MoMA digitizes its entire exhibition archive, from 1929 to present

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has digitized its complete exhibition history, making available online over 72,000 artworks from a collection of nearly 200,000 pieces by 20,924 artists. The archive includes original catalogs, press releases, and documents from every show since the museum's opening on November 7, 1929, just days after the Wall Street Crash. Highlights include the inaugural exhibition featuring Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and van Gogh; the 1935 "African Negro Art" show with loans from André Derain and Tristan Tzara; and the 1939 Picasso retrospective curated by Alfred H. Barr, where Guernica was shipped despite wartime risks and remained at MoMA for over forty years as a "loan from the people of Spain." The archive also covers architecture, design, and photography, including the acquisition of the @ symbol by Paola Antonelli and a recent exhibition on Shigetaka Kurita's 1998 emoji. Founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan—known as "the daring ladies"—MoMA set a precedent for open cultural dialogue under Barr's 40-year directorship. The online resource is continuously updated and serves as a model for museums worldwide to digitize and share their original documents for art education and dissemination.