Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914
The Museum of Modern Art, February 13-June 6, 2011

Picasso's two Guitar constructions–one in cardboard, one in sheet metal–bracket a brief but intense period of experimentation in the artist's long career. It is this moment in his work, and the place of these two modest yet revolutionary objects within it, that Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914 explores.

Children's Video and Audio Tour: West Building Highlights Explore 50 paintings in the West Building with a video and audio tour designed especially for children ages 7 to 12. This tour allows children to explore works of art on display in the Gallery's West Building through an online tour featuring one video for each painting masterpiece. The tour is also available onsite, with handheld digital audio players that allow children the freedom to move through the galleries at their own pace and choose from a list of works that includes Leonardo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Degas, Monet, and Homer.

Using the art and life of Thornton Dial as a point of departure, this public forum, held on April 8, 2011, explored the status of African American artists within the mainstream contemporary art world, an examination that reflects broader social, economic, and political “hard truths” within society at large. It explored the relevance of black creative expression to issues of social justice across racial boundaries.

More than sixty years have passed since the critic Robert Coates, writing in the New Yorker in 1946, first used the term “Abstract Expressionism” to describe the richly colored canvases of Hans Hofmann. Over the years the name has come to designate the paintings and sculptures of artists as different as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner and David Smith.