Museum of Modern Art, Modern art museum on West 53rd Street, Midtown Manhattan, New York City, United States
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan that displays paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, and design objects from the 1880s to the present. The permanent collection spans multiple floors with galleries organized by artistic movements and periods.
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan conceived the museum in 1929, and it opened on November 7 in the Heckscher Building, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Alfred H. Barr Jr. became its first director. The 1939 building on West 53rd Street was designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, and Yoshio Taniguchi's renovation reopened in 2004.
Visitors often move slowly through the galleries and pause in front of individual works, sometimes for many minutes. The atmosphere is quiet and focused, with people sitting on benches making sketches or talking softly to each other about the art.
The entrance is on 53rd Street, and the exhibition spaces spread across six floors with elevators and stairs. Admission is free on late Friday afternoons, which often leads to longer waiting lines, while weekday mornings are usually calmer.
The archive holds more than 25,000 film titles from different countries and decades, including many rare experimental works. Some of these films are screened regularly in the theater spaces located in the lower level of the building.
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