A comprehensive history of MoMA PS1, this publication emphasizes artist-centered radical experimentation that characterizes the institution. MoMA PS1: A History contains historical statements and in-depth interviews with founder Alanna Heiss and contemporary witnesses closely associated with the institution. Complemented by previously unpublished archival documentation of exhibitions, performances, and events, with an additional included chronology and exhibition history.
Introduction |
The artist-centered and community-driven institution, now known as MoMA PS1; was founded in 1971 by curator Alanna Heiss, an integral figure in the alternative art space movement of 1970s New York and after. MoMA PS1 operates within a historic nineteenth-century public school building in Long Island City, Queens it first occupied in 1976. The archival records documenting the history of PS1 are held by the Museum of Modern Art Archives, and with additional extensive library resources, provide evidence of MoMA PS1's crucial role as a nonprofit space rooted in artistic exploration and expression at the center of New York's contemporary art scene. Documentation of the organization's foundation and growth span over 35 years, and include records and publications for over 900 exhibitions and events. This research guide explores MoMA PS1's history and influence, contextualizing New York City's alternative art scene through the resources offered in MoMA's Library and Archives.
The content of this research guide was first written by Jonathan Lill in 2012 for publication online. The exhibition history, studio program participant list, and chronology were significantly edited and updated by Bettina Funcke and others for the 2019 book MoMA PS1: A History (link at left). Giana Amantea further revised and updated information when the content was moved to it's new location at research.moma.org in 2025.
P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center (now MoMA PS1), circa 2000. Photograph by John Harris.
Late 1960s
In London, Alanna Heiss works as artist liaison for SPACE, an organization that repurposes warehouses in St. Katharine Docks for use as artists’ studios. She returns to America in 1970 with the idea of starting such a program in New York City and is hired by the Municipal Art Society as program director.
Heiss founds the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, which is committed to contemporary art. Brendan Gill, chairman of the board of the Municipal Art Society, is also appointed chairman of the IAUR. In May, leveraging her roles at both the IAUR and the Municipal Art Society, Heiss creates the three-day Brooklyn Bridge Event, for which about thirty artists (including Gordon Matta Clark, Richard Nonas, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Dennis Oppenheim) create site-specific artworks and performances on piers under the Brooklyn Bridge.
Under the aegis of the Municipal Art Society, Heiss establishes the Workspace program, to make unused spaces available to artists, and begins looking all over the city for locations. She spends months attempting in vain to secure Building 13 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Later that year she leaves the Municipal Art Society, taking the Workspace program with her.
In April, Workspace acquires its first space, two floors of a warehouse at 10 Bleecker Street, between Elizabeth Street and the Bowery, which is then sublet to artists including Philip Glass, Richard Nonas, and Sydney Geist. The first exhibition there, Enclosures: Richard Nonas, takes place in May.
That summer, Heiss incorporates the IAUR as an independent entity.
In November, she signs a lease with the city for the top floors of 108 Leonard Street, downtown near Foley Square. The Clocktower offers unique exhibition space as well as artist studios and the IAUR offices. The following month, artists’ studios are established in the Eightieth Precinct police station, at Washington Avenue and Park Place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. At the National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Arts Program director Brian O’Doherty creates a new category of support for alternative spaces and offers the IAUR its first NEA grant.
The Clocktower’s inaugural exhibition, Joel Shapiro: Sculpture, runs in April.
Heiss opens the Condemnation Blight Sculpture Workshop, also known as the Coney Island Sculpture Museum, in the former Neptune Beverage Company building in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Jene Highstein, the only exhibition to be held at that location, takes place in October. The space is returned to the city toward the end of 1975.
In late spring, the Clocktower hosts its first group show, Discussions: Works/Words. The exhibition catalogue—the IAUR’s first—takes the form of a pack of small cards, each listing the entry for a single performance.
On New Year’s Day, Artists Make Toys opens at the Clocktower. With fifty-nine artists, it is the IAUR’s largest group exhibition to date.
The Idea Warehouse opens in February at 22 Reade Street with the performance Philip Glass Ensemble: Music in Twelve Parts. Comprising the top floor of six adjacent buildings near City Hall, the Idea Warehouse will host a number of performance programs over the next year.
In April, Collectors of the Seventies, Part I: Dorothy and Herbert Vogel opens at the Clocktower. The first in a series of five shows centering on art patrons, the exhibition introduces the Vogels’ historic collection of Conceptual and Minimalist art.
During the spring, the IAUR is made aware of Public School 1 in Long Island City, Queens. Built in 1893, the school had been a city storage facility since 1966 and is due to be auctioned off and probably demolished. Negotiations to take over the building begin, and planning will continue through the next twelve months.
Ideas at the Idea Warehouse opens in June, with works and performances by twenty-two artists, and an exhibition catalogue comprising artist-submitted content.
On April 22, the IAUR signs a twenty-year lease with the City of New York for the PS1 building.
To celebrate the opening of PS1, a gala benefit, dubbed the “PS1 Prom,” is held at the school building on June 9. Guests are bused from Manhattan, the collectors Herbert and Dorothy Vogel are elected prom king and queen, and a high school band provides music. Afterward, guests are invited to swim in the Ansonia Hotel pool in midtown Manhattan, while artist Max Neuhaus performs an underwater concert.
For PS1’s inaugural exhibition, Rooms, seventy-eight artists install artworks or create them onsite in the classrooms and hallways, basement and attic, closets and bathrooms, the parking lot/courtyard and elsewhere outside the building. The exhibition is featured on the cover of the October 1976 issue of Artforum and discussed in an article by Nancy Foote, “The Apotheosis of the Crummy Space.” A catalogue for the exhibition, containing extensive installation photography and other documentation, is published in 1977.
While Rooms officially runs only for two weeks in June, many works remain on view through the year—and indeed, some are still there today. Much of the building is soon rented out to artists for studio and installation space, and discussions begin as to how best to utilize the building. The only other exhibitions held at PS1 this year are A Month of Sundays—a coordinated series of open studios in the fall—and a handful of performances.
In December, the Idea Warehouse closes down after an installation by Carol Parker and Charlemagne Palestine catches fire and the city decides to repossess the buildings.
On New Year’s Day, the first Special Project rooms open, with sixteen artists assigned individual rooms and invited to install their work or stage a performance or other activity in the rooms, hallways, closets, and other spaces.
The Workspace program of renting city-owned studio spaces to artists is formalized at PS1 as the National and International Studio Program.
The fall season opens on October 1 with the first series of interdisciplinary exhibitions. Each season is planned by an independent curator and focuses on specific media: architecture, fashion, poetry, photography, film, video, or performance.
The largest exhibition staged by the IAUR to date, Sound, opens in September, with the work of more than 160 artists spread throughout the main exhibition rooms and in the coordinated Special Projects and interdisciplinary program spaces
Carol Squiers organizes Barbara Kruger’s first museum show. Afro-American Abstraction is also presented. West/East: First Generation Environmental Sculptures, a loose series of site-specific installations by Robert Irwin, Eric Orr, James Turrell, De Wain Valentine, and Doug Wheeler, opens in September and will run until Spring 1982. Turrell’s contribution will be refined and reopened in 1986 as the permanent installation Meeting.
The exhibition New York/New Wave, curated by Diego Cortez, opens in February. Featuring 118 artists from the burgeoning Lower East Side arts scene, the show embraces a distinct punk rock aesthetic and heralds a generational change in the art world. Numerous artists, including Nan Goldin and Keith Haring, make their first appearance at PS1 in this exhibition, and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s participation (in his first-ever museum presentation) helps launch his career.
Tom Finkelpearl is hired as a part-time press director and soon becomes a curator and the director of the Clocktower, a post he holds until 1990. Nearly a decade later, he will return to PS1 as deputy director and organize the presentation of Carsten Höller’s slide.
The exhibition Expressions: New Art from Germany, organized by the St. Louis Art Museum, is the centerpiece of the fall season. The show introduces Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, and A. R. Penck to a New York audience and, on the heels of the previous year’s exhibition Icebreakers: Contemporary Swedish Expressionists, signals PS1’s growing attention to European artists.
In January, the National and International Studio Program holds a formal group exhibition, with a published catalogue, for the first time. The annual studio program exhibition will be a fixture of the schedule for the next twenty years.
Heiss co-curates the Biennale de Paris with Kasper König and Achille Bonito Oliva, with artists including Baselitz, Kiefer, Daniel Buren, Richard Deacon, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, Bertrand Lavier, and Lawrence Weiner. Continuing the IAUR’s focus on bringing European artists to New York, The Knot: Arte Povera at PS1 opens in October.
As the commissioner of the American Pavilion at the 42nd Venice Biennale, Heiss produces the exhibition Isamu Noguchi: What Is Sculpture?, curated by Henry Geldzahler for PS1.
In the spring, the Clocktower hosts Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney, the Guerrilla Girls’ most publicized activity to date. Through a series of charts, graphs, and statements, the group protests the exclusion of women artists from this year’s Whitney Biennial and calls attention to gender inequity in all parts of the art world.
Chris Dercon joins the museum as program director and immediately begins work on Possibility/Franz West (1990), for which the artist inhabits a basement studio and produces a number of works on-site. The Institute for Art and Urban Resources officially changes its name to The Institute for Contemporary Art, PS1 and the Clocktower.
Tony Vasconcellos joins PS1 as program manager, a position he holds until his death from AIDS in 1995.
In late winter, Tom Finkelpearl organizes the retrospective David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble, 1969–1990 and produces the first monograph on the artist, who is awarded a MacArthur Fellowship six months later.
Heiss, who built strong ties to Chinese artists in the eighties, curates China—June 4, 1989, focusing on the government’s brutal suppression of the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. Heiss will revisit this generation of artists in a number of shows, notably the 1998 survey (co-hosted with Asia Society) Inside Out: New Chinese Art.
For the 45th Venice Biennale, Heiss curates a tribute to John Cage, The Swift Sound of Things: Cage & Co., which becomes something of a memorial when Cage suffers a fatal stroke during the show’s run.
The first historical exhibition at PS1, Stalin’s Choice: Soviet Socialist Realism 1932–1956, introduces artworks from the former Soviet Union never before seen in the West, four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. An exhibition preview held in September in Moscow coincides with Russia’s 1993 constitutional crisis.
Much of the building is closed for a major renovation spearheaded by Los Angeles– based architect Frederick Fisher. In addition to crucial infrastructural updates, including the installation of an elevator, the project entails the creation of a large enclosed courtyard that still serves as the museum’s outdoor galleries and main entrance. Limited programming continues for two of the renovation’s three years, while a few exhibitions are organized at the Clocktower and other venues.
Klaus Biesenbach, founding director of the Berlin art space Kunst-Werke, is appointed senior curator at PS1. Biesenbach retains his post at KW, and the two institutions will coproduce exhibitions for the next several years.
In advance of the October reopening, a new name is announced: PS1 Contemporary Art Center.
The reopening is a major event in the New York art world. Presented alongside installations throughout the building by more than one hundred artists, many of whom had participated in Rooms, are retrospectives of Jack Smith, Jackie Winsor, John Coplans, Martin von Haselberg, and Lynne Yamamoto as well as the first iteration of the Vertical Painting series, which saw works placed in the stairwells by such artists as Cecily Brown, R. H. Quaytman, William Kentridge, and Mary Heilmann, most of which are still on view. The “ghosts” of many other works, including those installed by John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner on the interior courtyard walls, remain visible today.
PS1 now operates five days a week, year-round, with regular hours, guards, and an education department.
Open during the summer for the first time, PS1 invites the artist collective Gelatin to install an environment of large sculptural works in the courtyard, Percutaneous Delights, among which are staged weekend DJ sessions/dance parties— setting the precedent for both the Warm Up series of outdoor concerts and events and the Young Architects Program, both of which continue to the present day.
On February 1, PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art announce a merger designed to preserve the artistic independence of both institutions while integrating their development, education, marketing, financial planning, and membership departments. Heiss is named deputy director of MoMA. Planning begins for a large collaborative project that will mix the staffs and play to the strengths of both institutions.
In the summer, the celebrated architect and former MoMA curator Philip Johnson designs the DJ booth for the inaugural Warm Up, the first of many co-produced projects between MoMA and PS1.
Greater New York, a survey of works by local emerging and mid-career artists, opens in February. Installed throughout the entire PS1 building, the show is the first curatorial collaboration between PS1 and MoMA. Working in pairs, some 30 curators from the two institutions reviewed the work of more than 2,000 artists, through extensive slide reviews and more than 250 studio visits. Greater New York becomes a series of surveys that take place every five years.
In July, SHoP wins the first Young Architects Program competition, an initiative organized by Terrence Riley and co-founded by MoMA and MoMA PS1.
The Clocktower’s final exhibition, the National and International Studio Program Exhibition (2000–2001): Strangers/Étrangers, opens in April. The studio program maintains studios in the building through 2003.
Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s choral sound work Forty Part Motet, part of their upcoming retrospective, opens early and becomes a gathering place for New Yorkers.
The Museum of Modern Art closes its Fifty-Third Street building for expansion and opens a satellite space in a former Swingline Staples factory near PS1, to be called MoMA QNS. When the Museum reopens, in 2005, MoMA QNS becomes the permanent home for collection storage and a facility for conservation, study, and research.
The International Studio Program comes to an end in the spring with the last group exhibition, Visa for Thirteen. The National Studio Program had ended the previous year.
Organized by Schaulager Basel in collaboration with MoMA and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Roth Time: A Dieter Roth Retrospective, the first comprehensive museum overview of the work of the postwar Swiss artist, opens in March at both MoMA QNS and PS1.
In April, Heiss launches WPS1, an internet art radio station, from renovated office space at the Clocktower. Broadcast internationally, around the clock, WPS1 features talk and music shows hosted by contemporary writers, artists, and musicians, along with rare historical material from MoMA’s audio archive.
On December 31, Heiss retires after thirty-six years as director of PS1. Heiss reoccupies the Clocktower space to run Art International Radio (AIR), a continuation of WPS1, and to once again curate exhibitions in the Lower Manhattan space.
In the fall, for the first time in its four years, the annual New York Art Book Fair is held at PS1. With a range of exhibitors as well as performances, events, and seminars, the fair is held annually at PS1 to the present day. Opening in October, the exhibition 1969, a historical survey of artwork made that year, marks the first time that works from MoMA’s permanent collection are shown at PS1.
At the end of October, Klaus Biesenbach is named director of PS1. Since first coming to PS1 in 1997, Biesenbach had gone on to become chief curator of MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance Art. As PS1 director, Biesenbach will also serve as MoMA’s chief curator at large.
PS1 is officially renamed MoMA PS1. A board is established, with Agnes Gund as chair.
Peter Eleey joins MoMA PS1 as curator, and will be named chief curator in 2016.
In February, Nicolas Jaar’s five-hour audio-visual event From Scratch in the VW Dome in the PS1 courtyard marks the debut of the Sunday Sessions series of performances, talks, and events.
Biesenbach is preparing Expo, a large-scale festival about ecology and sustainability, when Hurricane Sandy hits New York. MoMA PS1 helps organize volunteers and donated goods, initiates collaborations and fundraising programs, and establishes the VW Dome 2, a temporary cultural and community center in Rockaway Beach. MoMA PS1’s involvement in the devastated seaside community will continue with summer programming, including the Rockaway! exhibition series in Fort Tilden Park in Queens.
The comprehensive MoMA PS1 archives, which had been turned over to MoMA in 2008 to be organized for research, is opened to the public in December.
Mike Kelley, organized by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, is the first exhibition in MoMA PS1’s history dedicating the entire building to a single artist. The show sets the stage for landmark solo shows of Christoph Schlingensief, Maria Lassnig, and James Lee Byars the following year.
Two exhibitions commemorate the founding of MoMA PS1 on its fortieth anniversary. FORTY, organized by a curatorial team led by Alanna Heiss, includes works by many of the artists from the inaugural exhibition, Rooms. Simultaneously, Vito Acconci: Where We Are Now (Who Are We Anyway?), 1976, organized by Biesenbach and others, celebrates Acconci’s early actions and performances and features a reinstallation of the work that gives the show its title.
PS1 hosts the first major career retrospective of Carolee Schneemann, organized by the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.
Co-organized by MoMA and the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel, Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts, the most comprehensive retrospective of Nauman’s work to date, occupies the sixth-floor galleries at MoMA and all of MoMA PS1.
