Folk, Modern, and Facade: MoMA and the Afterlife of the American Folk Art Museum Building

September 8, 2026

Left: David Shankbone, American Folk Art Museum, 2006

Right: Ajay Suresh, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 2021

By Sam Brady-Myerov

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) absorbs nearly an entire Midtown block in glass, steel, and stone. Although New York City architecture is often defined by height, MoMA is notable for its length. The museum stretches from the Peggy and David Rockefeller Building to the west to the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building to the east, with the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at its center.^[1] In 2019, MoMA opened its most recent expansion, spreading westward into the lower floors of the neighboring skyscraper 53 West 53. Crucially, the expansion also occupied the former site of the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM), which had stood in between.^[2]

This summer, MoMA opened American Folk Art: Revisiting the Collection of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. The show, which runs through August 9, highlights MoMA’s role in advancing “a new understanding of folk art as integral to a modern American art history.”^[3] Read against the history of the site, however, the exhibition becomes a marker on the grave of the American Folk Art Museum, reopening the story of how its celebrated building was designed, demolished, and packed away in pieces.

An Idiosyncratic Home

When MoMA purchased and subsequently demolished the American Folk Art Museum, the building was barely twelve years old. Founded in 1961, AFAM was dedicated to the “creativity of individuals whose singular talents have been refined largely through personal experience rather than formal artistic training.”^[4] In its early years, the museum rented exhibition space in Midtown before purchasing its first property on West 53rd Street in 1979. In 1997, AFAM hired Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects to design a permanent building combining its two townhouses at 45 and 47 West 53rd Street.^[5]

The resulting eight-story building was only forty feet wide and one hundred feet long, yet contained permanent and temporary exhibition spaces, a small café, an auditorium, classrooms, and the museum’s library, archives, and offices.^[6] The architects called it “an idiosyncratic home for idiosyncratic art.”^[7] Given the narrow site, Williams and Tsien built niches into the walls, allowing the museum to display objects beyond its designated galleries.^[8]

But the most notable feature of AFAM’s former building was its facade. The museum was surrounded on three sides by MoMA: the Peggy and David Rockefeller Building stood to its right and behind, while the planned 53 West 53 expansion bordered it to the left. Williams and Tsien thus approached the facade as a statement of AFAM’s institutional independence.^[9] Through its facade, the museum boldly displayed its visual identity and asserted its autonomy from an ever-encroaching neighbor.

In direct opposition to MoMA’s “International Style” of modern glass-and-steel architecture,^[10] Williams and Tsien designed sixty-three textured tombasil panels made from a white bronze alloy.^[11] The panels were fabricated by Polich Tallix, a fine-arts foundry in Beacon, New York, known for its work on the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero and collaborations with Jeff Koons on his Balloon Dog sculptures.^[12] For AFAM’s facade, the foundry poured molten metal into sand molds that echoed the textured concrete of its own floors.^[13] The panel’s labor-intensive fabrication sought to embody the handmade ethos of folk art. Once installed, the irregular, worked surface was said to resemble a lava flow or lunar landscape as it shifted in the sunlight.^[14] Williams and Tsien also arranged the panels vertically to evoke an abstract open hand. Each crevice was as distinct as the creases of a palm, while a large vein rose through the facade and forked near the top like the head, heart, and life lines on a hand.^[15]

A little over a decade after its opening, burdened by mounting debt following the decline in tourism after the September 11 attacks and the 2008 recession, AFAM was forced to sell its home. At the center of its financial difficulties was the $32 million loan it had taken out to commission the building, compounded by a subsequent revenue shortfall.^[16] AFAM defaulted on its loan and, in 2011, permanently lost its West 53rd location. Today, the museum continues to operate from a much smaller location in Lincoln Square on West 66th Street.^[17]

Museum No More

MoMA quickly purchased the AFAM building, “completing” its campus with a fifth connected structure on the city block.^[18] With full ownership of the building and its architecture, MoMA removed the exterior panels and demolished the interior, eventually integrating the site into its 2019 renovation. In early 2014, The New York Times reported that wrecking crews had ripped the bronze panels from the facade and thrown them into large dumpsters.^[19]

Despite outcry from architects and preservationists, MoMA concluded that retaining the former folk-art museum was impossible. According to Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architectural firm responsible for MoMA’s 2019 redesign, AFAM’s floors did not align with MoMA’s because the building was set farther back than the surrounding structures. Its solid facade also disrupted the museum’s glass-and-steel modernist aesthetic.^[20] Williams and Tsien had created a bespoke building, designed specifically for the scale and character of AFAM’s collection. It received numerous awards, including the 2003 American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Architecture and World Architecture magazine’s 2002 Best New Building in the World.^[21] But it was this architectural independence, reflected in its unique commitment to interior function and exterior visual statement, that ultimately doomed it to destruction.

The circumstances surrounding AFAM’s razing expose a complex conflict between architectural value, practical use, and the limits of legal protection. On one hand, MoMA demolished an award-winning building by prominent American architects only twelve years after its completion. On the other, the building was so specifically designed that it could not be adapted and was too young to qualify for preservation protections. Due to practical function and public visibility, architecture and building facades occupy a significantly different legal landscape from other art forms. These differences help explain why a building like AFAM, itself a monumental work of American artistic expression, could be destroyed without the law’s protection.

In 1990, the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act (AWCP)—an amendment to the Copyright Act passed alongside the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA)—extended copyright protection beyond architectural drawings to constructed architectural works.^[22] Architects retain copyright over elements including a building’s overall design, form, and spatial arrangement. Once construction is complete, however, property ownership almost always outweighs an architect’s creative rights.^[23] While the VARA attempts to balance the interests of artists and owners, AWCP gives building owners broad discretion to alter or destroy architectural works regardless of copyright.^[24]

Historic-preservation law was also unable to offer the AFAM building any protections. To qualify under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, a property generally must be considered both “historic” and “significant”: at least fifty years old and associated with an important activity or development of the past.^[25] In New York City, a building must be at least thirty years old and possess historical or architectural merit, as determined by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.^[26] At only twelve years old, the AFAM building failed to meet either threshold.

Room for Folk Art

Many who opposed the building’s destruction pointed to possibilities for its partial preservation or reuse in MoMA’s expansion, particularly through the exterior panels.^[27] Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architecture studio responsible for MoMA’s 2019 expansion, was no stranger to architectural preservation or adaptive reuse. Most notably, the studio designed New York’s High Line, transforming a decaying urban rail track into an elevated public park.^[28] Yet the same firm concluded that the remnants of AFAM could not be incorporated into MoMA’s growth.

Today, the building survives only through its sixty-three facade panels, held somewhere within MoMA’s storage facilities. Since their removal in 2014, MoMA has announced no plans to display them or reconstruct any part of the former building.^[29] MoMA may have possessed the right to dismantle the building, but by burying its panels in storage, it has left both their future and the history they carry unresolved.

Contributing to the debate in 2014, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University, argued that preserving AFAM was less a matter of defining rights than of considering responsibility.^[30] In the hands of museums, that responsibility concerns not only safeguarding the past, but curating the image of the future. Museums shape that image through what they preserve and display, both inside their galleries and on their exterior walls, as well as in what they remove from public view and place on pedestals.

MoMA’s 2026 folk art exhibition forces the museum’s own entangled architectural history into the present. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s vibrant collection of folk art has been brought out of the museum vault and into the light, sparkling under museum-grade glass alongside wall text celebrating MoMA’s commitment to the art form. The gallery walls are painted a deep brown, distinguishing the exhibition from the white-walled spaces traditionally associated with “high” art and reflecting folk art’s outsider position. Yet, on closer inspection, their bronzy color becomes a ghostly echo of the facade that once faced outward from this very site. As MoMA celebrates the handmade character of folk art within its galleries, the hand-cast facade created to embody those same values remains buried deep underground.

About the Author

Sam Brady-Myerov (Center for Art Law Summer 2026 Graduate Intern) is a second-year master’s student in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art (HTC) program at MIT. She earned her B.A. in Art History and Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis in 2025 and was awarded a Fulbright Research/Open Study Award to Brazil. Her work focuses on urban decoration and the negotiations through which artists, public and private actors, and architects shape shared visual spaces.

Suggested Readings

1. Visit the American Folk Art Museum at its West 66th Street location, open Wednesday through Sunday. Admission is always free. Learn more on the museum’s website here.
2. Visit the Museum of Modern Art to see American Folk Art: Revisiting the Collection of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller before the exhibition closes on August 9, 2026. Find tickets here.
3. Read Valuing Architecture: Heritage and the Economics of Culture (2020). Chapter 7, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury’s “On the Architecture of the Late-Capitalist Museum: The Museum of Modern Art and the Demolition of the American Folk Art Museum,” was referenced in this article, but the whole book offers a fascinating look at debates over the economics and cultural value of architecture.
4. Explore out #FolkMoMA, a 2014 Tumblr project that collected creative, often humorous proposals for saving the American Folk Art Museum building.
5. Check out Rem Koolhaas’s Preservation Is Overtaking Us, available online here. The book brings together two lectures Koolhaas delivered at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Koolhaas also participated in MoMA’s invited 1997 design competition for one of the museum’s many expansions.

Select References

1. Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern Art History, MoMA (2026), available at https://www.moma.org/about/mission-statement/history. ↑
2. Sydney Franklin, MoMA reopens with a $450 million mega-expansion and slick renovation, The Architect’s Newspaper (Oct. 16, 2019), available at https://www.archpaper.com/2019/10/moma-reopens/. ↑
3. Museum of Modern Art, American Folk Art: Revisiting the Collection of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, MoMA, New York, N.Y. (June 13–Aug. 9, 2026), available at https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5919 . ↑
4. American Folk Art Museum, About Us, American Folk Art Museum (2026), available at https://folkartmuseum.org/about/. ↑
5. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, On the Architecture of the Late-Capitalist Museum: The Museum of Modern Art and the Demolition of the American Folk Art Museum, in Valuing Architecture: Heritage and the Economics of Culture, Ashley Paine, Susan Holden & John Macarthur eds., Valiz (2020). ↑
6. Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, American Folk Art Museum, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (2001), available at https://twbta.com/work/cultural/american-folk-art-museum/. ↑
7. Id. ↑
8. Id. ↑
9. Id. ↑
10. Merwood-Salisbury, On the Architecture of the Late-Capitalist Museum, supra note 5. ↑
11. GBH Forum Network, American Folk Art Museum, GBH (2008), available at https://www.wgbh.org/forum-network/partners/american-folk-art-museum. ↑
12. Masterworks Fine Art, Tallix Foundry Biography, Masterworks Fine Art, available at https://www.masterworksfineart.com/bio/tallix-foundry. ↑
13. Williams and Tsien, American Folk Art Museum, supra note 6. ↑
14. GBH Forum Network, American Folk Art Museum, supra note 10. ↑
15. Williams and Tsien, American Folk Art Museum, supra note 6. ↑
16. Holland Cotter, Will the Renovated MoMA Let Folk Art Back In?, New York Times (June 6, 2019), available at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/arts/design/moma-folkart.html. ↑
17. American Folk Art Museum, About Us, supra note 4. ↑
18. Robin Pogrebin, 12-Year-Old Building at MoMA Is Doomed, New York Times (Apr. 10, 2013), available at https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/arts/design/moma-to-raze-ex-american-folk-art-museum-building.html?eafs_enabled=false. ↑
19. David W. Dunlap, Folk Art Building May Be Lost, but Facade Will Live: In Storage Someplace, New York Times (Feb. 12, 2014), available at https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/nyregion/folk-art-building-will-be-demolished-but-its-facade-will-live-on.html. ↑
20. Pogrebin, 12-Year-Old Building at MoMA Is Doomed, supra note 17. ↑
21. Williams and Tsien, American Folk Art Museum, supra note 6. ↑
22. Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act, H.R. 3990, 101st Cong. (1990). ↑
23. Jane C. Ginsburg, Copyright in the 101st Congress: Commentary on the Visual Artists Rights Act and the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act of 1990, 14 COLUM.-VLA J. L. & ARTS 477 (1990), available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/3735. ↑
24. Id. ↑
25. National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places: How to List a Property, National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior (Sept. 10, 2025), available at https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/how-to-list-a-property.htm. ↑
26. New York Preservation Archive Project, New York City Landmarks Law, New York Preservation Archive Project, available at https://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/new-york-city-landmarks-law/. ↑
27. Dunlap, Folk Art Building May Be Lost, supra note 18. ↑
28. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, The High Line, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (2019), available at https://dsrny.com/project/the-high-line. ↑
29. Dunlap, Folk Art Building May Be Lost, supra note 18. ↑
30. Jorge Otero-Pailos, Preservation and MoMA’s Proposed Expansion, Artforum (Apr. 2014), available at https://www.artforum.com/columns/preservation-and-momas-proposed-expansion-219727/. ↑