The Sex Museum In New York City
Jeana Rodia
Entrance to the museum is free; tickets are not required. Safety measures are in place to protect the health of visitors, staff, and volunteers based on guidance from the CDC and local governments. Visitors who do not adhere to safety policies and guidelines may be asked to leave or may not be admitted to the museum.
To ensure a safe and enjoyable experience for visitors, capacity is limited in the imagiNATIONS Activity Center, and entry is available on a first-come, first-served basis. During high visitation periods, additional entry procedures may apply. Large groups should check-in at the imagiNATIONS Activity Center entrance. School groups require a reservation.
The museum is located in the historic Alexander Hamilton US Custom House at One Bowling Green in lower Manhattan. The museum entrance is on the south side of Bowling Green, adjacent to the northeast corner of Battery Park.
The National Museum of the American Indian in New York, NY, is accessible to people with disabilities. The ground floor entrance and all exhibitions are wheelchair accessible. Wheelchairs are available free of charge on a first-come, first-served basis by request of security staff on the ground floor. Additional accessibility services can be provided with two weeks advance notice. For scheduling questions, contact the Reservations Office at NMAI-GroupR...@si.edu or 202-633-6644.
Self-guided groups of any size are not required to register or have reservations or tickets to visit the museum. School groups interested in entry to the imagiNATIONS Activity Center, need to make a reservation. For other assistance, email NMAI-GroupR...@si.edu.
The museum does not have parking. Metered public parking is available on surrounding streets and there are several commercial parking facilities convenient to the museum. See Getting Here for more information.
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.
During the 1930s and 1950s, MoMA gained international recognition with landmark exhibitions, such as Barr's influential "Cubism and Abstract Art" in 1936, a retrospective of Pablo Picasso's works organized in 1939-40 and the "Indian Art of the United States" exhibition in 1941. Abby Rockefeller's son, Nelson, became the museum's president in 1939, playing a key role in its expansion and publicity. His brother, David Rockefeller, joined the board in 1948 and continued the family's close association with the museum. Significant events during this period included a major fire in 1958, which destroyed a painting by Claude Monet and led to the evacuation of other artworks. The museum's architectural evolution also continued, with a redesign of the sculpture garden by Philip Johnson and relocation to its current home designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, which opened in 1939.
In later decades, the controversial decision to withdraw funding from the antiwar poster "And Babies" in 1969, and the subsequent protests, highlighted the museum's involvement in contemporary sociopolitical issues. It was also among several institutions to aid CIA in its efforts to engage in cultural propaganda during the Cold War.[2] Major expansions in the 1980s and the early 21st century, including the selection of Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi for a significant renovation, nearly doubled MoMA's space for exhibitions and programs. The 2000s saw the formal merger with the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, and in 2019, another major renovation added significant gallery space.
In 2022, MoMA was the 17th most-visited art museum in the world and the 4th most-visited museum in the United States. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th-century to the present, and includes over 200,000 works of architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated and artist's books, film, as well as electronic media.[3] The museum is considered one of the most influential cultural institutions globally devoted to modern and contemporary art.[4] At the same time, MoMA has long faced criticism for developing and perpetuating Eurocentric narratives of modernism and for its insufficient focus on expanding access to socioeconomically underprivileged groups.[5][6][7] The museum has been involved in controversies regarding its labor practices, and the institution's labor union, founded in 1971, has been described as the first of its kind in the U.S.[8] The MoMA Library includes about 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, more than 1,000 periodical titles and more than 40,000 files of ephemera about individual artists and groups.[9] The archives hold primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art.[10]
The museum attracted 2,190,440 visitors in 2022, making it the 4th most-visited museum in the United States, and the third most-visited U.S. art museum. This attendance was 89 percent higher than in 2021, but still well below the pre-COVID attendance in 2019.[11]
The idea for the Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1929 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan.[12] They became known variously as "the Ladies" or "the adamantine ladies".[13][14] They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan,[13] and it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash.[15]
Abby Rockefeller had invited A. Conger Goodyear, the former president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, to become president of the new museum. Abby became treasurer. At the time, it was America's premier museum devoted exclusively to modern art, and the first of its kind in Manhattan to exhibit European modernism.[16] One of Rockefeller's early recruits for the museum staff was the noted Japanese-American photographer Soichi Sunami (at that time best known for his portraits of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham), who served the museum as its official documentary photographer from 1930 until 1968.[17][18]
Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Sachs and Frank Crowninshield to join him as founding trustees. Sachs, the associate director and curator of prints and drawings at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, was referred to in those days as a "collector of curators". Goodyear asked him to recommend a director, and Sachs suggested Alfred H. Barr Jr., a promising young protg. Under Barr's guidance, the museum's holdings quickly expanded from an initial gift of eight prints and one drawing. Its first successful loan exhibition was in November 1929, displaying paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Czanne, and Seurat.[19]
First housed in six rooms of galleries and offices on the 12th floor of Manhattan's Heckscher Building,[20] on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the museum moved into three more temporary locations within the next 10 years. Abby Rockefeller's husband, John D. Rockefeller Jr., was adamantly opposed to the museum (as well as to modern art itself) and refused to release funds for the venture, which had to be obtained from other sources and resulted in the frequent shifts of location. Nevertheless, he eventually donated the land for the current site of the museum, plus other gifts over time, and thus became in effect one of its greatest benefactors.[21]
During that time, the museum initiated many more exhibitions of noted artists, such as the lone Vincent van Gogh exhibition on November 4, 1935. Containing an unprecedented 66 oils and 50 drawings from the Netherlands, as well as poignant excerpts from the artist's letters, it was a major public success due to Barr's arrangement of the exhibit, and became "a precursor to the hold van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination".[22]
Abby Rockefeller's son Nelson was selected by the board of trustees to become its president, in 1939, at the age of 30; he was a flamboyant leader and became the prime instigator and funding source of MoMA's publicity, acquisitions, and subsequent expansion into new headquarters on 53rd Street. His brother, David Rockefeller, joined the museum's board of trustees in 1948, and took over the presidency when Nelson was elected governor of New York in 1958.
David Rockefeller subsequently employed noted architect Philip Johnson to redesign the museum garden, and named it in honor of his mother, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. The Rockefeller family and he have retained a close association with the museum throughout its history, with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund funding the institution since 1947. Both David Rockefeller Jr. and Sharon Percy Rockefeller (wife of former senator Jay Rockefeller) sit on the board of trustees.[citation needed] After the Rockefeller Guest House at 242 East 52nd Street was completed in 1950, some MoMA functions were held in the house until 1964.[25][26]
In 1937, MoMA had shifted to offices and basement galleries in the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center. Its permanent and current home, now renovated, designed in the International Style by the modernist architects Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, opened to the public on May 10, 1939, attended by an illustrious company of 6,000 people, and with an opening address via radio from the White House by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[27]
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