Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-71). / This thesis is an examination of the 1976 Museum of Modern Art exhibition of color photographs by William Eggleston-the second one-man show of color photography in the museum's history- with particular attention to the exhibition monograph, William Eggleston's Guide. From hundreds of slides, MoMA Director of Photography John Szarkowski dominated the process of selecting the 75 images for the exhibition and 48 to be carefully packaged in the Guide, a faux family photo album/road trip guidebook. It is my contention that, despite their verbal emphasis on the Modernist and universal (rather than Southern) nature of the images, the photographs can be read as being replete with the mythology of the Old South- its decay, vulgarity, and even horror. Through this act of manipulation, the images in the Guide appealed in a voyeuristic way to an elite Northern art world audience, ever eager to reinforce its own intellectual, economic, and ethical superiority over other parts of the country. Due to its presumed "vulgarity" and absence of aesthetic mystique at the time, color photography required for its inaugural moment at the museum a sharp distancing from the documentary tradition and advertising-the complete erasure of social context afforded by a Modernist aesthetic. / (cont.) The two-faced posture maintained by the curator and photographer combined a canny understanding of the cultural power of the images with an overtly Modernist disavowal of it. / by Anna Karrer Kivlan. / S.M.

The aim of this dissertation is to understand and analyze the museum location decision, defined as where museum founders choose to establish or relocate their institution. The empirical case is the museum population of New York City from 1910-2010. In three substantive chapters, I explore this complex decision process from the organizational-level, the population-level, and the audience-level. In the first chapter, I argue that the museum location decision has evolved over the past century, and has experienced three major paradigm shifts. Out of each era, a new model of the museum location decision has taken hold, resulting in the current organizational landscape. I demonstrate how these eras emerged through historical, comparative case studies of two New York museums, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In second chapter, I show that the location decisions illustrated through the histories of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art are representative of New York's museum population overall. Using a dataset of all museums that have existed in New York City (and all of those museums' relocations), I chronicle the aggregated movements of the museum population between 1910 and 2010. I argue that the three eras of the museum location decision interacted with key demographic changes to create the unique distribution we observe today. The insights from these findings indicate that the spatial diffusion of museums in New York is systematically patterned in relation to demographic changes. The final substantive chapter is devoted to exploring the possibility that institutional location impacts audience composition. I argue that proximity to museums and other kinds of arts institutions is a significant, yet understudied determinant of attendance. The introduced concept of institutional exposure suggests that local access to arts institutions has cognitive, behavioral, and interactional consequences. Although directly testing the effect of institutional exposure is beyond the parameters of this dissertation, I show that there is a strong correlation between exposure and attendance. I illustrate the increasingly unequal access to arts between white and African American New Yorkers, which correlates highly with still-unexplained low attendance rates of African Americans. The observed evolution of the museum location decision explains when and how New York institutions adopted and then abandoned each institutionalized practice of museum location. In the Conclusion, I highlight several implications of this work, both of sociological theory and on current cultural policy.

This dissertation provides a cultural history of the first North American film archive, the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), established in 1935. It asks a seemingly simple question: How was it that small, popular, debased, ephemeral objects like films came to be treated as precious, complex and valuable historical objects? It therefore explores how ideas about archiving (seeing and saving films) intersect with practices of collection and exhibition, by mapping the evolution of key institutional discourses and cultural trends from the birth of the medium to the Film Library. It considers links between the archive and longstanding concepts in film culture---utopianism, cinematic knowledge and art. It attends to the more specific convergence of interests---public and private, national and international---which impacted on the Film Library's institutional shape and on the debates in which it was embroiled. This dissertation shows that despite the Film Library's home within an institution of modern art, film's archival value was associated more with the urgency of recovering a history that had been lost and less with an art that had been neglected. This contention is further supported by an examination of the Film Library's first circulating film programs and their public reception. This dissertation postulates that the library's development of an unprecedented and broad acquisition policy as well as an active exhibition program made it more than a mere reflection of the uniquely historical and modern attributes of the cinema: a meeting of aesthetic ferment, technology, commercialism, propaganda, popularity and information. It concludes that the library was an important intervention into these discourses marking with institutional certainty the contested nature of film as a cultural object as well as the ongoing project to understand it.

No description available.

The Museum of Modern Art's television project sponsored by the Rockefeller Brother's Fund between 1952 and 1955 was designed to educate a democratic and cultured citizenry through the principles and practices of modern art and liberal humanism. Through a close reading of four television programs, related policy documents and exhibitions, as well as critical, educational and promotional literature, this study will show how within the context of the MoMA's mandate and history, the television project was a decisive, yet highly troubled attempt to forge cultural citizenship through the burgeoning media of modern art and television. This exploration will establish how the television project was an integral aspect of the MoMA's efforts since World War II to situate modern art as essential to the formation of an international polity shaped around the promise of universality, yet dependent on upholding the primacy of free and creative individuals. In addressing such a challenge, this dissertation will contend that television was not necessarily antithetical to modernism, rather it was just one among an array of struggling forces falling within the rubric of the modern. Moreover, this analysis will consider the importance of culture in logics of liberal governance. In order to elucidate the dimensions of cultural democracy as they emerged through the MoMA's television project, this study will be shaped around a discussion of three components crucial to the formation and maintenance of citizenly conduct---civic education, democratic cultural communications, and cross-cultural governance. To these ends, a range of sources from the disciplines of Communications, Cultural Studies and Critical Artistic Studies will be drawn on in order to investigate the provisional links forged between modern art, media pedagogy, and cultural citizenship in the Cold War period.

No description available.

Calif., Univ. of Calif., Diss.--Berkeley. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [301]-315) and index.

Historically Black colleges and universities served as primary sites of modernist artmaking. In 1920, however, no HBCU offered an art major or employed full-time fine arts faculty. This dissertation examines that swift transformation, demonstrating it not as a simple evolution, but rather as a contested site of Black thought and protest. I show this not through an institutional history or "timeline" of Black college art departments, but rather in a sustained attention towards Black colleges as nodes within a larger network of publics constituting Black modernism as sites for subjectivity. In doing so, this dissertation examines the conjuncture between two coincident forms: that of modernist art and of the same era's radical modes of racial exclusion. I ask what is at stake in art as lived experience, at a moment in which modernist aesthetics made claims as a means of producing novel ways of inhabiting being human while simultaneous modes of racial formation devalued Blackness within that conceptual category as life. Through this, I track aesthetic production as a relation and set of experiences occurring through specific sites and publics as an asymmetric arena for contestation, with an emphasis on historically Black colleges and universities. My first chapter, "Organize, Strike, Paint: Making Modern Art at Historically Black Colleges," charts that shift in a set of breaks in art-making at HBCUs, arguing for a student-driven movement away from industrial education towards a modernist visual arts, one embedded within a larger constellation of sites. My second chapter, "Aaron Douglas and a Liberatory History of the Senses," looks closely at Fisk University through the work of painter Aaron Douglas in a set of site-specific murals he made which visualize a long narrative of Black history, art, and labor. I argue that Douglas interrogated in those paintings central questions of visual modernism, placing the radical exclusion of Black subjects in slavery and its afterlives in the Jim Crow era as central to an understanding of modern vision and subjectivity. Through such works, HBCUs stand as necessary sites for theorizing a history of vision and its relation to the "human," as a rejoinder to histories of visual modernism that do not meaningfully account for racialization. In my final chapter, "Black Study in the White Cube: Racialized Subjectivities and the Museum of Modern Art, ca. 1935," I demonstrate the circulation and exclusions that structured Black audiences and art viewing. I do so through an examination of the Museum of Modern Art’s African Negro Art exhibition, which Black artists engaged with as visitors at MoMA, through mediated forms in print and photography, as well as in circulating satellite shows presented at HBCUs. In doing so, I attend to both the modes of viewership at the museum proper as well as the ways it interacted within a broader network of Black publics. Similarly, I examine the specific content of that MoMA exhibit in its primitivist imagination of an African past, one which might be used as a ground for "modern" white subjects. I track how Black artists confronted that continued legacy of anti-Blackness and addressed the immense dislocations inherent in it. Throughout, I provided sustained attention to artists including Hale Woodruff, Loïs Mailou Jones, Aaron Douglas, John Biggers, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Amaza Lee Meredith, William H. Johnson, Augusta Savage, and Elizabeth Catlett.