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Museum of Modern Art announces Sculpture Garden Mornings

eginning September 9, The Museum of Modern Art’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden will be open free of charge to the general public daily, from 9:00 to 10:15 a.m., allowing New Yorkers and visitors alike to start their day in one of the city’s most beloved outdoor spaces. The public can enter the Sculpture Garden directly through the west gate on West 54 Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Coffee and beverages will be available for purchase.

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at The Museum of Modern Art, 2013. Photo: Martin Seck
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at The Museum of Modern Art, 2013. Photo: Martin Seck

The new installation in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden is The Modern Monument, which brings together diverse works organized around the theme of the modern monument. Included are Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk (1967), which does not commemorate a specific event but, rather, serves as a symbolic monument for all people; and Pablo Picasso’s Monument (1972), a memorial for the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who died of influenza at the end of World War I. These two works are joined by German artist Katharina Fritsch’s Figurengruppe/Group of Figures (2006–08), which comprises nine boldly colored, life-size figures, among them St. Michael, a Madonna, a giant, and a snake. Favorites like Picasso’s She-Goat (1950) and Joan Miró’s Moonbird (1966) are shown alongside works by Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, Mark di Suvero, Tony Smith, and others. Also on view, in conjunction with the recent exhibition Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store, is Oldenburg’s Geometric Mouse, Scale A (1975), a large painted aluminum and steel sculpture of a mouse, whose form the artist based on both Mickey Mouse and a film camera.

The early morning hours in the Sculpture Garden will be in effect year-round, weather permitting. The Museum galleries open to the public daily at 10:30 a.m. www.moma.org