MoMA’s Plans for Expansion & Engagement with the Public

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is stirring up controversy and not because of its artwork.

For the past six months, MoMA has been working to expand into two additional sites, including three floors of a residential tower that sits next-door on West 53 Street, which was home to the American Folk Art Museum. MoMA plans to tear down the original architecture of the Folk Art Museum and replace it with new designs.

From the minute the news was released, critics were vocal, raising concerns that MoMA was turning towards “blockbuster art” and catering to tourists rather than showcasing artwork for serious art lovers.

This will not be the first time MoMA expanded its walls, as the museum had a recent expansion ten years ago. To some, this expansion confirmed that bigger is not always better.

“I think MoMA is already very overcrowded, and ‘adding’ more space has done nothing to alleviate this problem, but in fact has contributed to it,” said Janet Kraynak, an associate professor of Art History at The New School. “MoMA has misguided priorities or lack of true institutional vision.”

Some worry that MoMA will become a gargantuan, overcrowded tourist destination, instead of a place for the serious study of art. People at MoMA, however, say that the extension is important because it will, “expand MoMA’s public spaces and galleries, allowing the museum to reconceive the presentation of its collection and exhibitions and offer a more open, accessible, and engaging experience,” according to MoMA’s website, which tracks the overall production of the project.

MoMA wants to use this expansion to build gallery and performance space that will make MoMA more public and open to people by giving free admission to their entire ground floor. The bottom level will include The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, an expanded and reorganized entrance hall and a new glass-walled gallery for contemporary art and performance that will open directly onto 53 Street. MoMA is also proposing to build a performance space where the Folk Art Museum used to be.

Critics, however, worry that what the museum calls openness may lead to overcrowding and a diversion of focus from serious art. New School professor and digital video artist Maya Ciarrocchi pointed to recent and popular exhibits, such as Christian Marclay’s The Clock, Rain Room at PS1 and James Turrell at the Guggenheim. Ciarrocchi also said shows like these do a disservice to the museums by creating long lines and hype, and do not actually serve the museum as a whole.

“I think the expansion will continue the current trend of museums organizing blockbuster exhibitions,” Ciarrocchi said. “These exhibitions play primarily to tourists. I’m happy people are going to museums, it’s just that they seem to go see the main exhibit and the other floors are empty.”

Some critics are still upset about the last overhaul. Kraynak said that the expansion at MoMA just ten years ago, “rendered any former intimacy of the building moot.” She also said that it made the museum, “corporatized and bland.”

Kraynak specifically pointed out the second floor atrium—a huge hole in the very center of the museum. She said the space was, “problematic as its guiding mission, no matter how many large-scale contemporary art projects and installations it stages there, [it] seems to act as an event or party space.”

Many are also concerned about the museum’s architectural plans. MoMA’s expansion project claims to be for the people, but some critics find it questionable that the museum is choosing to use a majority of its funds on all the new architectural designs. The museum defends itself by saying that the former Folk Art building had to be razed in order to accommodate what MoMA plans to offer the public within its expansion.

“To save the building, we had to lose too much of the building,” said Elizabeth Diller of the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, speaking of MoMA’s new plans for the former home of the Folk Art Museum building, to the New York Times.

New School student and visual artist Rebecca Friedman thinks that the new design of the museum looks like an Apple store and is an attempt to be more accessable to the New York public. She called it, “Seeming populist with its glass wall design.” But Friedman mused that, if MoMA claims to be taking a populist approach, why not just reduce or eliminate the costs of admission.

“Money that could be used to support this program of free admission is instead being used to expand the museum space and gain recognition as an architectural feat,” she told the Free Press.

Not everyone is unhappy with the architecture however. BAFA student Gina Chiappetta is particularly enthused about the Gray Box performance space that will be able to showcase more performative art.

“The madness may be worth it for the new improvements promised, specifically the Gray Box,” Chiappetta said. “The fact that MoMA may in turn reach out to a wider audience is positive in my eyes.”

People acknowledge that a more versatile audience is good, but are skeptical about whether or not this expansion will achieve it. “The museum will still be crowded and now even more so once the garden is open to the street,” Ciarrocchi said. “I envision it mobbed with hot-dog-eating tourists, their shopping bags loaded with spoils from Uniqlo.”

This has raised the essential questions of who the museum is catering to and what the museum’s priorities are when it comes to the art that they bring in.

MoMA sees this expansion as an opportunity to engage with a larger audience and offer more gallery space and amenities to the New York public, according to MoMA’s “Building for the Future” website. The museum has big plans for what it will be able to showcase in its newly acquired 40,000 square feet of galleries—providing 30 percent more space for MoMA’s permanent collection and shifting exhibitions. With all this new space, the museum hopes to provide a more participatory experience for its visitors, with re-imagined and open spaces for performances, films, as well as educational programs.

“It’s a very nice gesture of a kind of new ethos: To make publicly accessible, unticketed space that is attractive and has cultural programming,” Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director, told the New York Times.

And this is not the only museum expansion taking place within the next few years. The new Whitney Museum in the Meatpacking District will open in 2015 while the Metropolitan Museum of Art will simultaneously move its modern and contemporary art collection to the Whitney Museum’s Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue.

“[This is] one more aspect of change to hate for the time being and everyone will get over it as they always do,” said Ciarrocchi of MoMA’s expansion. “New Yorkers tend to hate change, an irony since the city has always been one of flux.”