Tonight at 8 p.m., the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art turns into an open-air movie theater for the first night of this summer's Wednesday screening series, opening with Mira Nair's 1991 romance Mississippi Masala. Nair and the film's star, Sarita Choudhury, are on hand in Midtown Manhattan to introduce the picture.
Three Wednesday Nights Under the Stars
The screening kicks off "Film in the Sculpture Garden," MoMA's outdoor series that Time Out detailed as running three Wednesday nights this summer, mixing genre classics, restorations, and documentaries under the open sky.
A Ugandan Family's Story Opens the Season
Mississippi Masala stars Denzel Washington as Demetrius, an African American carpet cleaner, and Choudhury as Mina, whose Ugandan Indian family was expelled from Uganda in 1972 and settled in the American South, the outlet reports. Mina falls for Demetrius in a story set largely in Mississippi.
Salsa Icons and a French Port Town Round Out the Lineup
Later this month, on August 19, the series continues with Leon Gast's 1972 documentary Our Latin Thing, which captures the Fania All-Stars performing at Manhattan's Cheetah nightclub and is widely credited with helping popularize salsa music globally, according to the same report.
The season closes September 2 with Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre, a 2011 French-language drama set in the title port city that follows an aging shoeshiner who encounters a young undocumented immigrant hiding from police. The film won the FIPRESCI Critics Prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, the outlet notes.
The Garden's History as an Outdoor Gallery
The garden itself carries its own history: architect Philip Johnson redesigned the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden in 1953 as a "roofless room," introducing marble-paved plazas, fountain pools, and seasonal plantings, according to the Museum of Modern Art. The garden originally opened in 1939, before Johnson's redesign gave it its current layout.
Moviegoers this summer are also sharing the garden with French artist Pierre Huyghe's AI installation UUmwelt, on view from July 1 through November 29, which projects neural network interpretations of brain scan data onto freestanding screens that shift in real time as viewers watch, the museum says. It's not the first time MoMA has turned the space into a stage for experimental programming — the garden hosted a 2021 retrospective evening with filmmaker Ken Jacobs and a 2024 tribute to artist David Wojnarowicz.
Tickets, Sponsorship, and a Free Alternative Across the River
The series is underwritten by Chanel, the luxury fashion house that expanded its partnership with the museum in 2020 to become lead sponsor of MoMA's film programming, including its Annual Film Fund, the museum says. That support flows into a department with deep roots: MoMA's Department of Film was founded in 1935 as the Film Library under founding director Alfred Barr Jr. and curator Iris Barry, and now holds more than 30,000 films and 1.5 million stills.
General admission to MoMA's Midtown campus costs $30 for adults, $22 for seniors 65 and older, and $17 for full-time students, with visitors 16 and under admitted free, according to the Museum of Modern Art. New York State residents can also get in free on Friday evenings.
Across the river, MoMA's contemporary satellite MoMA PS1 in Queens has taken a different approach: a donor gift eliminated admission fees for all visitors from 2026 through 2028, as Hyperallergic reported during the venue's 50th-anniversary run-up.
