On the occasion of the exhibition Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, join MoMA for a program focusing on Robert Frank’s approach to bookmaking over the six decades following his landmark publication The Americans. Frank returned multiple times to his autobiographical photobook The Lines of My Hand (first published in 1972), adding new works and resequencing images and words. During the last decade of his life, his artist’s books published by Steidl—which Frank called “visual diaries”—were his main artistic output, and a space in which he could explore new relationships between his photographs.
Life Dances On, Frank’s first solo exhibition at MoMA, provides a new consideration of his expansive body of work by exploring the vibrant and lesser-known years of his career following the 1958 completion of The Americans, up until his death in 2019. Coinciding with the centennial of Frank’s birth, on November 9, 2024, this exhibition explores Frank’s perpetual experimentation across mediums—from photography, to film, to books—and his artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities.
Introduced by exhibition curator Lucy Gallun, the program will feature Gerhard Steidl, Frank’s longtime bookmaking collaborator, followed by a response from writer, editor, and educator Catherine Taylor.
The in-person program is now sold out.
Register for the virtual program
Presenters
Gerhard Steidl was born in 1950 in Göttingen, Germany. Steidl founded his publishing house and screenprinting workshop for graphic art and posters in 1968. Today, Steidl publishes the largest worldwide program of contemporary photobooks and an ambitious German literature list. He also conceives and curates international exhibitions. In 2020 Steidl became the first non-photographer to receive the Outstanding Contribution to Photography prize at the Sony World Photography Awards, and he was awarded the Gutenberg Prize by the International Gutenberg Society in Mainz. In 2021 he received the Grand Cross of Merit of Lower Saxony, and the publishing house received the Deutscher Verlagspreis (German Publishers Award). Steidl is the initiator and founding director of Kunsthaus Göttingen, which opened in June 2021, and curator of the documenta fifteen partner project “printing futures.”
Catherine Taylor is a writer and editor. She is founding co-director of the Image Text IFA and ITI Press at Cornell University. She is the author of Apart (2012) and You, Me, and the Violence (2017).
Accessibility
This theater is equipped with an induction loop that transmits directly to hearing aids with T-coils.
American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and live captioning is available for public programs upon request with two weeks’ advance notice. MoMA will make every effort to provide accommodation for requests made with less than two weeks’ notice. Please contact [email protected] to make a request for these accommodations.
The nearest all-gender restroom is located on floor T1.
Wheelchair accessible seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.
For more information on accessibility at MoMA, please visit moma.org/Visit/Accessibility.
The Adobe Foundation is proud to support equity, learning, and creativity at MoMA.
Access and Community Programs are supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).
Major funding is provided by Volkswagen of America, the Agnes Gund Education Endowment Fund for Public Programs, The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art Endowment for Educational Programs, the Jeanne Thayer Young Scholars Fund, and the Annual Education Fund.