For the next two years, the Volkswagen Group of America will be the lead sponsor of educational programming for the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), and will back major exhibitions including MoMA PS1’s survey of local artists, Greater New York, opening this autumn at the Queens museum.
Since 2011, the North American arm of the German carmaker Volkswagen has supported a number of special events and shows at both museums. Now, the collaboration will expand to cover further educational projects, particularly focusing on the museums’ digital learning initiatives, such as online courses and multimedia guides. The sponsorship deal will also include a series of talks to take place at MoMA and internationally, a curatorial training fellowship at MoMA PS1, and the extension of the Queens museum’s popular Sunday Sessions series of installations and performances, which took place in a distinctive temporary dome in its courtyard.
Volkswagen will also continue to sponsor exhibitions, including the survey show Greater New York 2015 (11 October-March 2016), which takes place every five years. Instead of focusing on emerging artists, however, this iteration will include more established artists and take a historic view of the city’s art scene. The curatorial team, led by MoMA PS1’s curator and associate director of exhibitions and programmes, Peter Eleey, includes the art historian Douglas Crimp, who organised the influential exhibition on the Pictures Generation of artists in the late 1970s; Thomas Lax, MoMA’s associate curator of media and performance art; and Mia Locks, the assistant curator at MoMA PS1.
“Volkswagen is das auto, and MoMA is das museum,” says the chairman of the board of directors for Volkswagen Group of America, Martin Winterkorn, in a press release. “The renewal of our partnership is a reflection of our commitment to an internationally recognised art institution, and it demonstrates Volkswagen’s engagement in the fields of arts, education and social matters.”