Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and American Modernism at MoMA

Abstract

This report examines Abby Aldrich Rockefeller's central role in the founding and shaping of the Museum of Modern Art. It focuses specifically on her collection gift of 1935 and the way that it defined the museum's understanding of modernism, specifically American modernism. MoMA has historically been thought of as an institution dominated by white men, both in terms of the trustees and the painters whose works were exhibited on its walls. My research, however, subverts this narrative, and argues that a woman quietly ran MoMA in its early years and tried to exert an inclusive agenda