MoMA Announces Events and Exhibitions for November 2014

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) has announced their events and exhibitions for November, 2014.

Modern Mondays: An Evening with Athina Rachel Tsangari
Monday, November 3, 7:00 p.m.
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

Athina Rachel Tsangari, director of Attenberg, screens clips and talks about her belief in being, as the French say, a cinéaste, with producing, teaching, programming, projecting, writing, directing, and acting all essential to her definition of herself as a filmmaker. From her early short film Fit to being named projections designer and video director for the Athens Olympic Games, and from acting as founding director of the influential avant-garde short-film showcase Cinematexas to being a founding member of the Haos Films production company, Tsangari's career refuses easy categorization.

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Sturtevant: Double Trouble
November 9, 2014-February 22, 2015
Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor
Press Preview: Tuesday, November 4, 2014, 9:30-11:30 a.m.

MoMA presents the first comprehensive survey in the U.S. of the 50-year career of Sturtevant (American, 1924-2014), and the only institutional presentation of her work organized in the U.S. since a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art in 1973. Sturtevant: Double Trouble brings together over 50 key artworks from all periods of Sturtevant's career in almost every medium in which she worked-including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, film, and video-identifying her as a pioneering and pivotal figure in the history of modern and postmodern art.

The Contenders 2014
November 13, 2014-January 15, 2015
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters

Every year there are films that resonate far beyond a theatrical release-if they manage to find their way to a commercial screen at all-or film festival appearance. Their significance can be attributed to a variety of factors, from structure to subject matter to language, but these films are united in their lasting impact on the cinematic art form. For this recurring series, the Department of Film combs through major studio releases and the top film festivals in the world, selecting influential, innovative films made in the past 12 months that we believe will stand the test of time. Whether bound for awards glory or destined to become a cult classic, each of these films is a contender for lasting historical significance, and any true cinephile will want to catch them on the big screen.

Making Music Modern: Design for Eye and Ear
November 15, 2014-November 15, 2015
Philip Johnson Architecture and Design Galleries, third floor

Music and design-art forms that share aesthetics of rhythm, tonality, harmony, interaction, and improvisation"have long had a close affinity, perhaps never more so than during the 20th century. Radical design and technological innovations, from the LP to the iPod and from the transistor radio to the Stratocaster, have profoundly altered our sense of how music can be performed, heard, distributed, and visualized. Avant-garde designers-among them Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Lilly Reich, Saul Bass, Jørn Utzon, and Daniel Libeskind-have pushed the boundaries of their design work in tandem with the music of their time. Drawn entirely from the Museum's collection, Making Music Modern gathers designs for auditoriums, instruments, and equipment for listening to music, along with posters, record sleeves, sheet music, and animation. The exhibition examines alternative music cultures of the early 20th century, the rise of radio during the interwar period, how design shaped the "cool" aesthetic of midcentury jazz and hi-fidelity culture, and its role in countercultural music scenes from pop to punk, and later 20th-century design explorations at the intersection of art, technology, and perception.

Modern Mondays: An Evening with Kathryn Bigelow, Michael Oblowitz, and Sylvère Lotringer
Monday, November 17, 7:00 p.m.
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

To Save and Project and Modern Mondays revisit Cine Virus, a film program organized in 1978 by the filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Michael Oblowitz to coincide with the publication of Schizo-Culture, a widely influential special issue of the radical journal Semiotext(e). Founded by Sylvère Lotringer and a group of Columbia University graduate students in 1974, Semiotext(e) was known both for introducing American readers to French poststructuralist theory and as a hub for New York's downtown cultural scene in the late 1970s and 1980s. While Schizo-Culture insisted on a violent break with the counterculture of the 1960s, its sister film program offered its own sinister directive. Kathryn Bigelow and Michael Oblowitz will join us to introduce films from Cine Virus, including Antony Balch's dizzying William S. Burroughs collage Cut Ups; Bruce Conner's music video for Devo's "Mongoloid;" and the MoMA restoration of Bigelow's own Set-Up, in which two semioticians-Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky-unpack, through voiceover commentary, seductively shot images of two men engaged in a brutal fight. Writer Kate Zamberno will read from the work of the late Kathy Acker, who contributed a live performance to the 1978 event and writing to Schizo-Culture. This event is presented in conjunction with The Return of Schizo-Culture at MoMA PS1, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Semiotext(e).

Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities
November 22, 2014-May 10, 2015
Architecture and Design Galleries, third floor

Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, a 14-month initiative to examine new architectural possibilities that address the rapid and uneven growth of six global metropolises-Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York, and Rio de Janeiro-culminates in an exhibition. In recent years, tactical modes of urbanism have arisen in the form of everyday, bottom-up approaches to local problems as a counterpart to a classic notion of top-down planning. Uneven Growth asks how current practices of architecture and urban design can learn from such developments by presenting design scenarios based on this type of urbanism, while also mapping emergent modes of tactical urbanism around the globe. The exhibition features design visions comprised of drawings, renderings, animations, and videos produced by six interdisciplinary teams of local practitioners and international architecture and urbanism experts, each focusing on a specific city.

Nicholas Nixon: Forty Years of The Brown Sisters
November 22, 2014-January 4, 2015
Museum Lobby

In August 1974, Nick Nixon made a photograph of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters. He wasn't pleased with the result and discarded the negative. In July 1975 he made one that seemed promising enough to keep. At the time, the Brown sisters were 15 (Mimi), 21 (Laurie), 23 (Heather), and 25 (Bebe). The following June, Laurie Brown graduated from college, and Nick made another picture of the four sisters. It was after this second successful picture that the group agreed to gather annually for a portrait, and settled on the series' two constants: the sisters would always appear in the same order-from left to right, Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie-and they would jointly agree on a single image to represent a given year. Also significant, and unchanging, is the fact that each portrait is made with an 8 x 10" view camera on a tripod and is captured on a black-and-white film negative. The Museum has exhibited and collected the Brown Sisters from the beginning; since 2006, acquiring the series both as lusciously tactile contact prints and as striking 20 x 24" enlargements (a new scale for Nixon). This installation-featuring all 40 images-marks the first time the Museum has displayed these larger prints.