The Museum of Modern Art announced that the museum’s exhibitions from its conception last 1929 to today are available to view for free on their website. 33,000 installation photographs, 3,500 exhibitions, and numerous other documents such as catalogs and press releases are included in what the museum calls a “living archive.”
Michelle Elligott, head of the museum’s archives, in an interview with the New York Times, said “This is like a dream come true for me, because I’ve been playing around with this material for twenty years and I know the depth of what’s here.”
From Picasso to the museum’s first female exhibitor (Dahlov Zorav Ipcar, and her body of work entitled “Creative Growth, Childhood to Maturity”), the efforts at digitization not only saves us the trouble of going to New York, but also the bigger picture, which is preserving the exhibitions for the future to a much, much wider audience.
“By making these unique resources available at no charge, the exhibition history digital archive directly aligns with the museum’s mission of encouraging an ever-deeper understanding of modern and contemporary art and fostering scholarship,” the Museum of Modern Art states on their press release.
Check the whole thing out here and let us know what you find on Twitter at @scoutmagph.
