Books published by Museum of Modern Art

A close reading of Helen Levitt's famous photograph of three children at play on a New York stoop

An abiding image of American racial segregation from 1950s New Orleans

Ana Janevski is Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art. Roxana Marcoci is Senior Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, and C-MAP Leader for Central and Eastern Europe at the Museum. Ksenia Nouril is former C-MAP Fellow for Central and Eastern European Art at The Museum of Modern Art.

Kynaston McShine was a Trinidadian museum curator who organized some of the 20th century¿s most consequential exhibitions and was the first curator of colour to work at a major American museum. At the time of the exhibition ¿Information¿ he was associate curator in MoMA¿s painting and sculpture department.

Michelle Millar Fisher is the Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Kat Kuang is an artist and illustrator based in San Francisco.

Stuart Comer is Chief Curator in the Department of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Sarah Hermanson Meister is a Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Frances Benjamin Johnston (American, 1864¿1952) achieved acclaim as a photo journalist and studio photographer based in Washington, D.C., and is recognized as a pioneer for women in photography. LaToya Ruby Frazier is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is represented by Gavin Brown¿s Enterprise in New York.

Comprised of 159 extraordinary platinum plates, Frances Benjamin Johnston's Hampton Album documents life at the Hampton Institute marking a pivotal moment in this historically black university's history . Frances Benjamin Johnston (American, 1864-1952), one of the first women in America to work as a professional photographer, was commissioned in 1899 to photograph the Hampton Institute, then a thirty year old institution dedicated to the practical and academic education of freed slaves and Native Americans. What became known as the Hampton Album - comprised of 159 platinum plates exhibited in 1900 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris - is Johnston's signature work, and has become a touchstone for contemporary historians and artists. The leather-bound album was discovered serendipitously by Lincoln Kirstein in a Washington, D.C. bookstore during World War II and donated to MoMA in 1965.

This new edition of MoMA Highlights presents 375 works from the Museum of Modern Art's unparalleled collection of modern and contemporary art. Featuring 170 new selections--a greater representation of women, artists of color, and artists from around the world--this updated volume reflects the inclusionary ethos of the newly expanded museum.ed museum.

Presents highlights from the transformative gift of nearly 150 works of modern art from Latin America offered to The Museum of Modern Art by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction presents a richly illustrated overview of the significant cultural transformations propelled by the abstract and concrete art movements in South America between the mid-1940s and the late 1970s. Published to accompany a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, the catalogue features works by artists working in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Venezuela - including Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Jesús Rafael Soto, Alejandro Otero and Tomás Maldonado - who advanced the achievements of geometric abstraction in the early twentieth century, and built a new modern vision of the region. The catalogue highlights a selection of works gifted to MoMA by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros between 1993 and 2016, which had a transformative impact on the Museum's holdings of Latin American art. The Cisneros collection, which includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, allows for in-depth study of art produced in the region during this period, allowing the Museum to represent a more comprehensive, plural, and robust narrative of artistic practices that demonstrate the integral role of Latin America in the establishment of modern art.

The first-ever history of New York's pioneering art space, with film stills, ephemera, and photography in a scrapbook style, this groundbreaking publication captures the vibrancy of a long and venerable tradition that began with the legendary series of performances and events organized by founder Alanna Heiss under the Brooklyn Bridge in 1971.

New in MoMA's 'One on One' series, this book focuses on Betye Saar's Black Girl's Window (1969) and a selection of the artist's prints from the 1960s and early 1970s . Betye Saar made Black Girl's Window in 1969. It is a deeply autobiographical picture that alluded to her African-American heritage along with her interest in mysticism and astrology. The black girl named in the title appears in the lower half of this found window frame. The girl's facial features are hidden. The only thing there are these surprisingly bright blue eyes, which appear to open and close if you shift back and forth in front of it. The work encourages us to think about connections between eyes, that are often said to be windows on the soul, and pictures, that have been said to be windows on the world. Saar herself once said that she considers windows to represent a means of traveling from one level of consciousness to another. If you continue to look at the girl, you can see that her hands are covered with yellow and red symbols. Some of these same symbols, in particular the crescent moon and the stars, are echoed in the nine small vignettes created in the spaces outlined by the intersecting crossbars of her found window frame.

Roberts' essay moves between the public and the private as it situates Kahlo's painting in the context of the Mexican Revolution's legacy, the Surrealist tradition and the artist's own life to explore the ways in which Kahlo constructed and reconstructed her own identity.

Now available in its original edition along with critical commentary, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture is the founding text of postmodernism in architecture, first published in 1966.

Originally delivered as talks at a symposium held at the Museum of Modern Art in 2016, the 10 essays gathered in this volume offer insight into the collaborations between architects and structural engineers that engendered many of the most important buildings erected in Japan after 1945.

This expansive collection of essays on nearly 200 works in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art is the first substantial exploration of MoMA's uneven historical relationship with black artists, black audiences, and the broader subject of racial blackness.

A dancer, designer, puppet maker, sculptor and painter at the heart of the Zurich Dada movement, Taeuber-Arp made Head in the wake of World War I, during a time of profound political and cultural self-questioning. Almost a century later, her witty wooden figure has lost none of its punch as an investigation of art across aesthetic and material boundaries rather than within them.

A lady checks her luggage for a train ride: a couch, a suitcase, a traveling bag, a picture, a basket, a hat-box, and a little dog. Will they all make it to her destination?

Every day, young Charles White's mother took him to the Chicago Public Library, where the librarians looked after him until six o'clock. At the library Charles looked carefully at the picture books the librarians give him and also at the people around him, later drawing what he saw on scraps of paper at home. He learned to be patient and observant - and, by watching art students painting in the park, how to mix and use oil paints. As he grew up, he painted the people he saw and admired, and ultimately became a great artist whose works now hang in museums all over the United States. Written and illustrated by his son, C. Ian White, and featuring full-colour. reproductions of Charles White's own artworks, this deeply personal story traces the childhood influences that inspired young Charles to become an artist and a teacher.