MoMA - The Modern Window: Pao Houa Her
Sat, Nov 01
|MoMA
A homeland remembered, reimagined. The Modern Window by Pao Houa Her explores memory, migration, and the landscapes of longing at MoMA.
Time & Location
Nov 01, 2025, 7:00 AM – Sep 30, 2026, 11:00 PM
MoMA, 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA
About the event
November 1, 2024 – Fall 2025
MoMA – The Modern Window Installation
Visit MoMA.org
In The Modern Window, photographer Pao Houa Her transforms a museum’s façade into a meditation on memory, migration, and the spectral traces of home. Born in Laos and raised in Minnesota among Hmong refugees, Her creates haunting photographs that trace the fragmented memories of a journey few could survive—let alone remember.
Her’s installation revisits the harrowing path her family took through the Laotian jungle in 1983 to escape persecution during the Laotian Civil War. Using Google Maps, Her retraced that clandestine route, photographing landscapes that seem serene but carry unspoken trauma. These are the spaces where her family once hid—now captured as quiet, green stillnesses layered with the weight of history.
In one photo, poppies from her mother’s garden in Minnesota are overlaid on the jungle terrain—linking past and present, memory and myth. Among the Hmong, the…