Cheng, JoyceShaw, Samantha2021-04-272021-04-272021-04-27https://hdl.handle.net/1794/26190During its ninety-year history, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) has undergone four major architectural renovations, accrued a permanent collection of almost 200,000 works, mounted over 5,000 exhibitions, and constructed a vast archive of publications. Apart from these transformations, the museum’s curatorial mission over the decades attests to an effort in expanding its representation of modern art beyond the so- called Western canon. In brief, it went from exhibiting modern art’s relationship to non- European influences in the early twentieth century to orchestrating major interventions within its concentration of great Eurocentric canonical modern masterworks in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. To trace this effort historically and assess its success and failure, I will examine major MoMA curatorial endeavors since its founding in 1929, including William Rubin’s famous 1984 “‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity Between the Tribal and the Modern” exhibition and Glenn Lowry’s 2019 permanent museum collection reinstallation.en-USAll Rights Reserved.Electronic Thesis or Dissertation