"Every movement counts": curating dance at the Museum of Modern Art

This thesis examines a series of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York that took the medium of dance as a primary focus. Through a series of case studies, this study considers the historical failure to integrate the medium into the museum at large, despite efforts to do so in the 1940s. Turning to the present day, this thesis explores the Museums concerted effort since 2009 to reconsider the contributions that dance makes to both historical understandings of art history and present-day museological interventions. Two exhibitions, On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century (2011) and Some Sweet Day (2012), offer potential methods for making MoMA a dancing museum and, as this thesis argues, set the stage for a bloom of scholarship and still more radical programming, which work together to question and remake the relationship between the medium of dance and the museum institution.