One of New York’s most important museums, the Museum of Modern Art, is only eight blocks directly north of Shimmie Horn’s Iroquois Hotel. MoMA is located at 11 West 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
If you are going to be staying at the Iroquois within the next few weeks, there are several noteworthy exhibits which are certainly worth the ten minute walk over to MoMA. One such showing is “Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art” which will be on exhibit now through May 14, 2012.
In 1931 MoMA brought the renowned muralist Diego Rivera from Mexico to New York, where he created five “portable murals” especially for the museum during the six weeks before the opening of the show. The murals dealt with Mexican themes of revolution and class. During the exhibition itself he produced three more murals, dealing with New York subjects and presenting them with monumental images of the urban working class and the terrible social gap which existed in the city during the Great Depression. All eight pieces were on display for the remainder of the run of the show, and Rivera’s work, “Agrarian Leader Zapata” is one of MoMA’s iconic pieces of their vast collection.
MoMA is presenting the murals together again for the first time in 80 years, and adding much more to the show. If you are staying at Shimmie Horn’s Iroquois, you owe it to yourself to see and admire these fine artworks.