MoMA’s "Greater New York" Captures the Good & Bad of NYC

Greater New York 2021
Image courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Noel Woodford

Installation view of Shanzhai Lyric, Incomplete Poem (2015-ongoing) in Greater New York 2021 on view at MoMA PS1 from October 7, 2021 to April 18, 2022.

Like the Whitney Biennial and other pulse-taking surveys of contemporary art, Greater New York was conceived as a way for MoMA, via its PS1 satellite, to put its institutional stamp on the zeitgeist by measuring it through a recurring interval of years—every five in the case of “GNY,” a figure that once might have marked seismic shifts in the art world. Today market indexes have replaced stylistic revolutions as cultural barometers, the reason, perhaps, for why the exhibit’s current edition seems to frequently insert the past into the present, both as a subject and as an opportunity for resurrecting careers.

Event Information
Start Date: October 7, 2021
End Date: April 18, 2022
Venue: MoMA PS1

Greater New York 2021