MoMA and ARTstor

* The Museum of Modern Art and ARTstor to Collaborate on Digitization
Project *

The Museum of Modern Art and ARTstor announced a project to digitize
nearly 23,000 photographs from the MoMA Archives� comprehensive
collection of exhibition installation photographs and distribute them
through ARTstor. This material richly documents every major exhibition
held at the Museum, beginning with the inaugural exhibition of 1929.
Enhanced and comprehensive online access to this important collection
will strongly encourage and advance scholarship on the history and
institutions of modern art.

In reaching this agreement, Milan Hughston, Chief of Library and
Museum Archives and Max Marmor, ARTstor�s Director of Collection
Development, expressed their shared enthusiasm in collaborating to use
digital technologies to make these high quality images of contemporary
art and architecture more broadly available for noncommercial
educational and scholarly purposes.

"The Museum's 75th Anniversary in 2004 gave us a chance to highlight
this collection in a special publication, Art in Our Time, edited by
Museum Archivist Michelle Elligott and Harriet Bee. Those images were
only a small sampling of a vast body of important material, and we are
grateful to ARTstor for recognizing the value of digitizing the entire
collection for distribution," comments Hughston.

"Our new collaboration with staff of the MoMA Library and Archives,"
adds Marmor, "represents an important milestone in ARTstor's ongoing
effort to provide teachers, scholars and students with digital image
collections documenting the development of modern and contemporary
art. We are delighted to help make this important photographic archive
available now online for non-commercial use in education and
research." The MoMA installation photographs are highly prized by art
historians and other scholars. In addition to Art in Our Time, they
provided the basis for Mary Anne Staniszewski�s pioneering The Power
of Display: a History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of
Modern Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).

The MoMA Archives was established in 1989 to preserve and to make
accessible historical documents about the Museum and modern and
contemporary art. The Photographic Archive documents and maintains the
complete visual history of the Museum. �The installation photographs
of exhibitions at MoMA are a unique and valuable resource. Like the
other collections in the Archives, these materials tell the story of
modern and contemporary art. Because of MoMA�s singular role in the
introduction and dissemination of modern art, these photos document
this evolution and are critical to the study of modern art as well as
the history of modern museums, and the field of installation design,�
according to Michelle Elligott, Museum Archivist.