The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded with the kind of revolutionary zeal that it sought to promote. It was the late twenties and, against a backdrop of energy, enthusiasm and exhilaration (what prohibition?), three avant-garde patrols of the arts felt that the time was right to launch a new establishment.
It would be, in comparison to the square policies of many of the conservative museums in the US, radical in its ideas, a direct challenge to traditional hegemony and novel in its exclusive presentation of modern art.
And so, Ms Lillie P. Bliss, Miss Cornelius J. Sullivan, and Ms John D. Rockefeller, Jr. promoted this groundbreaking idea with much success and, with the support of its original trustees, A. Conger Goodyear, Paul Sachs, Frank Crowninshield and Josephine Boardman Crane, established the museum in 1929.
Since then MoMA has gone on to be one of the most important art institutions in the world, delivering on its promise to be a leading supporter of modern works, as well as upholding its desire to be a creative, engaging and thought-provoking space.
In continuation of its progressive ideals, MoMA’s current board of trustees has given the green light to initial details of a major building project that will drastically expand the museum and its immediately vicinity.
Senior members of the museum will be working closely with the New York-based interdisciplinary studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro to incorporate the main building with two sites that lie west of its midtown Manhattan campus.
“The plans approved today are the result of a recommendation from the architects after a diligent and thoughtful six-month study and design process that explored all options for the site,” MoMA stated in an official press release.
“The analysis that we undertook was lengthy and rigorous, and ultimately led us to the determination that creating a new building on the site of the former American Folk Art Museum is the only way to achieve a fully integrated campus.”
When the project is finished in 2019, the building will be roughly 40,000 square feet bigger and have 30 per cent more space to dedicate towards exhibitions and its titanic collection of permanent works. It will allow it to continue breathing new life into the world of modern art.
Space matters, after all, as does change and a commitment to what you believe in (“a dialogue between the established and the experimental, the past and the present, in an environment that is responsive to the issues of modern and contemporary art”). This is a grand vision for an epic offering that has endured for many, many years.
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