Museum of American Art (MoAA), which opened in Berlin (Stalinallee 91) in 2004, is an educational institution dedicated to assembling, preserving and exhibiting memories of 20th century modern art. Its major focus is on exhibitions of American modern art organised by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and travelling through Western Europe during the Cold War. Those exhibitions helped to establish a common cultural post-war identity based on individualism, internationalism and modernism.
In addition to the permanent installation in Berlin, the Museum of American Art holds several collections such as Savremena umetnost u SAD/Modern Art in the USA (2006). The theme of this particular collection refers to a touring exhibition organised by MoMA New York, which arrived in the Yugoslav capital Belgrade in 1956.
The collection Savremena umetnost u SAD/Modern Art in the USA thematises the conditions of the reception of US exhibitions of modern art in the specific political context of socialist Yugoslavia, with its relatively liberal system, open borders and free circulation of cultural contacts. MoAA can be seen as an attempt to re-remember crucial achievements of modern art and to retell art history against the backdrop of subjective and political interests. Underlying the highly political aspects of a seemingly neutral project of Western modernism, MoAA argues for more complex readings of the wider front of the Cold War cultural epoch. By taking up the long cultural and historical ties between Belgrade and İstanbul, this presentation of the collection of MoAA provides impulses for a future MoAA İstanbul.