The Museum of Modern Art presents Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, an exhibition that provides new insights into the interdisciplinary and lesser-known aspects of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank’s expansive career. On view until January 11, 2025, the exhibition delves into the six decades that followed Frank’s landmark photobook The Americans (1958) until his death in 2019, highlighting his perpetual experimentation and collaborations across various mediums. Coinciding with the centennial of his birth and taking its name from the artist’s 1980 film, Life Dances On explores Frank’s artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities. The exhibition features more than 200 objects, including photographs, films, books, and archival materials, drawn from MoMA’s extensive collection alongside significant loans. Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue is organized by Lucy Gallun, Curator, with Kaitlin Booher, Newhall Fellow, and Casey Li, 12 Month Intern, Department of Photography.
“This exhibition offers visitors a fresh perspective on this beloved and influential artist,” said Gallun. “The enormous impact of Frank’s book The Americans meant that he is often remembered as a solo photographer on a road trip, a Swiss artist making pictures of an America that he traversed as an outsider. And yet, in the six decades that followed, Frank continually forged new paths in his work, often in direct artistic conversation with others, and these contributions warrant closer attention. The pictures, films, and books he made in these years are evidence of Frank’s ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life, at once searing and tender.”
Organized loosely chronologically, Life Dances On focuses on the theme of dialogue in Frank’s work and reflect on the significance of individuals who shaped his outlook. Frank’s own words will be present throughout the exhibition—in the texts he scrawled directly onto his photographic negatives, in the spoken narrative accompanying his films, and in quotes woven into the exhibition catalogue published by MoMA in conjunction with the exhibition. Also revealed throughout the exhibition are Frank’s innovation across multiple mediums, from his first forays into filmmaking alongside other Beat Generation artists, with films such as Pull My Daisy (1959), to the artist’s books he called “visual diaries,” which he produced almost yearly over the last decade of his life.
