On a cold Saturday in January families and groups of friends turned up at the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Open Worlds 2026” launch celebration, despite an impending snowstorm.
The large white building along Astoria’s 35th Avenue started out as a Paramount studio where silent then early sound-era films were made. During WWII, the US Army took over the building to make training films for soldiers. It lay dormant through the 1970s, then since the 1980s has been home to the Museum of the Moving Image, or MOMI for short.
NYC 51 to 1 sat down with MOMI’s Executive Director Aziz Isham earlier in the month to hear about what makes the museum special, for the surrounding neighborhood and beyond.
Evolving with the times
In many ways we’re living in a world that is saturated with moving images. That makes the role of a museum that recounts the moving image’s history, explores its role in our lives and evolves with the times all the more important.
As Aziz says:
We are definitely a museum that’s having its moment right now. But from very early on…the original founder of the museum, Shelley Slovin, recognized that the moving image was beyond film and beyond TV. It was the first museum back in the 80s to have a museum show on video games. It was the first museum in the world to have a curator of digital art.
So we take the broad mandate of the moving image quite seriously, and we always have. It is obviously transforming and changing all the time. That’s why we have a lot of lab spaces here where we can incorporate new things, whether that’s video game design or 3D printing or VR and AR. We continue to provide community access to cutting edge technologies.
As MOMI’s “Dissolving Views” exhibit on them explains, a magic lantern “was essentially an early slide projector, using a light source and a lens to project images from transparent slides”.
Visitors on the rise
MOMI has seen increasing numbers of visitors since Isham became Executive Director in 2023. The museum’s “Open Worlds” programming is part of that effort.
We have basically converted a third of the museum to free entry. So every Thursday through Sunday, come in to the museum, there is always some programming on the ground floor, at the cafe, in the Fox amphitheater, or in the digital learning suite, or sometimes all of those spaces. Where people can have a completely unique experience and it’s totally free.
It could be a puppet workshop, it could be resume development, it could be…we had a whole day dedicated to looking at fungi through electron-scanning microscopes!…
On Thursdays from 2pm – 6pm, the whole museum is free admission.
Listening to New Yorkers
Another example of opening the museum up to New Yorkers – and harnessing the way that it sits at the intersection of the city’s physical built environment and the role of film – was when then Mayor-elect, now Mayor, Zohran Mamdani held a 12-hour listening session with New Yorkers on the ground floor. The session drew inspiration from performance artist Maria Abramovíc.
Each of the 140 participating New Yorkers had a 3-minute one-on-one audience with Mamdani.
That was a perfect example of the intersection between the moving image and civic engagement. Everything was videoed, everything was recorded. A lot of the clips found their way onto various social media sites and YouTube and streaming.
But it was also a situation where New Yorkers got one-on-one face time with the mayor in order to talk about what New York means to them and how they hope to play a role in the evolving pattern of the city.
Celebrating Jim Henson
Other stand-out moments for Aziz during the two years since he became Executive Director have included celebrations of the puppeteer and muppets-creator Jim Henson. The museum has a huge collection of objects from throughout Henson’s career. Among them are 47 puppets, including Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Rowlf and The Swedish Chef.
While the museum has long hosted Henson-related events, Aziz says that:
Over the past couple of years, something has really kind of shifted in the culture. Last year there were around 5,000 people from around the world here, many of them bringing their own homemade puppets and fan art and costumes. It went from like a single afternoon, to a full weekend extravaganza of Muppet fans and Muppet lovers.
The future of the arts in Queens
Momi shares its stretch of 35th Avenue with Kaufmann Astoria Studios, and Frank Sinatra School of the Arts. The area was officially designated as an arts district in 2014, but is still dotted with vacant buildings. Aziz says that “there is huge opportunity to covert a lot of that space into sculptural space, into civic engagement space”, helping the district to really take off.
Queens feels like it’s having a real moment right now. People are discovering some of our cultural offerings, sometimes for the first time. I think it’s really exciting to be here and to be a Queens-based cultural institution. I’m very optimistic about the future of arts in Queens.
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- Share your stories on NYC 51 to 1! We’re gathering New Yorkers’ meaningful buildings and places, and ideas for the future of their neighborhoods: submit yours here. (Other Queens examples are here).
- Read our story on another Queens museum, Lewis Latimer House in Flushing.
- And check out “I live here“: bringing together the words for “I live here” in the 140+ languages spoken in the borough.
- MOMI is a member of the “Cultural Institutions Group“, a group of almost 40 nonprofit museums, performing arts centers, historical societies, zoos and botanical gardens throughout the city.