There is a museum in Long Island City called PS1, which is a contemporary art museum in an abandoned, possibly haunted school. The art there (like all contemporary art) is generally hit or miss, but usually at a slightly higher hit rate than most other contemporary art museums out there. PS1 eventually became MoMA PS1, and to celebrate the takeover, MoMA PS1 started the Young Architects Program, which introduced a new, usually interesting and sometimes great temporary pavilion in the courtyard where their Saturday summer dance party series Warm Up took place. I did not see every pavilion that MoMA PS1 ever offered, but I did see the last seventeen of them, which you can see in this slideshow,

As 2020 started, MoMA PS1 announced a pause on the Young Architects Program, a real shame and something which made me fear early on that 2020 wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as 2019. Now I’m not specifically blaming MoMA PS1 for the shut down and worldwide pandemic that followed, but what I am saying is that both at the time and in retrospect, it definitely felt like a harbinger, bad, bad, bad harbinger of things to come.

Summer 2019

The last of the MoMA PS1 YAP Warm Up pavilions was Horama Rama by Pedro & Juana, and it sat over most of the courtyard while keeping its distance from the Warm Up stage. I watched Warm Up develop from a fun dance party attended mostly by people who never normally saw the sunlight into a big time event that was sometimes hard (even as a MoMA member) to get tickets to. Because of that, I skipped the Saturday afternoon summer dance party crows and only saw this one on a quiet Sunday, which might affect my opinion about it. That opinion is that this pavilion was ok. I liked the wood planks from the outside, but the inside where it was supposed to feel like a lush forest with an actual working waterfall was nice in the model/renderings but disappointing in its execution.