A Century of Animation at the Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art in New York opened It's Alive! A Century of Animation from the Collection on August 1, 2026. With work by more than 35 artists and filmmakers, it covers over a hundred years of the form. The exhibition centres on New York and how the city stayed a hub for animation. Felix the Cat, Koko the Clown and Gertie the Dinosaur show how much character-based animation mattered in the silent era, from the 1890s to the 1920s, and the hand-drawn work of Otto Messmer, Dave Fleischer and Winsor McCay is where it started. Later decades, in work by Isadore Sparber, Mary Beams, Kathy Rose, Tissa David and David Ehrlich, show that black-and-white line drawing stayed a living style right through the predigital period. Colour arrived in the 1930s, and John Hubley's modernisation of animation design in the 1950s, a response to the classical Disney style, shaped independent artists for decades after. Jane Aaron, John Canemaker, Faith and Emily Hubley, George Griffin, Candy Kugel, Jeff Scher and Michael Sporn all lived in New York and split their work between public television, MTV and their own films, a mix that became a force in popular culture. The exhibition was organised by Ron Magliozzi, curator in the museum's Department of Film, and runs into the summer of 2027 at the Debra and Leon Black Family Film Center. Read more: https://press.moma.org/film-media/itsalive/

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