MoMA Courses: Curatorial Perspectives

Curatorial Perspectives: Artistic Mediums in Dialogue
MoMA Courses, New York
Starts 9 October, 4 weeks
Instructors: Masha Chlenova, Judith B. Hecker

Much modern and contemporary art has been created through a dialogue between artistic mediums, with artists moving fluidly between drawing, printmaking, painting, film, poetry, and performance. Cross-media collaborations enabled such key breakthroughs as the invention of abstraction. How can museum presentations successfully reflect the close dialogue between artistic mediums in individual artists’ careers and across entire historical periods? How do artworks come together on a wall, in a gallery, or within a larger space to tell a story? What choices do curators make and how do those decisions affect the way we understand the work of an individual artist or an artistic movement? This class considers current collection gallery installations at MoMA, along with recent and current exhibitions, to explore curatorial perspectives on building narratives and connections between artists, artworks, and mediums. Exhibitions considered during the course include Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 (2012–13), William Kentridge: Five Themes (2010), Jasper Johns: Regrets (2014), andJean Dubuffet: Soul of the Underground (2014).

Judith B. Hecker (MA, University of Chicago) is an assistant curator in MoMA’s Department of Drawings and Prints. She curated Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now: Prints from The Museum of Modern Art and co-curated MoMA’s presentation of William Kentridge: Five Themes. She has organized collection rotations for the Museum’s Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries and contributed to numerous collection catalogues. She also works on new acquisitions for the collection.

Masha Chlenova (PhD, Columbia University) is an art historian and curator specializing in early 20th-century art. Most recently she was a curatorial assistant in MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture, where she worked on the exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 and an upcoming retrospective of Francis Picabia. Her writing has appeared in the journal October and in exhibition catalogues published by MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, and Tate Modern.

Please visit the website for further information on the course’s cost and registration.