The Museum of Modern Art is closing its Marcel Duchamp retrospective on Sunday, August 23, and the entire final day belongs to members. MoMA calls it Last Look: Marcel Duchamp, and according to the membership emails the museum sent out, it runs from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at MoMA’s building at 11 West 53 Street in Manhattan.
Here’s the catch, and it’s the whole point: the last day of every major exhibition at MoMA is reserved just for members. If you were planning to walk in off the street on August 23 to catch Duchamp before it’s gone, you can’t. You need a membership to get in that day.
The show itself is a big one. It traces nearly seven decades of Marcel Duchamp’s practice and features more than 300 artworks, according to MoMA. Even if you’ve already seen it, the museum says the exhibition “always contains more to be revealed.”
MoMA leaned on the Duchamp connection for member programming all month. Earlier in August the museum held a members-only game night built around Duchamp’s passion for chess, with chess, backgammon, puzzles and trivia. The retrospective includes work like his Rotorelief optical disks, the spinning printed cardboard discs he made in the 1930s, per the artwork credits in MoMA’s emails.
If you’re already a member and you’re spending the day there, the Duchamp show isn’t the only thing on the walls. MoMA’s current lineup includes It’s Alive! A Century of Animation from the Collection in the theater galleries, plus two second-floor contemporary displays: Refractions, a cross-media mix of sculpture, textile, photography and painting, and The Last Supper, which pairs Andy Warhol and Félix González-Torres around consumption, loss and desire. On the third floor, Frida and Diego: The Last Dream and Architects of Liberation are both still up.
Not a member yet and want in before August 23? MoMA sells memberships through its membership page, and members can lock in their Duchamp send-off at the museum’s Last Look event page.
Featured image: Courtesy moma.org
