Refik Anadol: Unsupervised
“I am trying to find ways to connect memories with the future and to make the invisible visible.” — Refik Anadol
What would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of The Museum of Modern Art? Artist Refik Anadol uses artificial intelligence to interpret and transform more than two hundred years of art at MoMA in #Unsupervised, a new installation opening on November 19 at MoMA.
Known for his groundbreaking media works and public installations, Refik Anadol Studio has created digital artworks that unfold in real time, continuously generating new and otherworldly forms that envelop viewers in a large-scale, site-specific installation.
Unsupervised is a meditation on technology, creativity, and modern art. #RefikAnadol trained a sophisticated machine learning model to interpret the publicly available data of MoMA’s collection. As the model “walks” through its conception of this vast range of works, it reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been—and what might be to come.
Learn more → mo.ma/anadol
Thank you to Hyundai Card (현대카드) for making this project possible.
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Refik Anadol. Sample data visualization of “Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations — MoMA.” 2021. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Refik Anadol Studio
How to See: Women in Horror
“I hope that more non-white people, especially women, get mainstream attention...so people stop thinking that it’s just white boys in black T-shirts making horror films.” — Ashlee Blackwell
In the six decades since Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” reinvented horror as a mainstream box office attraction, the genre has morphed and mutated to become arguably the most complex and radically provocative in cinema.
Horror movies reflect the major concerns of our times. Rooted in reality and fueled by the fantastic, these works question the supremacy of humankind, and visualize a dizzying array of consequences for our folly.
When women step behind the camera, moving beyond the slasher film and the “final girl” to explore motherhood, sexuality, trauma, and gender discrimination, a new and exciting language in horror cinema is created.
In charge of telling their own stories, women filmmakers can address the longstanding tropes that have been established in horror by male directors.
🎥 This #Halloween watch “How to See: Women Reframing Horror” on #MoMAMagazine, a video about the changing role of women in horror movies, both in front of and behind the camera → mo.ma/3bMEvBR
Green Card: An American Romance
“I hope that Asian American artists will soon have their moment in the sun.” — Bruce Yonemoto
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto were born in California’s Silicon Valley to a Japanese American mother shortly after her release from Tule Lake internment camp, and a Japanese American father who had recently completed a wartime tour of duty in the US Army.
After moving to Los Angeles, Bruce and Norman forged a path in video art during the 1970s. Combining experimental approaches to the new medium without shying away from the visual codes of the film and television industries, they collaborated with a range of artists and counterculture luminaries.
The Yonemotos addressed complex questions about the Asian American experience, unfixing rigid notions of race and identity within an approach as rooted in popular culture as it was in underground sensibilities.
“Green Card: An American Romance” is the third and final installment in the Yonemotos’ Soap Opera Series. Satirizing 1980s Los Angeles and the city’s burgeoning art scene, the film betrays the Yonemotos’ fascination with the melodramatic clichés of American soap operas and the films of Douglas Sirk, drawing on the vernacular of Southern California’s entertainment industry.
📺 Stream Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s “Green Card: An American Romance” from October 26 – November 9 in the latest installment of our Hyundai Card Video Views series featuring video works from the collection → mo.ma/3zkh9vL
📖 Read an interview between Bruce Yonemoto and Julie Ault on #MoMAMagazine.
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Bruce Yonemoto, Norman Yonemoto. “Green Card: An American Romance” (excerpt). 1982. Video (color, sound), 79:15 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © 2022 Bruce Yonemoto. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix, New York
Holiday Gift Guide
✍️ Start working on your wishlists, our holiday shop is open at @momadesignstore!
Discover hundreds of designs online and in-store, from artist-created holiday cards to festive decor, #MoMADesignStore has everything you need to get a headstart on the season.
🎄 Explore our Holiday Gift Guide → store.moma.org/gifts
Air Propo at Just Above Midtown
“I was trying to become a conduit for something else…losing the self and allowing this other spirit to come through.” — Senga Nengudi
This clip is part of the performance “Air Propo” at Just Above Midtown in 1981. Created as part of a series of collaborations among artists working in different mediums, the musician Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris is seen playing a cornet before cutting to artist Senga Nengudi, who is seen standing in an installation of bamboo crosses covered in a gauzy fabric—exhaling short, sharp breaths.
Later, Morris plays again and is joined by dancer and choreographer Cheryl Banks-Smith who performs an improvised dance.
See documentation of the full performance in #JustAboveMidtown, an exhibition presenting artists and artworks previously shown at the art gallery and self-described laboratory led by Linda Goode Bryant that foregrounded African American artists and artists of color → mo.ma/justabovemidtown
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Excerpt of Senga Nengudi and Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris performing “Air Propo” at Just Above Midtown, 1981. Courtesy Senga Nengudi and Collection Linda Goode Bryant, New York.
Why Is There a Bed in the Middle of MoMA?
Why is there a bed in the middle of MoMA?
Robert Gober’s art is deeply engaged with everyday life—and at the same time profoundly disruptive of it.
Gober created this work called “Untitled” using materials purchased at a local lumberyard and a neighborhood store. Far from commonplace, though, this bed is surreal: a personal space of dreaming and desire that is strangely generic, recalling a dollhouse copy or a vague childhood memory.
“Untitled” appeared in the mid-1980s at a moment when queer communities in New York were fighting for equal rights, and the AIDS crisis was just beginning. Eternally empty, Gober’s “bed” evokes both unfulfilled longing and unfathomable loss.
🛏️ See Gober’s bed in Gallery 202: To Live and Die in New York → mo.ma/3z3p2pq
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[1] Robert Gober. “Untitled.” 1986. © 2022 Robert Gober. Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser [2] Robert Gober. "Untitled." 1985. © 2022 Robert Gober. Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser [3] Robert Gober. "Cat Litter." 1989. © 2022 Robert Gober. Acquisition from the Werner Dannheisser Testamentary Trust [4] Robert Gober. "Untitled Leg." 1989-90. © 2022 Robert Gober. Gift of the Dannheisser Foundation
ArtSpeaks: Naeem Douglas on Gordon Parks
“Gordon Parks was really, really good at telling stories with just one image.” — Naeem Douglas
In this edition of our UNIQLO ArtSpeaks, Naeem Douglas, a content producer on the Creative Team, finds contemporary resonance in a selection of photographs—including 1952’s “Emerging Man, Harlem, New York”—that photographer Gordon Parks created to celebrate Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.”
See Parks’s photograph “Emerging Man, Harlem, New York” in Gallery 409: Underground → mo.ma/3sbTZnp
UNIQLO USA is MoMA’s proud partner of #ArtForAll.
The Teachings of the Hands
How can a region's past, present, and future be in conversation?
This question animates the work of Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, which focuses on the struggles for territorial sovereignty, Indigenous rights, and the building of environmental memory.
The artist’s multimedia installation grew out of their years-long research into an area that the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe calls Somi Se’k, which includes parts of Southwest Texas, Northern Mexico, and the Rio Grande Valley.
“The Teachings of the Hands (Las enseñanzas de las manos),” narrated by Juan Mancias (Chairman of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas), highlights the tribe’s values and knowledge through their enduring bond with the land.
“Somi Se’k is what we call Texas,” Mancias explains. “Before it was Spain, it used to be nothing but Somi Se’k. Before it was Mexico, it was Somi Se’k.”
Focusing on three locations across West Texas—the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, the Amistad Dam on the Rio Grande, and the Permian Basin oil fields—the film also addresses the region’s complex histories of colonization, extractive violence, and Indigenous struggle, weaving together scenes spanning the past four thousand years.
→ The artists sat down for a conversation with Juan Mancias and C. J. Alvarez to discuss how digging into the past can inspire movements that are fighting for environmental justice today, and the ways in which we can reframe our connection to the land by altering our understanding of time. Read the conversation on #MoMAMagazine → mo.ma/3yC3qPF
→ See Caycedo and De Rozas’s multimedia installation, on view now at MoMA → mo.ma/3PSjLI1
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Excerpt from “The Teachings of the Hands” (2020), a film by Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, narrated by Juan Mancias, Chairman of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas. Courtesy the artists. Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa (@ballroommarfa).
Pierre Clémenti's "Positano"
Pierre Clémenti’s magnetic screen presence captured the imagination of countless moviegoers during the cultural heyday of the 1960s and ’70s.
His roles are as unforgettable as they are varied, brushing up against the sacred and the profane in characters often adapted from mythology, literature, theater, and religion. Angel, demon, hippie, rebel, poet: a child of 1960s counterculture, Clémenti played—and was—all of them.
In 1967, Clémenti’s purchase of a 16mm camera unleashed a two-decade drive to capture life around him. Chronicling family, friends, travels, life on film sets, and the barricades of May 1968, his small-gauge diaries, bursting with psychedelic flair and ingenious editing, comprise a significant body of underground films.
See the entirety of the actor’s directorial output in our theaters opening October 13.
🎟️ Learn more and get tickets → mo.ma/3Vb8LrS
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“Positano.” 1969. France. Directed by Pierre Clémenti. © The Estate of Pierre Clémenti
Watch Now: A Magical Substance Flows into Me
“The film is very much about telling history through the senses; through muscle memory, sound, and taste.” — Jumana Manna
Jumana Manna’s works dig into focused topics to produce narratives that expose how history and its accompanying value systems are constituted.
“A Magical Substance Flows into Me” the artist and filmmaker explores a Jerusalem archive of music from different ethnic and religious groups. The film speaks to the myriad implications of the archive, including how it can fix knowledge around traditions—even as they transform.
In the film, we see the role individuals play in keeping certain ways of life alive, and how simple gestures can maintain diversity and preserve complexity in the face of hegemonic forces.
📺 Stream “A Magical Substance Flows into Me” from September 28 – October 12 in the latest installment of our Hyundai Card Video Views series featuring video works from the collection → mo.ma/3UOGPK4
📖 Read an interview between Jumana Manna and Ruba Katrib on #MoMAMagazine → mo.ma/3UOGPK4
🍞 See Jumana Manna’s exhibition “Break, Take, Erase, Tally,” on view now at MoMA PS1 → mo.ma/jumana
ArtSpeaks: Margarita Lizcano Hernandez on Barbara Kruger
“There’s this level of activation of the space that, just by entering it, you become part of it.” — Margarita Lizcano Hernandez
In our latest UNIQLO ArtSpeaks, curatorial assistant Margarita Lizcano Hernandez takes a close look at Barbara Kruger’s “Thinking of Y̶o̶u̶. I Mean M̶e̶. I Mean You” and describes the sometimes overwhelming feeling of being surrounded by the colossal installation.
See the artist’s large-scale commission “Thinking of Y̶o̶u̶. I Mean M̶e̶. I Mean You.” on view now. Learn more and plan your visit → mo.ma/barbarakruger
UNIQLO USA is MoMA’s proud partner of #ArtForAll.
Opening Soon: Just Above Midtown
"Let's just do it ourselves"
Just Above Midtown—or JAM—was an art gallery and self-described laboratory led by Linda Goode Bryant that foregrounded African American artists and artists of color.
Open from 1974 until 1986, it was a place where black art flourished and debate was cultivated.
#JustAboveMidtown, an exhibition opening presenting artists and artworks previously shown at JAM, opens October 9 → mo.ma/justabovemidtown
#MoMAMembers experience major exhibitions before they open to the public. Become a member to see the exhibition first from October 6 – 8 → mo.ma/membership
The exhibition is made possible by the Ralph Lauren Corporation .
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