The building dates to 1892 as Long Island City's first public school, closed in 1963, and reopened in 1976 as an Institute for Art and Urban Resources project, taking the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center name after its 1997 renovation and formally affiliating with MoMA in 2000.
Galleries are laid out room by room through old classrooms and stairwells, and the courtyard turns into a dance-music venue for the Warm Up series on summer Fridays.
Alanna Heiss founded the organization behind PS1 in 1971 as the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, on a premise that was as much about property as about art: New York had empty buildings and artists had nowhere to work. The Institute put exhibitions into disused city stock, and in 1976 it took on an abandoned school in Long Island City. The opening show, Rooms, handed 78 artists the run of the place to make work in situ, and it set the pattern the institution has kept since — art made for the building rather than delivered to it.
That history is why a visit here feels unlike a museum visit. The Romanesque Revival building dates from 1892 and served as Long Island City’s first public school until it closed in 1963; the renovation by Frederick Fisher and Partners, which reopened the center in October 1997, left the plan legible. You move room by room along corridors, up institutional staircases, into small chambers and down below ground. Shows are hung to suit each odd space rather than a long neutral wall, so the same exhibition can feel intimate in one room and unmanageable in the next.
The affiliation with the Museum of Modern Art was announced in 1999 and completed the following year; the name became MoMA PS1 in 2010. The program stayed the experimental end of the arrangement. Greater New York, begun in 2000, is a periodic survey of artists working in and around the city, and in summer the concrete courtyard becomes a dance-music venue for the Warm Up series.
Admission is the practical headline. From the start of 2026 through the end of 2028, entry is free to everyone, funded by a gift from the collector Sonya Yu and timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the 1976 opening; before that, only New York residents got in without paying.
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101 · Official site ↗
MoMA PS1 is a contemporary art museum at 22-01 Jackson Avenue in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, in New York City, United States. In addition to its exhibitions, the institution organizes the Sunday Sessions performance series, the Warm Up summer music series, and the Young Architects Program with the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA PS1 has been affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art since January 2000 and, as of 2013, had about 200,000 visitors a year.
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