The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, located on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Founded in 1929, it was the first museum devoted to the modern era, and its collection spans the late 19th century to the present, comprising over 200,000 works across architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated and artist's books, film, and electronic media.

MoMA was created by three progressive arts patrons—Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller—along with additional original trustees, with Alfred H. Barr Jr. as its founding director. Initially located in the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, it opened just days after the Wall Street Crash and moved to its current West 53rd Street site in 1939. It was among the first U.S. museums to include industrial design, architecture, photography, and motion pictures in its collection.

The museum's holdings include landmark works such as Claude Monet's Water Lilies, Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, and Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, alongside pieces by Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and others. MoMA is affiliated with MoMA PS1, a leading nonprofit contemporary art center in Queens. Following major expansions—including a 2004 reconfiguration by Yoshio Taniguchi and a more recent project by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Gensler—MoMA welcomed over 2.8 million visitors in 2023, ranking as the 15th most-visited art museum in the world.

As a major collecting institution working across film, design, performance, and electronic media, MoMA is highly relevant to innovations in how art is presented, preserved, and experienced—from gallery and public-space design to digital and media-based works.