CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/21/2019

'MoMA Now' points to the future with Kerry James Marshall

Today MoMA opens its newly expanded and rehung galleries to the public, and the art world celebrates the Museum's new ethos—a beacon for other institutions that seek to honor yet explode the western canon. "The galleries that visitors now encounter represent the convictions of a new generation of chief curators, who have spent the last several years working closely together to conceive a mode of presentation we find true to our own time," the curators write in MoMA Now, from which Kerry James Marshall's Untitled (policeman) (2015) is reproduced. "Our approach to the Museum's collection reflects far more than individual opinions; it bespeaks an intensive reconsideration of curatorial practice currently underway at museums throughout the world. Grounded in scholarly developments dating back many decades, curatorial thinking has moved beyond the familiar model of a linear history of art, in which the work of one artist, or one movement, inexorably leads to the next in a progressive evolution. The organizing principle of a canon, with its emphasis on defining singular masters, seems out of step with the present-day interest in elucidating a complex fabric of multiple histories, many of which are entirely absent from canon-based narratives."