Modern Artifacts

A compilation of the Modern Artifacts series that Esopus magazine ran with the Museum of Modern Art Archives from 2006 to 2019, reproducing documents from the museum's institutional record in facsimile.

Edited by Esopus founder Tod Lippy with Michelle Elligott, MoMA's Chief of Archives, Library, and Research Collections, the volume gathers all eighteen instalments of the series. Its contents run from planning documents for exhibitions that were never staged to pages from the museum's first guest book, each introduced by Elligott. Six artists, Mary Ellen Carroll, Rhea Karam, Mary Lum, Clifford Owens, Michael Rakowitz and Paul Ramirez Jonas, contributed new projects responding to particular holdings, many taking the form of removable inserts in keeping with the magazine's tactile approach to print. An introductory essay by Elligott and a foreword by Lippy open the book.

Esopus, founded by Lippy in 2003, published artists' projects, essays, fiction, interviews and music, each contribution produced in a format of its maker's choosing. Published by Esopus Books in 2020, Modern Artifacts was named among the best art books of the year by the New York Times.