The Dawn Patrol. 1930. USA. Directed by Howard Hawks

These notes accompany screenings of Howard Hawks’s The Dawn Patrol, July 21, 22, and 23 in Theater 1.

Like his friendly rival John Ford, Howard Hawks (1896–1977) began work as a Hollywood property man (in Hawks’s case, while still attending school). He received a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell, and his films reflect both the precision this implies and the erudition of a college boy. (Ford, by contrast, spent about two minutes in college.) After a stint in the Army Air Corps and a job designing airplanes, Hawks wound up directing his first film at the Fox studio—where Ford was also under contract—in 1926. Read more

On Tuesday evening, MoMA held an opening party for our first-ever Community Partners Art Show. On view through July 30 in the lower gallery of the Cullman Education Building, the exhibition showcases artwork created in collaboration with the various populations served through the Museum’s twenty-nine different community partnership organizations. These organizations serve a wide variety of social, economic, and educational needs across a wide section of New York City, and the issues that our Community Partner Organizations address (issues that include but are not limited to homelessness, HIV/AIDS, juvenile incarceration, adult basic education, immigration services, prostitution, drug addiction, family literacy, and job training) are not issues that are immediately associated with traditional museum education. Read more

How well do you know your MoMA? Above are images of works from the MoMA collection that are currently on view throughout the Museum. If you think you can identify the artist and title of each work, please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—in two weeks (on Friday, July 30), along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.

ANSWERS TO THE JULY 2 CHALLENGE: Read more

Film still of Ida Lupino in The Big Knife (1955), directed by Robert Aldrich. The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Collection

The name Ida Lupino became a part of my cultural consciousness when I was about ten years old. I grew up watching classic American television shows such as Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir—all shows which featured Lupino as a guest director at one time or another in the mid to late 1960s. Read more

Yoko Ono. Selections from Whisper Piece (four shown of sixteen total; installation view at The Museum of Modern Art). 2010. Pen on wall, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist. Photo: Jason Persse

I first heard about Yoko Ono’s so-called “instruction pieces” as a high school student, when a friend told me the (possibly apocryphal, certainly embellished) story of Ono’s first meeting with John Lennon. History according to the poorly fact-checked lunchtime ramblings of rock ‘n’ roll–obsessed seventeen-year-olds: During a visit to London’s Indica Gallery in 1966, Lennon encountered Ono’s Ceiling Painting. Climbing to the top of a tall, white ladder, he used a magnifying glass dangling from a thread to read a message printed in tiny letters on the ceiling: “YES.” Profoundly moved by the work’s unalloyed positivity, he demanded to meet the artist right away. Read more

Morocco. 1930. USA. Directed by Josef von Sternberg

These notes accompany screenings of Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco, July 14, 15, and 16 in Theater 2.

On March 31, 1930, Marlene Dietrich appeared on the stage of Berlin’s Gloria Palast for the premiere of The Blue Angel before sailing that very night for America to work on Morocco. The director of both films, Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969), had long since departed, expecting never to see the actress again. Read more