O POST DO MOMA
I. About post
post is a site for encounters between the established and experimental, the historical and emerging, the local and global, the scholarly and artistic. An online journal, archive, exhibition space, and open forum that takes advantage of the nonhierarchical nature of the Internet, post seeks to spark in-depth explorations of the ways in which modernism is being redefined. The site’s contents are intended to build nuanced understandings of the histories that shape the practices of artists and institutions today. As a networked platform, post aims to provide an alternative to the model of a unified art historical narrative.
post invites active participation! It is a space for sharing research and testing ideas, a platform for critical responses, and an instrument for increasing expertise through exposure to knowledge from around the globe. post is designed to produce a changing and layered articulation of multiple modernities, which will emerge over time as more people from more places participate. While post takes as its starting point research undertaken at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), it will continue to seek and develop a network of engaged partners and users whose complementary research and concerns will shape future approaches and content. New essays, interviews, reports, and reflections, as well as archival materials and artists’ commissions, will be released regularly to ensure that new voices enter the debates and new research concentrations continue to emerge.
II. About C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age Initiative)
post begins as the public face of C-MAP, a cross-departmental research program launched in 2009 to expand our reading of art history and, consequently, what we do at MoMA. The scope and methodologies of C-MAP research question the judgments that grow out of the assumption that artistic modernism is or was determined only by the Western European and North American narratives of early twentieth-century avant-gardes. The aim of C-MAP is to understand more fully the historical imperatives and changing conditions of transnational networks of artistic practice and to seek verbal and material accounts of histories that often have been little known outside their countries of origin.
C-MAP’s core working structure is the long-term research group. Currently, there are three research groups focusing respectively on Central and Eastern Europe, Asia (with a particular focus on Japan), and Latin America, regions with strong histories of modernism. These groups are led by Christophe Cherix, Doryun Chong, and Jodi Hauptman, respectively. The groups’ members include senior and junior staff from all curatorial departments, the library, the archives, and the Department of Education. They are joined by three international scholars with multiyear fellowships—Magdalena Moskalewicz, Miki Kaneda, and Zanna Gilbert—as well as visiting scholars, curators, and artists to create cross-disciplinary investigations. In addition, three distinguished scholars serve as counselors for the initiative: Mieke Bal, Professor of Humanities, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Universiteit van Amsterdam; Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University; and David Joselit, Carnegie Professor of Art History at Yale University. Group members travel together to deepen their understanding of the specific qualities and histories of the places they are studying. Each trip involves dozens of meetings with artists and specialists, including those who have participated in seminars at MoMA.
C-MAP forges new relationships and partnerships and undertakes collaborative research in order to develop new expertise, share what has been learned, and ultimately, inform the development of exhibitions, publications, educational programs, and the collection, for the benefit of scholars, curators, educators, students, critics, artists, and the general public alike.
The Museum of Modern Art’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age Initiative (C-MAP) is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.
Additional funding is provided by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Adriana Cisneros de Griffin, and Marlene Hess.
For questions or comments, please contact us at Contact_C-MAP@moma.org.
post is designed and developed by TC Labs. The post platform was conceived in collaboration with Caleb Waldorf.