How Adam Himebauch Made His Fake Museum a Reality
NYC MOCA was a performance art piece — until it wasn’t.
Summary
- New York Museum of Contemporary Art, the fabricated museum by artist Adam Himebauch gets very real with a window gallery in Tribeca
- The project aims to challenge access, reality, perception and prestige as it relates to the art world
- Its debut exhibition Is This Yours by New York-based artist Olivia Gossett Cooper opens April 23
What makes a museum real? Is it scathing critics or a full staff of curators? The weight of its featured artists or marketing budget? These questions make up the foundation of the New York City Museum of Contemporary Art (NYC MOCA), an institution that was performance art until it wasn’t. It’s fabrication was an open secret. For years, save for a few in-person exhibitions, the only “place” the museum existed was in the mind of its audiences. That is, until now.
NYC MOCA is ushering in a new era with the launch of its first permanent foothold: a window gallery in the heart of Tribeca. Opening to the public at 79 Walker, the space will play host to a rotating slate of shows by emerging and established artists with Olivia Gossett Cooper’s Is This Yours first on deck.
Himebauch first “opened” the museum in 2022 as part of his year-long performance piece, “Back To the Future.” In one NYC MOCA pop-up , Before & Back, Himebauch doctored archival footage and images with his own image and artworks to make himself look like a successful artist from the 60s and 70s. Fabricating a high-profile cultural institution naturally followed. It served as a way to further push back on art world prestige and the facade of cultural legitimacy.
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In its current form, NYC MOCA operates as a conceptual and curatorial platform reconsidering what a contemporary museum is. The project’s “Board of Directors” include Himebauch, Tim Shopa, Andy Glass, Frank Carson and Francesca Pessarelli who, together, aim to bypass conventional gatekeepers and transform the modest window into a fully fledged cultural institution.
“NYC MOCA rewards those who are in on the joke, while continuing to operate as a functional museum for everyone else — reimagining the gallery not as a destination, but as an idea,” the museum wrote. “The real ‘moment of art’ happens when a curious viewer realizes the institution isn’t what it seems.”
The museum’s debut exhibition is set to open on April 23 on the corner of Walker St and Cortlandt Alley in Tribeca, New York. To celebrate the moment, NYC MOCA is dropping a merch line running it back to 1992, the museum’s supposed inaugural year.
Check out NYC MOCA’s website to learn more.
