Muñoz 1 Pablo Muñoz Professor Claire Bishop ART 70000, Methods of Research 19 December 2018 Exhibition analysis of “Judson Dance Theatre: The Work is Never Done” at MoMA. “Judson Dance Theatre: The Work is Never Done” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City is the first museum exhibition on this particular dance historical benchmark, which attempts to integrate previous projects on the history of this artistic endeavor 1 . In order to unfold the exhibition’s methods, I am going to focus on the specificity of the social geography of the approach of downtown Manhattan, the spirit of collaboration and the interrelationships between art mediums. I will also mention the associated activities (performances and lectures) during the time frame of the exhibition (September 2018 to February 2019). Introduction Upon arriving in the exhibition, we first encounter in the atrium a video installation by Charles Atlas on a loop with excerpts of the works by choreographers included in the performance program for this atrium. 2 At the opposite wall to the entrance, we find a collection of posters and flyers from the Judson Dance Theater concerts from a variety of repositories: Judson Memorial Church Archive at New York University, and Yvonne Rainer 3 Papers at the Getty Research 1 The immediate predecessor of MoMA’s Judson exhibit was “Radical bodies : Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955-1972” organized by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara, and presented at the New York Public Library in between May and September 2017. See Bennahum, 2017. Although the exhibition was not specifically focused on Judson Dance Theatre, it was dedicated to three very influential artists to the formation of Judson Dance Theatre. It is worth mention that Simone’s Forti’s “Slant Board” (1961) was presented in “Radical Bodies”, not as a performance, but as a sculpture, which was already acquired by MoMA in 2015. Previous projects about Judson Dance Theatre history include: “Judson project” at Bennington College which MoMA’s Judson exhibition incorporates, “Judson Now” at Dancespace and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project called “Past Forward”. 2 Works are shown by Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, David Gordon, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, and Trisha Brown. The catalog listed the interview video series “Recollections” as part of the Atrium as well, but they are actually inside the Gallery 4 | Judson Dance Theatre. 3 Rainer’s relationship to MoMA is a long one, as well as Simone Forti’s. In 2015 Rainer premiered the performance “The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move?” at MoMA, the same year that Forti’s “Dance constructions” (1960) were acquired by the museum. Both Rainer and Forti participated in the performance exhibition series organized by MoMA in 2009.