I should probably start by telling you that I’m a card-carrying MoMA member. Have been for years ever since my student discount days at SCAD. So when I say what I’m about to say, know that it comes from a place of love.
I visited MoMA on June 7th, 2025- just days after finishing my Master’s in Preservation Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design. My husband Rashid and I were on what I call our Gilded Age tour; we’d already been through the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, soaked in Manhattan, and now MoMA was meant to be the grand finale. A celebration.
I walked through those doors carrying something heavier than a diploma. I was carrying every museum I’d ever stepped into across two continents.
The Floors That Found Me
The first exhibit that stopped me was Jack Whitten. I hadn’t planned on his exhibit, it happened to be showing- and it stopped me completely. His massive works aren’t paintings in any traditional sense. They’re constructed surfaces, acrylic laid down like bricks, scraped and embedded and layered until the canvas becomes architecture. Standing in front of his work, days after defending a thesis on Preservation Design, I felt something click. Here was a man who preserved materials inside his art, who built monuments on canvas. He spoke my language without knowing it.
Then came Hilma af Klint. If you don’t know her, she was painting abstract art before Kandinsky, before Mondrian, before any of the men who got the credit. She painted the invisible architecture of living things: botanicals, spiritual geometries, the structures underneath what the eye can see.
I stood there with a magnifying glass they’d provided, leaning into one of her botanical studies from 1919, larch branches, pinecones, a bee in flight, tiny color swatches in the corner cataloguing the palette of a single plant. My grandmother was a herbalist in the Philippines. She spent her life studying the roots and leaves that heal. Hilma was painting what my grandmother knew with her hands. I could have stayed in that room for hours.
Jack Whitten gave me something I didn’t know I was looking for. Hilma gave me my grandmother. Those two exhibits made my entire afternoon.
The Floors I Chose to Skip
Here’s the part where honesty meets love.
After those two extraordinary exhibits, Rashid and I made our way toward the permanent collection floors, the ones with the names everyone comes for. Dalí. Picasso. Van Gogh. Matisse. Cézanne. Mondrian.
And I made a decision.
I’ve been to the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres. I’ve visited the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, four times. I’ve stood inside Picasso’s Château in Antibes. I’ve walked through the Matisse Museum in Nice. I’ve seen Cézanne at the Musée d’Orsay. I’ve been to Van Gogh’s Yellow House in Arles, and seen his work at the Orsay and the Louvre- three times. Mondrian, well, I’d rather see him at the Hague, where he belongs. Henri Rousseau- I’ve already spent time with his work in DC.
When I reached the Dalí floor at MoMA, I saw a crowd of people- fifteen, twenty deep, standing shoulder to shoulder in front of what I believe was The Persistence of Memory. I couldn’t even see the painting. I’ve stood three feet from Dalí’s work in Spain. Alone. With the painting talking to me.
I turned to Rashid and said, “We’re skipping these floors. We’ve seen most of them at the source.“
It wasn’t disappointment. It was a choice. I didn’t want to ruin the vibe of what Jack Whitten and Hilma had just given me. I didn’t want to replace the intimacy of Figueres with the back of someone’s head. I didn’t want postcards of places I’d already lived in.
What MoMA Taught Me That Day
MoMA is a beautiful museum. I’m still a proud member. But what I learned that afternoon is something I think every well-traveled art lover eventually discovers: when you’ve been to the source- when you’ve stood in the towns and châteaux and dedicated museums where these artists actually lived and worked: a general collection hits differently.
The magic of MoMA that day wasn’t on the famous floors. It was in the rooms I didn’t plan for. Hilma af Klint, painting the invisible. Jack Whitten, building pyramids from memory. The art that found me was better than the art I came looking for.
Sometimes the best thing you can do in a museum is skip the floor everyone else is crowding and follow the pull toward something you didn’t know you needed.