MoMA Current Exhibitions: What's on View

A Museum That Never Stands Still

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is not a static repository of masterpieces hung on walls and left undisturbed for decades. It is a living institution, one that has been in constant motion since its founding in 1929. At any given moment, the galleries at 11 West 53rd Street contain a layered program of permanent collection displays, temporary special exhibitions, film screenings, and performance-based works that together form one of the most ambitious curatorial undertakings in the world. Understanding MoMA current exhibitions requires understanding that this museum treats its program as an evolving conversation rather than a fixed statement.

For visitors planning a trip, this dynamism is both thrilling and occasionally disorienting. The painting you saw on your last visit may have been rotated into storage. A gallery that once held postwar American abstraction might now feature Latin American concrete art or contemporary video installations. MoMA exhibitions are designed this way by intention, not by accident. The museum's leadership has committed to a model in which the collection is a living organism, constantly reshuffled to reveal new connections, challenge established narratives, and bring overlooked artists into dialogue with canonical ones.

This guide is designed to help you navigate that complexity. Whether you are a first-time visitor trying to understand what is currently on view, a returning patron curious about what has changed, or a student of curatorial practice interested in how one of the world's most influential museums organizes its program, the following sections will give you the context you need. We will explore MoMA's exhibition philosophy, the types of shows it mounts, the physical spaces that house them, and the practical details that will help you plan a visit around the exhibitions that interest you most.

How MoMA Organizes Its Exhibition Program

To understand MoMA current exhibitions at any point in time, it helps to recognize that the museum operates on two parallel tracks. The first is the permanent collection display, which occupies the majority of the gallery space across the museum's six floors. The second is the temporary special exhibition program, which brings in focused, often monographic or thematic shows that run for a defined period before closing.

The Permanent Collection and the Rotating Gallery Model

For most of MoMA's history, the permanent collection was displayed in a relatively stable configuration. Certain iconic works occupied the same walls for years or even decades. Visitors could count on seeing Starry Night in the same spot, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in the same gallery, and Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans in their familiar location. While some of these anchor works remain in consistent positions, the broader gallery context around them has changed dramatically since 2019.

That year, MoMA completed a major expansion designed by the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler. The physical expansion added approximately 47,000 square feet of gallery space, but the more radical change was philosophical. Under the leadership of then-director Glenn Lowry and chief curator Ann Temkin, the museum announced that it would begin rotating roughly a third of its permanent collection galleries every six to twelve months. This was a seismic shift in how a major encyclopedic museum operates.

The rationale was straightforward but bold. MoMA's collection contains over 200,000 works spanning painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, film, media, performance, architecture, and design. At any given time, only a small fraction of that collection can be on display. The old model, in which the same relatively narrow selection of canonical works dominated the galleries year after year, meant that vast portions of the collection remained invisible to the public. The rotating model allows the museum to bring different works into view, to tell different stories, and to integrate contemporary acquisitions into the historical narrative far more quickly than was previously possible.

In practical terms, this means that the MoMA exhibitions you encounter in the permanent collection galleries will differ meaningfully depending on when you visit. A gallery on the fifth floor that featured French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism during one rotation might be reinstalled to focus on global modernisms from the same period, bringing in works from Japanese, Brazilian, or Indian artists that complicate the traditional Euro-American narrative. A fourth-floor gallery devoted to Abstract Expressionism might be reconfigured to place those works alongside contemporaneous movements in Europe, Latin America, or the Middle East.

Temporary Special Exhibitions

Running alongside the permanent collection displays, MoMA's temporary exhibition program typically features between eight and fifteen special exhibitions at any given time. These range enormously in scale, from major retrospectives that occupy multiple galleries and represent years of curatorial research, to smaller focused presentations that might fill a single room or hallway alcove.

Major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art generally run for three to five months. These are the shows that tend to generate significant media coverage, draw large crowds, and sometimes require timed-entry tickets. Smaller exhibitions and collection-based presentations might run for shorter periods, sometimes as brief as two months. The museum also maintains ongoing programs in its film department, which screens works daily in its two purpose-built theaters, and in its media gallery spaces, which present time-based and digital works on a rotating basis.

Types of Exhibitions MoMA Mounts

The range of MoMA exhibitions is broader than many visitors expect. While the museum is best known for its painting and sculpture collection, its exhibition program reflects the full scope of its curatorial departments, which encompass architecture and design, drawing and prints, film, media and performance art, painting and sculpture, and photography. Understanding the different categories of exhibition will help you decide which shows to prioritize during your visit.

Major Retrospectives

The retrospective is perhaps the most prestigious and resource-intensive type of exhibition the Museum of Modern Art undertakes. These shows survey the career of a single artist, bringing together works from multiple periods and drawn from collections around the world. MoMA has a distinguished history of mounting definitive retrospectives, from its landmark Picasso show in 1939 to more recent career surveys of artists such as Henri Matisse, Jasper Johns, and Louise Bourgeois. These exhibitions often travel to partner institutions after their New York presentation, and the accompanying catalogues frequently become standard references in the field.

A major retrospective at MoMA typically occupies a significant portion of the sixth-floor galleries or spreads across multiple floors. The preparation for these shows can take three to five years, involving extensive negotiations with lending institutions, conservation work on fragile pieces, and original scholarly research by the curatorial team. For visitors, retrospectives offer an unparalleled opportunity to understand an artist's development across decades, seeing early experiments, breakthrough works, and late-career explorations side by side.

Thematic and Group Exhibitions

Not all MoMA exhibitions center on a single artist. The museum regularly mounts thematic exhibitions that bring together works by multiple artists around a shared idea, movement, medium, or historical moment. These shows might explore a particular artistic movement, examine a social or political theme through the lens of modern and contemporary art, or investigate a formal question such as the relationship between painting and photography.

Thematic exhibitions are often where MoMA's curatorial voice is most distinctive. Because the museum's collection is so vast and its scholarly resources so deep, these shows can draw unexpected connections across periods, geographies, and media. A thematic exhibition at MoMA might juxtapose a 1920s Bauhaus design object with a 2020s digital artwork, using the pairing to illuminate a shared concern with the relationship between technology and aesthetics. These shows tend to reward visitors who approach them with curiosity and a willingness to let go of conventional art historical categories.

Architecture and Design Exhibitions

MoMA was the first museum in the world to establish a dedicated curatorial department for architecture and design, and its exhibitions in this area remain among the most influential in the field. Architecture exhibitions at the museum might focus on the work of a single architect or firm, explore a typological question such as affordable housing or urban infrastructure, or present the results of a design competition. The museum's design exhibitions have been equally varied, covering everything from the history of the typeface to the design of video games to the evolution of domestic appliances.

These exhibitions are particularly notable because they often include three-dimensional models, full-scale prototypes, and interactive elements that give them a different character from the painting and sculpture shows. The architecture and design galleries on the third floor provide a flexible space that curators frequently reconfigure to accommodate these diverse formats.

Photography Exhibitions

MoMA's photography collection is one of the most important in the world, numbering over 25,000 works that span the entire history of the medium. The museum's photography exhibitions draw on this collection as well as loans from other institutions and private collections. Shows might focus on a single photographer's body of work, explore a particular genre or technique, or examine the role of photography in relation to other artistic media.

Photography exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art tend to occupy the third-floor galleries adjacent to the architecture and design spaces. Because photographs are light-sensitive works on paper, these galleries are maintained at lower light levels than the painting galleries, giving them a more intimate, contemplative atmosphere. Visitors who make a point of visiting these spaces are often rewarded with discoveries, as the photography program regularly features lesser-known artists and historical bodies of work that have not been widely exhibited.

Film and Media Programs

MoMA's film program is one of the most active in any museum worldwide. The museum maintains a collection of over 30,000 films and four million film stills, and it screens works daily in its two theaters. The film program includes retrospectives of individual filmmakers, thematic series organized around genres or national cinemas, and premieres of new works. The museum also presents media and performance art in dedicated gallery spaces, reflecting the growing importance of time-based practices in contemporary art.

For visitors interested in film, it is worth checking the museum's screening schedule in advance. Film screenings at MoMA are included with museum admission, and they offer an opportunity to see rare prints of classic and experimental films in a purpose-built theatrical environment. The program changes frequently, with new series launching every few weeks.

Emerging Artist Showcases and Projects Series

Alongside its major exhibitions, MoMA maintains several ongoing series devoted to newer and emerging voices. These smaller-scale presentations often occupy the street-level galleries or dedicated project spaces within the museum. They provide a platform for artists who may not yet have had a major museum exhibition but whose work the curators consider significant. These shows tend to be more experimental in format and content, and they give the museum's program a sense of immediacy and engagement with the present moment that balances the historical depth of the larger shows.

MoMA's Exhibition Spaces

The physical layout of MoMA shapes the visitor's experience of its exhibitions in important ways. Understanding the building's geography will help you navigate the museum efficiently and ensure you do not miss the exhibitions that most interest you.

The Gallery Floors

MoMA's exhibition galleries are organized across the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors of the museum. The fifth floor has traditionally been home to the collection's most iconic works of modern art, including painting and sculpture from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The fourth floor typically presents art from the 1940s through the 1980s, while the second floor houses contemporary work from the 1970s to the present. The sixth floor is generally reserved for major temporary exhibitions and special presentations. The third floor is devoted to architecture, design, drawing, and photography.

Since the 2019 expansion, these divisions have become somewhat more fluid. The rotating gallery model means that works from different periods and departments may appear on floors where they would not have been found under the old system. This fluidity is intentional, designed to break down the rigid chronological progression that characterized the museum's earlier installations and to encourage visitors to encounter unexpected juxtapositions.

The Kravis Atrium and the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio

The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium on the second floor is one of the museum's most dramatic interior spaces. Rising through multiple levels, the atrium serves as both a gathering point and a venue for large-scale installations and performances. The museum frequently commissions site-specific works for this space, taking advantage of its scale and visibility to present ambitious projects that would not fit in conventional gallery rooms.

Adjacent to the main gallery floors, the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio provides a flexible space for performance, film, music, and interdisciplinary events. This venue has become an important part of MoMA's exhibition ecosystem, hosting programs that extend the themes of gallery exhibitions into live and time-based formats.

Street-Level Galleries

One of the most visitor-friendly features of MoMA's 2019 redesign is the inclusion of street-level gallery spaces that are free and open to the public without museum admission. These galleries, accessible from the museum's 53rd Street entrance, typically present smaller exhibitions drawn from the collection or focused on a single artist or theme. They serve as an entry point for passersby and casual visitors who may not be planning a full museum visit but are curious about what the museum has on offer.

The free galleries rotate their presentations regularly and are worth checking even if you are a frequent visitor. They often feature works that connect to larger exhibitions upstairs, providing a preview or complement to the paid galleries. For visitors on a budget or with limited time, these spaces offer a genuine engagement with MoMA's collection at no cost.

The Sculpture Garden

The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, designed by Philip Johnson and first opened in 1953, remains one of the most beloved spaces in the museum. The garden displays a rotating selection of modern and contemporary sculpture in an outdoor setting, framed by the museum's architecture and the surrounding Midtown Manhattan skyline. The garden is accessible from the museum's ground floor and is included with general admission. It also hosts special events, performances, and summer programming that extend the museum's exhibition activity into the open air.

The Evolution of MoMA's Curatorial Strategy

To fully appreciate how MoMA exhibitions are organized today, it is worth understanding how the museum's curatorial philosophy has evolved over its nearly century-long history. The story of MoMA's curatorial strategy is, in many ways, the story of how the Western art world has thought about modern art itself.

Alfred Barr and the Departmental Model

When Alfred H. Barr Jr. became MoMA's founding director in 1929, he established a model for the museum that was revolutionary for its time. Barr envisioned MoMA as a multi-departmental institution that would encompass not just painting and sculpture but also architecture, design, film, and photography. Each department would have its own curatorial staff, its own collection, and its own exhibition program. This structure gave each medium a dedicated advocate within the institution and ensured that MoMA's definition of modern art was far broader than what any other museum of the era was willing to embrace.

Barr also established a narrative framework for the collection that would prove enormously influential. His famous chart of modern art movements, which he created for the catalogue of the 1936 exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Art," laid out a genealogy of modernism that traced a linear progression from Impressionism through various avant-garde movements to abstraction. This teleological narrative shaped not only MoMA's installations but the broader art historical understanding of modern art for decades. The collection galleries were organized to tell this story, moving chronologically from the late nineteenth century to the present, with each gallery representing a chapter in the unfolding drama of modernism.

Challenges to the Canon

By the late twentieth century, this linear narrative was coming under sustained critique from scholars, artists, and curators who argued that it was too narrow, too focused on Western European and North American developments, and too invested in a particular definition of artistic progress. Critics pointed out that the Barr model marginalized the contributions of women artists, artists of color, and artists working outside the Euro-American mainstream. It also tended to privilege certain media, particularly painting and sculpture, over others.

MoMA responded to these critiques gradually. Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating in the 2000s, the museum made significant acquisitions of work by underrepresented artists and began to incorporate these works into its collection displays. Curators experimented with thematic and cross-departmental installations that disrupted the strict chronological flow. But the fundamental structure of the galleries, and the narrative they told, remained largely intact until the 2019 expansion provided the opportunity for a more radical rethinking.

The 2019 Expansion and the New MoMA

The reopening of MoMA in October 2019 after a four-month closure for renovation and expansion represented the most significant reimagining of the museum since Barr's founding vision. The physical expansion provided more gallery space, but the curatorial changes were far more consequential. The museum committed to a fundamentally different approach to displaying its collection, one that emphasized multiplicity, juxtaposition, and regular rotation over the old model of a stable, linear narrative.

Under this new approach, the collection galleries are organized around loose thematic groupings rather than strict chronological sequences. A gallery might bring together works from different decades and different media around a shared interest in the human body, or in the relationship between abstraction and political activism, or in the dialogue between Eastern and Western artistic traditions. Within these groupings, the curators deliberately pair canonical works with less familiar pieces, creating dialogues that ask visitors to reconsider works they thought they knew.

The rotation schedule means that these groupings change regularly, typically every six to twelve months for about a third of the galleries at a time. This ensures that the museum always feels fresh to returning visitors while maintaining enough stability that first-time visitors can still count on encountering certain anchor works. The approach has been both celebrated for its ambition and critiqued by some who feel it can make the museum harder to navigate for visitors seeking specific works. But it has undeniably made MoMA a more dynamic and inclusive institution, one whose exhibition program reflects the full breadth and diversity of modern and contemporary art.

Planning Your Visit Around MoMA Exhibitions

Because MoMA's exhibition program is so active and varied, a little advance planning can significantly enhance your visit. Here are some practical considerations to keep in mind.

Ticketing and Admission

General admission to MoMA includes access to all gallery exhibitions, the sculpture garden, and film screenings. The museum offers timed-entry tickets, which can be purchased in advance through the website. For major special exhibitions, advance ticketing is strongly recommended, as popular shows can generate significant crowds, particularly on weekends and during the final weeks of a run. MoMA members receive free unlimited admission and early access to special exhibitions, which is one of the most compelling benefits of membership for frequent visitors.

The museum also offers free admission on certain evenings and for specific visitor groups, including New York City residents on designated days. Students, seniors, and children under sixteen receive discounted or free admission. These policies change periodically, so it is worth checking the website for the most current information before your visit.

Timing Your Visit

The timing of your visit within an exhibition's run can significantly affect your experience. Opening weekends for major shows tend to be the most crowded, as media coverage and word of mouth drive initial interest. The middle of an exhibition's run is often the quietest period, making it the ideal time to visit if you prefer a more contemplative experience. The final two to three weeks of a popular show can see a surge in attendance as visitors rush to see the exhibition before it closes.

Within a given day, the museum tends to be least crowded during the first hour after opening and during the last two hours before closing. Weekday mornings are generally quieter than weekends, and Friday evenings, when the museum has extended hours, can be a particularly pleasant time to visit, as the crowds thin out after the initial after-work rush.

Member Previews and Special Access

MoMA members at certain tiers receive invitations to exhibition previews, which take place in the days before a show opens to the general public. These previews offer the rare opportunity to see a newly installed exhibition with relatively few other visitors, and they often include talks by the curators who organized the show. For serious art enthusiasts, the preview alone can justify the cost of membership. Members also have access to the member lounge and dedicated entry lines, which can save significant time during busy periods.

MoMA PS1: The Contemporary Art Center

Any comprehensive discussion of MoMA exhibitions must include MoMA PS1, the museum's contemporary art center located in Long Island City, Queens. While PS1 operates as a distinct institution with its own exhibition program, curatorial staff, and physical identity, it has been an affiliate of MoMA since 2000, and the two institutions collaborate on exhibitions, acquisitions, and public programs.

History and Mission

PS1 was founded in 1971 by Alanna Heiss as the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, with the mission of transforming abandoned and underused buildings in New York City into exhibition and studio spaces for artists. In 1976, the organization moved into a former public school building in Long Island City, which it has occupied ever since. The building's classroom-scale rooms, industrial character, and rough surfaces give PS1 a radically different atmosphere from MoMA's polished Midtown galleries, and this aesthetic has been central to the institution's identity.

PS1's mission has always been oriented more strongly toward the contemporary and the experimental than MoMA's broader historical scope. The center focuses on living artists and new work, and it has a track record of presenting artists early in their careers, often before they have received significant institutional recognition. This makes PS1 an important complement to MoMA's main program, providing a venue for work that might be too new, too experimental, or too site-specific for the 53rd Street building.

The Warm Up Summer Series

One of PS1's most distinctive programs is Warm Up, the outdoor music series held in the center's courtyard on Saturday afternoons during the summer months. Warm Up brings together DJs, electronic musicians, and live performers for events that blur the line between art exhibition and social gathering. The series has been running since 1997 and has become one of the most anticipated cultural events of the New York summer, attracting a diverse audience that includes art world insiders, music fans, and neighborhood residents.

Warm Up events are ticketed separately from MoMA admission, and they sell out quickly. Visitors attending Warm Up also have access to PS1's galleries during the event, which provides an opportunity to see the current exhibitions in an unusually energetic and social atmosphere. The combination of contemporary art and live music has become a defining feature of PS1's public identity and a model for how museums can engage audiences beyond traditional gallery visits.

The Young Architects Program

Each year, MoMA and PS1 jointly sponsor the Young Architects Program, a competition in which emerging architecture firms are invited to design a temporary outdoor installation for PS1's courtyard. The winning design is constructed in time for the Warm Up series and remains on view throughout the summer. The program has launched the careers of numerous architects and has produced some of the most inventive temporary structures in recent memory, ranging from canopy-like shade structures to interactive water features to immersive environments built from recycled materials.

The Young Architects Program reflects both institutions' commitment to supporting emerging talent and to exploring the intersection of architecture, art, and public life. The installations are designed to be functional as well as aesthetic, providing shade, seating, and gathering spaces for Warm Up attendees while also serving as works of architecture in their own right. Visitors to PS1 during the summer months should make a point of experiencing the current installation, as each year's design is unique and will be dismantled at the end of the season.

Getting to PS1

MoMA PS1 is located at 22-25 Jackson Avenue in Long Island City, Queens, approximately a fifteen-minute subway ride from MoMA in Midtown Manhattan. The center is accessible via the E, M, G, and 7 subway lines. Admission to PS1 is included with a MoMA ticket or membership within fourteen days of your MoMA visit, making it easy to combine the two institutions into a single trip or to spread your visit across two days. PS1's hours and exhibition schedule are listed on its website, and visitors should check in advance, as the center's opening days and hours differ from MoMA's.

The Bigger Picture: Why MoMA Exhibitions Matter

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition program is not just a local attraction for New York City visitors. It is a bellwether for the global art world. The shows MoMA chooses to mount, the artists it chooses to highlight, and the narratives it chooses to tell through its collection displays all carry enormous weight in shaping how modern and contemporary art is understood, valued, and discussed. A major retrospective at MoMA can redefine an artist's reputation. A thematic exhibition can introduce a new framework for understanding an entire movement. The decisions made in the galleries at 53rd Street ripple outward through the museum world, the art market, academia, and public discourse.

This influence carries responsibility, and MoMA has grappled with that responsibility in increasingly visible ways. The 2019 rehang was in part an acknowledgment that the stories the museum had been telling were too narrow, too rooted in a particular canon, and too reflective of a particular set of cultural assumptions. The commitment to regular rotation is an ongoing effort to broaden the range of voices and perspectives represented in the galleries. Whether the museum is fully succeeding in this effort is a matter of ongoing debate, but the ambition itself is significant.

For visitors, the takeaway is simple but important: checking MoMA current exhibitions before you visit is not an optional step. It is essential to getting the most out of your time at the museum. The shows on view will determine what you see, and what you see will shape your understanding of modern art in ways that persist long after you leave the building. The Museum of Modern Art has spent nearly a century building one of the most extraordinary collections of modern and contemporary art in existence. Its exhibition program is the means by which that collection speaks to the public. Take the time to listen.