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.

Cette thèse est consacrée aux questions de réception et d'institutionnalisation de la photographie documentaire et de la photographie de reportage à partir de 1937 jusqu'aux années 1970 au Museum of Modem Art (MoMA) de New York. Le premier chapitre revient sur la genèse et les enjeux de l'instauration de la straight photography comme canon d’une tradition esthétisante du médium et éclaire l’influence de la critique formaliste dans l'émergence d'un modernisme documentaire, exemplifié par la production de Walker Evans. De nombreux photographes dont les pratiques ne correspondaient pas aux idéaux de perfection technique de la straight photography ont de exclus des circuits de légitimation institutionnelle, en particulier les membres de la Photo League de New York. La photographie documentaire urbaine, développée en dehors de la doxa moderniste, fait l'objet du deuxième chapitre de cette étude. A. cet égard, une attention particulière est consacrée à l'œuvre critique d'Elizabeth McCausland, principale porte-parole de la fonction sociale de la photographie. Le troisième chapitre se concentre sur la période de l’après-guerre. Dans ce nouveau contexte, les Américains sont à la recherche de nouveaux canons artistiques, qu'ils trouvent dans la photographie de reportage française, dont Henri Cartier-Bresson représente le chef de file. Ce chapitre dévoile les intérêts diplomatiques du modernisme dans les échanges transatlantiques avec la France, ainsi que ses intérêts économique à travers l'exemple d'André Kertész dont l'exposition au MoMA suscite l'envol de sa cote sur le marché naissant de la photographie dans les années 1970. / This thesis is dedicated to questions of reception and institutionalization of documentary photography and reportage photography from 1937 through to the 1970s at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The first chapter looks at the development and objectives of the advent of straight photography as a canon or an aestheticizing tradition of the medium, and sheds light on the influence of formalist criticism in the emergence of a form of documentary modernism, exemplified by the works of Walker Evans. Many photographers whose practices do not correspond to the ideals of technical perfection of straight photography were excluded from the circuits of institutional legitimization, particularly the members of the New York Photo League, Urban documentary photography, developed outside of the modernist doxa will be the subject of the second chapter of this study. In this respect, particular attention is paid to the critical work of Elizabeth McCausland, a major spokesperson for the social function of photography. The third chapter focuses on the post-war period. ln this new context. The Americans were looking for new artistic canons, which they found in French reportage photography, with Henri Cartier-Bresson leading the fray. Finally, this chapter reveals the diplomatic interests of modernism in Transatlantic exchanges with France, as well as its economic interests, taking André Kertész, as an example, whose exhibition at MoMA caused his works to suddenly rise in value on the inchoate photography market of the 1970s.

In 1940 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (MoMA) became the first major American art museum to establish a curatorial department dedicated exclusively to photography. From the perspective of the photographers, curators, and critics who had sought institutional legitimacy for the medium, the founding of the Department of Photographs was a watershed event, marking the moment when photography finally came to be recognized as a museum subject equal to painting and sculpture. Although the department has since had a pervasive influence on the field and the history of photography, surprisingly little scholarship has addressed its contentious formation. This dissertation seeks to fill this significant gap in the literature by examining the department's inception and the six years Beaumont Newhall served as its curator.Of particular concern are the ideological battles waged over how photography would be presented at MoMA by Newhall, his wife Nancy--who served as acting curator when her husband enlisted in the army during World War II--and the department's co-founder and key advisor, Ansel Adams. As acolytes of the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who himself had long fought for the recognition of photography as a medium of art, the Newhalls and Adams took aesthetic quality as their guiding metric, asserting that in order to raise the profile of photographers, educate the public, and improve standards of taste, the museum should show only the very best work ever created--the "heavy cream" of photographic production. Their vision for photography at the museum was counterbalanced by that of the photographer Edward Steichen and many prominent writers and critics, who argued that MoMA should treat photography as a broad-ranging cultural phenomenon and means of communication, rather than merely as a medium of self expression. The debate between these two camps illustrates the considerable philosophical, interpretive, and museological challenges raised by photography's introduction into the museum, issues that remain as contentious as ever.

Museums are culturally constructed as places dedicated to tastemaking, preservation, historical record, and curation. Yet the contemporary isn’t yet absorbed by history, so as museums incorporate contemporary art these commonly accepted functions are disrupted. Through case studies, this thesis examines the successes and failures of three New York museums (MoMA, Dia:Beacon and New Museum) as they grapple with the challenging, perhaps irresolvable, tension between the contemporary and the very idea of the museum.

In 1998, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective exhibition of artworks by Jackson Pollock. Curators Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel worked in an art historical context that had been significantly shaped by the early critical writings by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. The curators’ stated intention for the exhibition installation was to provide “a fresh chance for new generations of artists to come to terms with a legendary figure” and to enable “the broader public to reassess a quintessentially American artist in light of three decades of new scholarship,” without “ hewing to any particular critical dogma.” Despite this curatorial intention, this thesis examines the ways in which the retrospective inscribed Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s theories, while disregarding subsequent scholarship that did not explicitly inscribe or align with the mid-century criticism in its account of Jackson Pollock.

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.

The diploma thesis deals with the construction of building the Central European Forum in the vacant space on the street Denisova in Olomouc. SEFO new building is directly connected to the existing building Olomouc Museum of Art is within the urban conservation. The new facility will expand the exhibition and storage capabilities of this institution that deals with modern art. In building will be located mainly in the exhibition space and the first and sekond floor. Furthermore Library 3.NP and 4.NP. Depository, administrative offices, workshops and technical facilities are situated on two underground floors. In the courtyard garden created with exhibitions. Those are defined as two roof surfaces.

American and British exhibitions of town planning, dwellings, and home furnishings proliferated during World War II as architects seized an opportunity to rethink housing on a mass scale. “Tomorrow on Display” analyzes a range of these displays to illuminate how wartime planning and modern architecture were inextricably intertwined. The dissertation demonstrates how concepts such as the neighborhood unit and the production of modern dwellings were spurred by the war as architects in the U.S. and Britain envisioned more egalitarian forms of living. But it also illustrates how architects, curators, and institutions promoted such concepts, visualizing postwar housing for non-professional audiences by connecting architectural designs to ideas about democracy during and following the war. As “Tomorrow on Display” shows, with men enlisted in the conflict, many of these new curators and museum personnel were women. Chapter one analyzes the exhibitions Wartime Housing (Museum of Modern Art, 1942) and Rebuilding Britain (Royal Institute of British Architects, 1943) to illustrate how curators framed the war as an opportunity to modernize housing. Chapter two examines Look at Your Neighborhood (MoMA, 1944) and Planning Your Neighborhood (Army Bureau of Current Affairs, 1945) to illuminate the ways in which town-planning displays communicated to visitors the egalitarian potential of the neighborhood unit. Chapter three looks at Integrated Building (MoMA, 1945) and Kitchen Planning (British Gas Industry, 1945) to elucidate how kitchen-planning exhibits encouraged women to think of the postwar future by planning their new homes. Finally, chapter four studies how model housing displays such as Idea House II (Walker Art Center, 1947-48) and 4 Ways of Living (Ministry of Health/Council of Industrial Design, 1949) encouraged postwar audiences to envision themselves living in and furnishing modern homes. Collectively this research reveals how curators and their institutions called upon visitors to advocate, personalize, and consume as democratic duties. Ultimately, the project argues that the exhibitions’ underlying ideological agendas constructed and reinforced a democratic citizenry to combat the totalitarian regimes against which the U.S. and Britain were unified. / 2025-10-31T00:00:00Z

Engaging with both the materiality and visuality of the embroidered artworks by Marguerite Zorach and Elaine Reichek, this thesis analyzes the material acknowledgement, or lack thereof, of the embroidery medium in both the artists' own motivations and how the Museum of Modern Art represents and displays modern embroideries. Often perceived as old-fashioned, in both cultural and artistic frameworks there is at a times tremulous acceptance of the embroidery medium. Both Zorach and Reichek's embroideries are undoubtedly rooted in modernist ideas surrounding form, subject, and aesthetics. Expressed in thread, the concepts behind these artworks are closely stitched to the medium itself, enhanced by the textural and methodological process of embroidery. Despite this, the modes of display used by the MoMA exhibits portray a reluctance to fully embrace and acknowledge the importance of materiality in in the history of embroidery. Examining the inclusion of Zorach's The Circus in the 1938 Three Centuries of American Art exhibition alongside Reichek's 1999 solo exhibition Projects 67: Elaine Reichek displaying her When This You See… embroidery series, this thesis evaluates each artist's use of the medium and how the respective exhibitions framed the embroidered artworks. / Master of Arts / Embroidery, often perceived as a domestic or craft practice, faces cultural and artistic reception challenges when being used as a medium for modern art. Using Marguerite Zorach and Elaine Reichek's embroidered modern artworks, this thesis analyzes how the artists' motivations are translated through the Museum of Modern Art's curatorial and conceptual framework. For these two artists, the materiality, physical processes, and cultural history of the embroidery medium provide grounding contexts for their individual artistic production. This emphasizes that artistic motivation for the use of embroidery is inherently tied to the physical and contextual qualities of the medium, rather than being a simply coincidental choice of medium. Despite this, the MoMA, while not wholly ignoring the material qualities of embroidery and the intimate connection between artist, materiality, and process, does not fully acknowledge and exhibit these closely stitched connections. Analyzing how the MoMA displayed Zorach's The Circus in the 1938 and Reichek's When This You See… embroidery series in 1999, this thesis delves into the cultural forces informing the MoMA's exhibition framing of embroidery alongside how each artist's use of the medium.

La thèse s’intéresse aux expositions de design graphique, à la fois en tant qu’événements constitutifs de l’histoire de la discipline et en tant qu’espaces (scénographiques et discursifs) où se manifestent ses liens plus ou moins assumés avec la création artistique. Elle s’appuie sur un corpus de quatre cents expositions, organisées entre 1895 et 1995, au sein de trois institutions muséales : le Stedelijk Museum d’Amsterdam, fondé en 1895, le Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) de New York, créé en 1929 et le Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de création industrielle (Mnam/Cci), né en 1993 de la fusion de deux départements du Centre Pompidou. L’étude des archives de ces manifestations met au jour ce que furent les choix de programmation des musées (quels objets, quelles époques, quels graphistes mettent-elles en avant ?) ; mais aussi les différents statuts qui sont conférés aux objets imprimés, par la scénographie ou par les discours qui les environnent. La thèse révèle, notamment, la préférence des musées d’art moderne pour l’affiche, pour le graphisme « d’utilité publique » et pour le travail des « graphistes-auteurs ». À ce graphisme « de musée » sont appliqués des cadres interprétatifs qui le rapproche de la création artistique : assimilation du graphiste à un artiste, omission des circonstances de la commande, description des styles, recherche des influences… Les expositions de « communications visuelles » organisées par le CCI offrent un singulier contrepoint à ce modèle, dans la mesure où elles consacrent moins les « œuvres » du graphisme qu’elles ne s’interrogent sur leur contexte social de production et d’utilisation. / This dissertation looks at graphic design exhibitions both as events that are part of the history of the discipline and as scenographic and academic forums for expressing, more or less consciously, its links with artistic creativity. It is based on the analysis of four hundred exhibitions, held between 1895 and 1995 at three modern art museums : the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, founded in 1895, the MoMA in New York, inaugurated in 1929 and the Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de création industrielle (Mnam/Cci), created in 1993 after the fusion of two separate departments of the Centre Pompidou. The archives of these exhibitions highlights both the choices of programming (what objects, eras and graphic designers do they ?), and the various status confered to printed objects by scenography and surrounding texts and discourses. The dissertation reveals the preference of modern art museums for posters, for graphic design for the public domain, and for the work of ‘graphic designers-cum-authors’. This specific graphic design elected by museums is envisionned according to interpretative frames that likens it to artistic creation through the rapprochement between graphic designers and artists, the omission of circumstances pertaining to commissions, descriptions of styles, search for influences, etc. The ‘visual communication’ exhibitions organised by the CCI provide a striking contrast to this model in so far as they concentrated less on the actual ‘works’ of graphic design than on the social context of their production and use.