Michelle Kuo (curator, MoMA) — MoMA acquires first generative-art NFTs

2022

Artists: Michelle Kuo (curator, MoMA), Casey Reas (artist, acquired), Ian Cheng (artist, acquired) · Year: 2022 · Medium: Institutional acquisition — generative artworks including Casey REAS, Ian Cheng, and others · Substrate: Ethereum and Tezos; varied technical substrates across acquired works · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Museum of Modern Art In 2022 and 2023, the Museum of Modern Art made its first serious institutional acquisitions of generative and on-chain art works beyond the Anadol Unsupervised commission. The acquisitions, curated primarily by Michelle Kuo (Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA) and the museum's digital-art specialists, included works by Casey Reas (specifically pieces from his Ultrachrome series and his Centuries series), Ian Cheng (from the Emissaries trilogy), and several other generative and AI-focused artists. The acquisitions were announced through the museum's standard accessions process rather than as a dedicated digital-art announcement. The curatorial framing is important. MoMA positioned the acquisitions as continuous with its existing holdings in computer art and conceptual practice — pieces were accessioned alongside works by Vera Molnár, Manfred Mohr, and other first-generation figures MoMA had acquired decades earlier. The generative-art acquisitions were not treated as a departure but as the latest iteration of a practice MoMA had been collecting for half a century. The Kuo acquisitions, along with the Anadol Unsupervised commission and the museum's earlier Paik, Knowlton, and Schwartz holdings, mean that MoMA now has a meaningful institutional collection across the full arc of computer art from 1960 to the present. This kind of cross-era depth is rare among American museums and makes MoMA's holdings a primary reference for scholarly work on the field. The acquisitions came during the deepest portion of the crypto winter, which signals that MoMA's commitment was not market-cycle driven. Lore Michelle Kuo, the Marlene Hess Curator at MoMA's Department of Painting and Sculpture, led the museum's first major institutional acquisition of generative-art NFTs in 2023 — works by Refik Anadol (Unsupervised, displayed in the museum's lobby), Casey Reas, Ian Cheng, and several others. Kuo had been at MoMA since 2017 and had previously been editor-in-chief of Artforum from 2010 to 2017. Her acquisition argument took roughly two years to negotiate through the museum's internal committees; the central institutional concern was preservation — how MoMA could commit to maintaining these works in perpetuity given the technical-infrastructure dependencies. The Anadol piece in particular required a dedicated technical-staff position within the museum's information-systems department. Kuo has remained at MoMA and continues to lead the institution's digital-art acquisitions. Sources • MoMA — collection additions announcements (2022–2023) • Kuo, Michelle — curatorial essays • Artforum coverage of MoMA accessions