The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Artstor have collaborated on a project to digitize approximately 16,700 photographs from the Museum Archives’ comprehensive collection of exhibition installation photographs. This material documents every major exhibition held at the museum, from its first in 1929 up to 2000.

In 2004, on the museum’s 75th anniversary, their archival collection was celebrated in Art in Our Time(editors Michelle Elligott and Harriet Bee). The published images were only a small sampling of a vast body of material, which was digitized in the initiative of the museum and Artstor.  This material also provided the foundation 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 Museum of Modern Art Archives was established in 1989 to preserve and make accessible documents relating to the museum’s art-historical and cultural role. Within the Museum Archives, the Exhibition History is the repository for the installation photographs.

The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929 as an alternative to more conservative historical museums – dedicated to the mission of becoming the world’s leading repository of modern art. Its permanent collection consists of more than 200,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and drawings, design objects, and films in addition to millions of film stills. The museum also maintains a library and archives to support research and scholarship related to modern and contemporary art.

For related collections, see The Museum of Modern Art: Architecture and Design, and The Museum of Modern Art: Painting and Sculpture