Museum of Biblical Art (Manhattan)
The Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA) was a non-collecting institution dedicated to exploration of the Bible's legacy in Jewish and Christian art. Started in 1997 as an art gallery at the American Bible Society building in New York, the museum became an independent entity on May 12, 2005.
The museum aimed to become a nationally recognized center of expertise on art and the Bible, while maintaining a secular distance from its subject. Although it grew out of the American Bible Society and was subsidized by that organization, it was not a religious institution and took no stand on religion itself. Rather, MOBIA hoped to open dialogue on a subject it considered under-explored, the influence of religion on art, by providing exhibits and educational programs to visitors.
In April 2015, the museum announced it would be closing in June after failing to find a new space. The institution had been paying only $1 in rent on its space in the headquarters of the American Bible Society, but the latter's impending move to Philadelphia made the continuation of that arrangement impossible.
The Museum of Biblical Art was located on the second floor of the American Bible Society's headquarters building at the corner of Broadway and 61st Street, between Columbus Circle and Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York. The main 2,500-square-foot (230 m2) exhibition space was created after extensive renovation, and the museum also included an 1,100-square-foot (100 m2) education center for lectures, concerts, and children's activities. Principal architects were Randall Goya and Sara Lopergolo, of G&L Architects of New York.
In 2015, due to the intention of the American Bible Society to sell their New York building and move to Philadelphia, MOBIA announced that it was seeking a new location, but the search was unsuccessful and the museum closed permanently on June 14, 2015.
The Museum of Biblical Art presented four exhibitions per year which highlight the changing relationship of faith — whether express, implied, or absent — to art.
MOBIA's first exhibition was "Coming Home!: Self-taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South", featuring ninety-five works by seventy-three artists. The exhibit explored the way the Bible, in the context of evangelical Christianity, has influenced the subject matter, meaning and function of art made by Southern self-taught artists.
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