The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) fourth-floor galleries have long been devoted to painting and sculpture. Not any more. To tell a broader story of the New York museum’s holdings, a team of 17 reinstalled the collection with work from all six curatorial departments (From the Collection: 1960-69, until 12 March 2017). “We leapt to the 1960s because it is the inspiration for exactly the kind of boundary-crossing the installation exemplifies,” says Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture. Each of the ten rooms is devoted to a single year between 1960 and 1969. The approach offers “a bit of socio-cultural history you wouldn’t get in a room just of paintings”, she says. In the gallery dedicated to 1963, for example, Alberto Burri’s painting Black Plastic, made from melted plastic, sits next to a plastic serving bowl and a radio designed in the same year. “It’s not just from the head of Zeus that Burri started working in plastic,” Temkin says.
