The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The institution was conceived in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Initially located in the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, it opened just days after the Wall Street Crash. The museum, America's first devoted exclusively to modern art, was led by A. Conger Goodyear as president and Abby Rockefeller as treasurer, with Alfred H. Barr Jr. as its first director. Under Barr's leadership, the museum's collection rapidly expanded, beginning with an inaugural exhibition of works by European modernists. Despite financial challenges, including opposition from John D. Rockefeller Jr., the museum moved to several temporary locations in its early years, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. eventually donated the land for its permanent site.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue between 88th and 89th Streets on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It hosts a permanent collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year. It was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, under the guidance of its first director, Hilla von Rebay. The museum adopted its current name in 1952, three years after the death of its founder Solomon R. Guggenheim. It continues to be operated and owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
The American Folk Art Museum is an art museum in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, at 2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue at 66th Street. It is the premier institution devoted to the aesthetic appreciation of folk art and creative expressions of contemporary self-taught artists from the United States and abroad.
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), based in Manhattan, New York City, collects, displays, and interprets objects that document contemporary and historic innovation in craft, art, and design. In its exhibitions and educational programs, the museum celebrates the creative process through which materials are crafted into works that enhance contemporary life.
Ammi Phillips was a prolific American itinerant portrait painter active from the mid 1810s to the early 1860s in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. His artwork is identified as folk art, primitive art, provincial art, and itinerant art without consensus among scholars, pointing to the enigmatic nature of his work and life. He is attributed to over eight hundred paintings, although only eleven are signed. While his paintings are formulaic in nature, Phillips paintings were under constant construction, evolving as he added or discarded what he found successful, while taking care to add personal details that spoke to the identity of those who hired him. He is most famous for his portraits of children in red, although children only account for ten percent of his entire body of work. The most well known of this series, Girl in Red Dress with Cat and Dog, would be sold for one million dollars, a first for folk art. His paintings hung mostly unidentified, spare for some recognition in the collections like those of Edward Duff Balken, for decades until his oeuvre was reconstructed by Barbara Holdridge and Larry Holdridge, collectors and students of American folk art, with the support of the art historian Mary Black. Ammi Phillip's body of work was expanded upon their discovery that the mysterious paintings of a "Kent Limner" and "Border Limner" were indeed his.
Zilia Sánchez Dominguez is a Puerto Rico-based Cuban artist from Havana. She started her career as a set designer and an abstract painter for theatre groups in Cuba before the Cuban revolution of 1953-59. Sanchez blurs the lines between sculpture and painting by creating canvases layered with three dimensional protrusions and shapes. Her works are minimal in color, and have erotic overtones.
Thelma Golden is an American art curator, who is the Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, United States. She is noted as one of the originators of the term post-blackness. From 2017 to 2020, ArtReview chose her annually as one of the 10 most influential people in the contemporary art world.
Catherine de Zegher is a Belgian curator and a modern and contemporary art historian. She has a degree in art history and archaeology from the University of Ghent.
Reuben Moulthrop (1763–1814) was an early American artist based in East Haven, Connecticut. During his lifetime Moulthrop was famous for the wax figures that he arranged in tableaux, but he is known to posterity through his portraits, which are in many important collections, including those of the American Folk Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Historical Society.
Lisa Phillips is an American museum director, curator, and author. She is the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York City. In 1999, Phillips became the second director in the museum's history, succeeding founding director Marcia Tucker. Prior to beginning her directorship at the New Museum, she worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art for twenty-three years.
Christine Y. Kim is an American curator of contemporary art. She is currently the Britton Family Curator-at-Large at Tate. Prior to this post, Kim held the position of Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Before her appointment at LACMA in 2009, she was Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem in New York. She is best known for her exhibitions of and publications on artists of color, diasporic and marginalized discourses, and 21st-century technology and artistic practices.
Layla Soudavar Diba is an Iranian-American independent scholar and curator, specializing in 18th/19th-century and contemporary Persian art and the Qajar period. She has curated various exhibitions, such as the Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch 1783-1925 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and co-curated Iran Modern (2013) alongside Fereshteh Daftari at New York City's Asia Society.
Leeza Ahmady is an Afghan-born American independent curator, author, arts administrator, dance instructor, and educator; she is known for her work within the genre of Central Asian art. She is the founder of AhmadyArts and Director of Asia Contemporary Art Week (ACAW) since 2006. Ahmady has organized large-scale festivals, exhibitions, artistic collaborations, and experimental forums revolving around contemporary art practices from across all regions of Asia. Ahmady is New York based and was born and raised in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Adrienne Edwards is a New York–based art curator, scholar, and writer. Edwards is currently the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Legacy Russell is an American curator, writer, and author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, published by Verso Books in 2020. In 2021, the performance and experimental art institution The Kitchen announced Russell as the organization's next executive director and chief curator. From 2018 to 2021, she was the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Maura Reilly is the director of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, and previously served as the founding curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Reilly is also known for developing the concept of ‘curatorial activism’.
Eva Respini is a curator of contemporary art who served as chief curator (2015–2023) and deputy director for curatorial affairs (2022–2023) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. She is also a lecturer at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Alison "Ali" Gass is an American curator and museum director. She is the founding director of the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco. She has served as the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, Smart Museum of Art, and chief curator of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.
Jenny Schlenzka is a Berlin-born curator of time-based art, currently serving as Executive Artistic Director at Performance Space New York. Schlenzka was the first full-time curator dedicated to performance art at The Museum of Modern Art and established the Sunday Sessions program at MoMA PS1. In March 2023, she was selected to become the next director of Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau; her term will begin in September 2023.
Massumeh Farhad is an Iranian-born American curator, art historian, and author. She is the Chief Curator and Curator of Islamic Art at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Asian Art. She is known for her work with Persian 17th-century manuscripts.
