reappeared from time to time throughout the 20th century after their debut by Polaroid in the 1930s.

Some interactive displays were also designed to literally throw guests in the spotlight, so they could experience for themselves the polarising technology, updated for the new generation of glasses (which, incidentally, were on hand for trying on). Also on show, was an original pair from 1946, which sits within MoMA's collection of Architecture and Design after being donated to MoMA by Edgar Kaufmann Jr, heir to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.