The Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded on November 7, 1929, by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan, opening just days after the Wall Street Crash in six rented rooms of the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue. Under founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum pioneered an encyclopedic, cross-disciplinary approach to modern art, establishing the world's first museum curatorial departments devoted to architecture and design, photography, and film. MoMA moved to its permanent site at 11 West 53rd Street in 1939, and Philip Johnson later designed the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden (1953). Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi led a $425 million renovation completed in 2004, and a further expansion designed with Diller Scofidio + Renfro opened in 2019, bringing the museum to roughly 708,000 square feet of floor space. Landmark exhibitions such as "Cubism and Abstract Art" (1936) and the 1939–40 Picasso retrospective helped cement MoMA's role as a principal arbiter of modernism. Today it remains one of the most influential and heavily visited modern-art institutions in the world, with an encyclopedic collection spanning painting, sculpture, design, architecture, photography, and film.