CASE STUDY

Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Artist Identity Project at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a focus group of staff members across the institution who have the shared goal of recentering the identity and experience of the artist by designing a holistic, progressive, and respectful approach to identity information. This project was prompted by the dovetailing of a number of factors and motivations, primarily the desire to respect the artists with whom MoMA collaborates and innovates. Additionally, the creation of the Cataloguing in the 21st Century team, which has been tasked with examining the ways in which the institution can represent, display, and collect artist identity information; DEAIB workshops; and staff-led initiatives, which occurred as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement; and the longtime institutional objective of a more intersectional and diverse collection all defined the need for more nuanced and detailed artist information. There is also an institutional desire for increased database utilization focusing on forwarding extant database structures in order to more easily import, utilize, and store the identity responses and cataloguing information that will be collected.