Joel Sternfeld. Little Talbot Beach, Florida. September 1980. Chromogenic color print, printed 1980, 13 9/16 x 16 15/16\

INSIDE/OUT is bidding summer a fond farewell by taking advantage of the long holiday weekend. We’ll be back, rested and refreshed, on Tuesday, September 7.

From the entire INSIDE/OUT team, have a wonderful holiday!

Photo (and all subsequent photos) by Ben Prosky

“YES,” I replied, without delay, to the e-mail announcing MoMA and the AIA Center for Architecture’s last boat tour of the New York harbor in August. Having missed several tours earlier in the summer, I could not let this opportunity pass. Through Rising Currents, MoMA had not only invited architects and landscape designers into their galleries to present works responding to a real-world dilemma, but was now taking the public out of its galleries and into the areas examined as well. Read more

City Lights. 1931. USA. Written, directed, and music by Charles Chaplin

These notes accompany screenings of Charles Chaplin’s City Lights, September 1, 2, and 3 in Theater 3.

City Lights is Charles Chaplin’s most perfectly accomplished and balanced work. It would certainly be on the short list of films with which I would care to be stranded on a desert island.

By 1931 the silent cinema was effectively dead. It took considerable courage to lavish two years of rather expensive production on a silent film (and even more courage with Modern Times five years later), but Chaplin felt he had very little choice. He correctly perceived that the Tramp would lose his poetry and grace if he were coerced into the leveling mundanity of human speech. He foresaw that sound would force him to sacrifice the “pace and tempo” he had so laboriously perfected. Read more

Clement Greenberg speaking in New Delhi in 1967 at a presentation of the MoMA exhibition Two Decades of American Painting

In 1952, The Museum of Modern Art established the International Program of Circulating Exhibitions, which was supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, with the aim of sending exhibitions to museums around the world. The following year, the International Council was organized to provide long-term financial support to the program.

Amy Horschak: In light of MoMA’s upcoming installation Abstract Expressionist New York and the exhibition of many of the “AbEx” artists abroad by the International Program (IP) in the 1950s, can you comment on the often-made claims that the IP was, at that time, part of a CIA project? Read more

How well do you know your MoMA? If you think you can identify the artist and title of each of these works—all currently on view in the Museum’s fifth-floor Painting and Sculpture Galleries—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—in two weeks (on Friday, September 10), along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.

ANSWERS TO THE AUGUST 13 CHALLENGE: Read more

Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Chicago's Millennium Park gives the city a chance to reflect on itself

I’m interested in the big picture. How do arts organizations function and build support, survive and thrive? During a recent visit to Chicago I had the opportunity to sit down with four nonprofit leaders working at different levels of the city’s art scene. At a time of financial rollercoasters, shifting demographics, and a globalizing world, I was interested to see how these art organizations continued to reach out to changing communities and tap in to the creative energy they have to offer. Read more