MoMA Opens Taking Back Our Space, a Photography Survey of Bodies and Public Space

By Darren Smith, Arts Reporter
September 22, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art has put Marianne Wex back into the argument about who is allowed to occupy public space, and how the camera records that permission. Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives opened in the second-floor Paul J. Sachs Galleries on September 20, 2026, and the museum’s own installation captions and press header carry the run through May 2, 2027. The Art Newspaper’s September 21 report, published while the galleries were already live, is the immediate news peg: a landmark 1970s feminist photo-taxonomy is no longer sitting only in storage or in a catalogue footnote. It is the spine of a new collection exhibition that asks seven later photographers to answer Wex in the present tense.

MoMA’s press page describes the show as presenting eight artists who use photography to study the relationship between bodies and space from intersectional feminist perspectives. The historical core is Wex’s 1977 project Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, which the museum acquired in its entirety in 2018. Around that acquisition, the exhibition places recent works by Nona Faustine, Martine Gutierrez, K8 Hardy, Yuki Kihara, Joiri Minaya, Paulina Olowska, and Wendy Red Star. The press text is explicit that each of those contemporary works is on view at MoMA for the first time. The show is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Acting Chief Curator of Photography and the David Dechman Senior Curator, with Caitlin Ryan, Assistant Curator in the Department of Photography.

What opened this week — at a glance

• Title: Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives
• Venue: The Museum of Modern Art, Paul J. Sachs Galleries, second floor, New York
• Dates: September 20, 2026–May 2, 2027
• Anchor work: Marianne Wex’s 1977 photo-taxonomy, acquired entire in 2018
• Contemporary voices: seven artists, all showing the selected works at MoMA for the first time
• Organizers: Roxana Marcoci with Caitlin Ryan, Department of Photography

Wex, who lived from 1937 to 2020, photographed postures on the streets of Hamburg between 1972 and 1977, concentrating on arms, legs, heads, hands, and feet. The Art Newspaper, following the museum’s account, notes that she also drew on books, newspapers, advertisements, and film and television stills, then sorted the images by types of body language. MoMA’s collection record for the series currently lists 213 works online. Press-image captions on the museum’s exhibition page describe panels as gelatin silver prints, paper, and ink mounted on 277 boards, a figure that belongs to the object description rather than to a visitor-count claim. The useful fact for readers is institutional scale: this is not a single iconic print surrounded by wall text. It is a classificatory machine, built to show how women and men were trained to take up different amounts of room.

Key facts for readers and visitors

Fact	Detail	Source basis
On view	Sept. 20, 2026–May 2, 2027	MoMA press header; installation captions; Art Newspaper
Galleries	Paul J. Sachs Galleries, second floor	MoMA press page
Historical core	Wex, Let’s Take Back Our Space, 1977	MoMA press / collection
Acquisition	Entire project, 2018	MoMA press; Art Newspaper
Physical description	Prints mounted on 277 boards	MoMA press-image captions
Online collection	213 works listed from the series	MoMA collection record
Contemporary artists	Seven, first-time MoMA presentation of these works	MoMA press page
News peg	Art Newspaper feature, Sept. 21, 2026	theartnewspaper.com

Marcoci, speaking to The Art Newspaper, framed Wex as both a feminist landmark and a method that later artists can still use. “I was interested in the new conversations it could generate,” she said. “If Wex exposed the social production of gender through the choreography of the body in public space, the contemporary artists gathered here expand that inquiry through intersectional perspectives attentive to race, colonialism, Indigenous sovereignty, sexuality and self-representation.” That quote is reported speech from September 21, not a wall-label paraphrase invented for this desk. A second Marcoci line in the same article refuses the nostalgia trap: the exhibition is “not simply reaffirming Wex’s historical importance,” she said; it asks “what her project makes possible today.”

The contemporary checklist is not a decorative sequel. MoMA’s press images identify specific works now in the galleries, each already in the museum’s collection and each carrying a credit line that tells you how it entered. Wendy Red Star appears with Catalogue Number 1944.26 from the series Accession (2019), an inkjet print acquired through Christine A. Symchych and James P. McNulty. Joiri Minaya is represented by Wake (2022), a sixty-by-forty-inch inkjet print bought with the Photography Council Fund. K8 Hardy’s Position Series (2007–12, printed 2017) is a suite of fifty chromogenic prints, each thirty by twenty inches, acquired with support from the Fund for the Twenty-First Century and The Estate of Byron R. Meyer. Those numbers are object data, not marketing adjectives.

Works the museum has put on the record

• Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1944.26 from Accession, 2019 — archive logic turned into living Indigenous memory
• Joiri Minaya, Wake, 2022 — a large inkjet that, in the Art Newspaper’s account, pushes against exoticizing images of women and the Caribbean
• K8 Hardy, Position Series, 2007–12 — fifty prints that treat gender as something performed and restaged
• Paulina Olowska, Body Movement Alphabet Studies, 2007 — cut-and-taped printed paper, plastic sheet, and paint on fifteen sheets
• Nona Faustine, They Tagged The Land With Trophies and Institutions From Their Rapes and Conquests, Tweed Courthouse, NYC, 2013 — credited to the Nona Faustine Estate
• Martine Gutierrez, Body En Thrall, p. 120 from Indigenous Woman — a ninety-by-sixty-inch chromogenic print
• Yuki Kihara, Two Fa’afafine (after Gauguin) from Paradise Camp, 2020 — self-representation in place of a colonial gaze

Paulina Olowska’s Body Movement Alphabet Studies (2007) is described in the press caption as cut-and-taped printed paper, printed plastic sheet, and paint on fifteen sheets, with heights running from about 18¼ to 18⅝ inches and widths from about 24½ to 25¾ inches, a gift of the artist. The late Nona Faustine is present through They Tagged The Land With Trophies and Institutions From Their Rapes and Conquests, Tweed Courthouse, NYC (2013), an inkjet print whose credit line now reads © 2025 Nona Faustine Estate. The Art Newspaper’s September 21 artist note said Faustine used her body to mark sites of enslavement and racial violence. That is the paper’s characterization of a practice, not a new quotation from the artist.

Martine Gutierrez enters at spectacular scale: Body En Thrall, p. 120 from Indigenous Woman is a chromogenic print measuring 90 × 60 inches, acquired through the Fund for the Twenty-First Century. The Art Newspaper describes Gutierrez as collapsing the roles of artist, editor, model, and creative director in order to contest who is authorized to construct identity. Yuki Kihara’s Two Fa’afafine (after Gauguin) from the series Paradise Camp (2020) is a chromogenic print, about 37 by 28 inches, acquired with the Photography Council Fund. The same Art Newspaper recap says Kihara’s photographs of Indigenous Samoan fa’afafine models shift the narrative from a colonial gaze to self-representation. Those sentences should be read as attributed critical framing, not as MoMA wall text transcribed here.

A September 15 MoMA Magazine essay by Marcoci and Ryan, “A Curators’ Guide to Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives,” is the museum’s own pre-opening walk-through. The public abstract states that Wex categorized thousands of images by the positions of arms, legs, feet, hands, and heads, then pasted them onto more than 200 panels. The curators write that the contemporary artists “reappraise the relationships between contemporary bodies and public spaces from queer, decolonial, and feminist viewpoints,” and that many of the works treat “taking back space” as both a reclamation of physical territory and the power to represent oneself. The magazine page also points readers to a 2026 exhibition catalogue for fuller artist interviews. The press site confirms that catalogue with a published cover image and notes generous publication funding from The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

How to read the show without flattening it

• Start with Wex’s boards as a method, not as a period piece to be admired and left behind
• Use the seven later artists as arguments, not as a diversity appendix
• Keep estate and acquisition credits visible: Faustine is present as an estate; Wex as a completed 1977 project
• Treat The Art Newspaper’s September 21 feature as opening-week criticism, not as a substitute for MoMA’s object list
• Check moma.org for tickets, hours, and any gallery rotation before traveling; this desk is not reprinting admission prices

Leadership support, according to the museum’s press page, comes from the William Randolph Hearst Endowment Fund for Photography and The Marion Silverstein Slain Fund, with additional funding from the Anne Levy Charitable Trust and the Annual Exhibition Fund. Those lines matter only as proof that this is a collection exhibition with named institutional backing, not a pop-up timed to a fair week. The more durable news is curatorial: MoMA waited eight years after buying Wex whole, then opened a long-running photography hang that refuses to treat 1977 as a closed case. For ArtChain readers, the verified story this morning is simple and large enough. A Hamburg street taxonomy is on the wall in midtown, seven later photographers are answering it in public, and the museum has given the conversation a run that lasts into next May.