MoMA COURSES

Artist Xaviera Simmons collaborates with screenprint maker Sara Gates of Kingsland Printing to present an afternoon of dialogue and action. Drawing from the MoMA Library and Archive collections, Simmons presents a selection of images surrounding various methods of political action or protest documented, presented, or in response to MoMA throughout its history. Using these images as source material, the workshop explores the ephemeral and performative nature of political action, and the ways in which artists have used various techniques to get their messages across. Following a group discussion, Gates and Simmons lead a screenprinting workshop, allowing each participant to create their own portable political messages via t-shirts and tote bags. This workshop is part of MoMA's Artists Experiment initiative, and is part of Simmons' ongoing Archive as Impetus project.

Xaviera Simmons produces installations, sculptures, photographs, and video and performative works. She received a BFA from Bard College (2004) after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the trans-Atlantic slave trade with Buddhist Monks. She completed the Whitney Museum’s ISP in Studio Art (2005) while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with the Maggie Flanigan Studio. Simmons has exhibited nationally and internationally, including The Museum of Modern, MoMA PS1, Nouveau Museum National de Monaco, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Public Art Fund, and SculptureCenter. Simmons is a recipient of numerous awards, including the David C. Driskell Prize, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, an Art Matters fellowship, and a smARTpower fellowship. Simmons was a 2012 artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Henri Labrouste was arguably the first architect to adopt a resolutely avant-garde posture and to radically challenge classical design ideals. He pioneered advanced building technologies such as iron-framed construction, gas lighting, and pneumatic tube systems, prefiguring modern architecture of the 20th century. Yet even as he embraced mechanization and industry, he insisted that architecture retain its symbolic and communicative function. Labrouste was a Romantic, appropriating dramatic techniques from panoramas and theater to fashion total environments that engaged the imagination, fantasy, and bodily experience. Understanding history not in terms of universal ideals but as a contingent process shaped by social action and change, he also designed some of the first public spaces—notably libraries—created in the wake of democratic revolutions and urban renewal campaigns that reorganized metropolitan life in the 19th century.

This intensive course explores Labrouste’s multifaceted architectural practice through a combination of lectures, debates, guest speakers, and in-depth investigation of the special exhibition Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light. His significance for contemporary questions regarding architecture and social politics will also be explored. Labrouste's struggle to assimilate competing cultural forces—industry, technology, architectural signification, and an emerging public realm—has particular relevance today, as digital technologies transform architectural practice, modes of social interaction, and forms of cultural signification, tensions played out in the contentious renovation of the New York Public Library and the politics of public space in an era of surveillance and privatization.

Jennifer Gray (PhD, Columbia University) is a historian of modern art and architecture, specializing in the relationships between progressive social politics and the built environment. She teaches and lectures at The Museum of Modern Art.

Experience New York through the lens of poetry and architecture. Kenneth Goldsmith ends his residency on a double-decker bus tour of New York City's landmark sites, accompanied by a marathon reading from his work-in-progress, Capital, a poetic history of New York City in the 20th century, inspired by Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project, which documented the cultural history of Paris in the 19th century. 'Pataphysics—the science of imaginary solutions to imaginary problems—was pioneered by Alfred Jarry in the early 20th century. By leasing a Gray Line open-top tour bus and making it do things it normally doesn't, we'll recast it as a 'pataphysical vehicle, turning a quotidian tourist trap into a magical mystery tour.

Tickets ($40, $30 members, corporate members, $20 students, seniors, and staff of other museums) are available online, at the Information Desk in the main lobby or at the Film Desk.

This special format class proposes a close look at Claes Oldenburg’s 1960s and 1970s work, in conjunction with the artist’s large-scale solo exhibition on view at the Museum. By focusing on objects, installations, and happenings from a wide variety of perspectives, the class explores how Oldenburg addressed matters of consumption in 1960s America and investigated the role of late-20th-century museums. Comprehensive readings of Oldenburg’s multimedia practice are complemented by discussions of works by artists who were associated with Pop art and with the Judson Church Gallery, and by an examination of the socioeconomic and cultural context of the 1960s New York art scene. The class consists of short slide presentations, discussions in the galleries, special film screenings, and studio exercises that ground the understanding of Oldenburg’s work in material practice.

Ágnes Berecz (PhD, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) teaches modern and contemporary art history at the Pratt Institute and in the School of Graduate Studies of the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her writings have been published in Art in America, Artmargins, and Praesens, and in European and U.S. exhibition catalogues.

This special format class proposes a close look at Claes Oldenburg’s 1960s and 1970s work, in conjunction with the artist’s large-scale solo exhibition on view at the Museum. By focusing on objects, installations, and happenings from a wide variety of perspectives, the class explores how Oldenburg addressed matters of consumption in 1960s America and investigated the role of late-20th-century museums. Comprehensive readings of Oldenburg’s multimedia practice are complemented by discussions of works by artists who were associated with Pop art and with the Judson Church Gallery, and by an examination of the socioeconomic and cultural context of the 1960s New York art scene. The class consists of short slide presentations, discussions in the galleries, special film screenings, and studio exercises that ground the understanding of Oldenburg’s work in material practice.

Ágnes Berecz (PhD, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) teaches modern and contemporary art history at the Pratt Institute and in the School of Graduate Studies of the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her writings have been published in Art in America, Artmargins, and Praesens, and in European and U.S. exhibition catalogues.

During the 1920s, the spectacular and still very bohemian City of Light was home to numerous American expatriates and other foreigners who brought both culture and enjoyment of the city’s pleasures to dizzying new heights of artistic inspiration, experimentation, and intoxication. It’s not for nothing that these years were known as les années folles!

Come experience Paris by Night—and get to know spirited, larger-than-life characters like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Django Reinhardt, Josephine Baker, Gerald Murphy, Man Ray, and Pablo Picasso—through this interdisciplinary intensive course, which includes after-hours discussions in MoMA's galleries and a heady mix of experiential components related to the art, literature, and nightlife of the time.

Larissa Bailiff (PhD, ABD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) is a specialist in 19th-century French art and social history. Formerly an associate educator at MoMA, she has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at both the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Pratt Institute.

During the 1920s, the spectacular and still very bohemian City of Light was home to numerous American expatriates and other foreigners who brought both culture and enjoyment of the city’s pleasures to dizzying new heights of artistic inspiration, experimentation, and intoxication. It’s not for nothing that these years were known as les années folles!

Come experience Paris by Night—and get to know spirited, larger-than-life characters like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Django Reinhardt, Josephine Baker, Gerald Murphy, Man Ray, and Pablo Picasso—through this interdisciplinary intensive course, which includes after-hours discussions in MoMA's galleries and a heady mix of experiential components related to the art, literature, and nightlife of the time.

Larissa Bailiff (PhD, ABD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) is a specialist in 19th-century French art and social history. Formerly an associate educator at MoMA, she has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at both the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Pratt Institute.

During the 1920s, the spectacular and still very bohemian City of Light was home to numerous American expatriates and other foreigners who brought both culture and enjoyment of the city’s pleasures to dizzying new heights of artistic inspiration, experimentation, and intoxication. It’s not for nothing that these years were known as les années folles!

Come experience Paris by Night—and get to know spirited, larger-than-life characters like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Django Reinhardt, Josephine Baker, Gerald Murphy, Man Ray, and Pablo Picasso—through this interdisciplinary intensive course, which includes after-hours discussions in MoMA's galleries and a heady mix of experiential components related to the art, literature, and nightlife of the time.

Larissa Bailiff (PhD, ABD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) is a specialist in 19th-century French art and social history. Formerly an associate educator at MoMA, she has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at both the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Pratt Institute.