PopRally is the MoMA's recent "happenings division."  Whatever that even means, we just made it up.  In any case, PopRally events have included Les Savy Fav, Paper Rad, Cory Arcangel, Doug Aitken, Cat Power... and much more are planned.

We headed uptown to talk with Margaret Raimondi and Eliza Ryan to see if they could explain how it happens to be that every few weeks the MoMA stays open late and lets us run loose amongst the art and artists.


Chief Magazine: How did PopRally come about initially? Was it a sole individual’s brainchild, or was it a sort of collaboration with the powers that be?

Margaret Raimondi: The powers that be definitely wanted to start an initiative to bring people in the post-college, pre-natal age group in the museum and basically set up a committee and said, “Have at it.” That was pretty much the only mandate. We had no restrictions otherwise, as far as what kind of event or how many a year. It was a great deal of free rein.

Eliza Ryan:  And basically they selected people from different departments they thought would add skills based on their interests as well as what they do with the museum, and really just told us to go from there.

There was that level of freedom from the start?

MR: Absolutely.

ER: We essentially were all put together in a room and given the go.

How many people are in PopRally? How many people run it?

ER: Margaret and I are the co-chairs of PopRally, we oversee all the events, but really every single person in PopRally is involved to some degree. Typically there are two people that lead an event, and they’ll be the people that lead interactions with the curator, artists, and performers.

MR: All in all, there’s about fourteen of us.

ER: It’s pretty small. It represents a lot of different departments, curatorial as well as other different departments in the museum, like marketing and sponsorship.

How long have you been doing it?

MR: About a year and a half. The first event we did was April 22nd, 2006, and it was a collaboration with Marcel Dzama. We showed some of his films, and there was music played by David Driver and a few other Broadway musicians, and there was a reading by a Hollywood actor. Do you remember his name?

ER: I do not. It was a very organic evening. It was fun, though. It was our first event and we weren’t really sure what to expect. Most of our events are pretty experimental.

MR: When we came together for PopRally, it was a lot of hashing out, like “What events do we like? What do we like to see? Where do we like to hang out?” We really tried to extract different strands and try to make it come together in all these different events.

ER: We meet officially as a committee, every two weeks, for about an hour or so. That’s an outstanding meeting. And on top of that, of course, depending on what event you’re working on, we’ll have meetings all the time.

How do you choose your projects? Is it a democratic process?

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MR: The greatest thing about PopRally is that it’s all collaborative, and so people will come with an idea and we try to tie everything to a MoMA or PS1 exhibition. Sometimes that always doesn’t happen, but that’s the idea... Like for Automatic Update, Cory Arcangel or Paper Rad was one of the artists, so two people on the committee were like “Let’s do something with this.”  And that’s how we started with the whole Paper Rad concert. A lot of it is just, “How can we make an exhibition a totally new and exciting experience for people in the community?”

ER: A lot of it’s working with the curator, of course. We want their approval before we do anything because it’s their show, and it’s great because we really work with curators as well as the artists, and a lot of times there’s an obvious music tie-in if we’re choosing to go that route. For example, our Doug Aitken event, Cat Power—Chan Marshall—was one of the characters in Sleepwalkers, his film, so it was kind of an obvious tie-in to work with her. Sometimes there are exhibitions that will really be appealing to this crowd that don’t have an obvious tie-in, and that forces us to be creative, which can be good as well, because you can basically bring in anything. It varies from event to event what we tie in and bring. It’s a lot of brainstorming.