Leona Strassberg Steiner
MOMA - Queens storage facility
Once again, Stephen met us at the door with a
smile and escorted us through this huge vast tomb of art that may never be
shown in a museum in the next decade. As we walked through the many boxes and
crates we discovered famous names along with weird shapes and ghostly
sculptures hidden in corners in the dark.
We started off in the screening room where
work is accepted to be stored or shipped to MOMA or to other museums on loan.
Each piece of art is meticulously and carefully packaged with crates being
specifically built for each unique piece by Box Art, who designs the crates
according to the museums specifications.
All work is entered into a database, where
each piece has a specific number to be able to find the piece easily. The
storage facility was once the museum itself, when the original MOMA was being
revamped to what it is today. Stephen showed us where the café once was and how
second stories were built to accommodate the vast amount of art that MOMA owns.
After our tour, we continued to PS1, MOMA’s
daughter branch for emerging international artists. The two exhibits that I
found most interesting were that of Huma
Bhabha, a Pakistani sculpture now living in New York. She is known for her engagement with the human figure and
for her use of found materials, incorporating materials like Styrofoam, animal
bones and clay, often leading towards the grotesque, featuring bodies that
appear dissected and dismembered, or monuments to human life reclaimed from the
rubble of a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Constructed from the carcass of the present and
its discarded utopias, her figures stand amidst the wreckage, waiting to wake
up in a new world.
James
Turrells’ Meeting was a lovely way to
end our tour, a meditation if you will, looking up to the sky, Mother Earth’s art
in all its glory.
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