Museum of Modern Art
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 Location of MoMA in Manhattan
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| Established | November 7, 1929 |
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| Location | 11 West 53rd Street New York, NY 10019 |
| Coordinates | 40°45′41″N 73°58′40″W / 40.761484°N 73.977664°W |
| Visitors | 3.1 million (2013) Ranked 13th globally (2013) |
| Director | Glenn D. Lowry |
| Public transit access |
Subway: Fifth Avenue / 53rd Street (E M trains) Bus: M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M7, M10, M20, M50, M104 |
| Website | www |
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA /ˈmoʊmə/) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
MoMA has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as one of the largest and most influential museums of modern art in the world. MoMA's collection offers an overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist's books, film, and electronic media.
The MoMA Library includes approximately 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, over 1,000 periodical titles, and over 40,000 files of ephemera about individual artists and groups. The archives holds primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art.
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. They became known variously as "the Ladies", "the daring ladies" and "the adamantine ladies". They rented modest quarters for the new museum in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue (corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street) in Manhattan, and it opened to the public on November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash. Abby 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. One of Abby'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.
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