How Merchery turned MoMA PS1’s 50th anniversary into merch worth keeping

For its 50th anniversary, contemporary art institution MoMA PS1 turned to Merchery to produce a custom merchandise collection, built as an extension of the anniversary identity designed by PORTO ROCHA. Founded in 1976 in Long Island City and affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1 has rarely produced merchandise that expresses its own identity rather than supporting one of its exhibitions. Merchery sources and personalises premium products and runs bespoke projects, with clients ranging from Netflix and Uber to Pentagram – making them the perfect partner for this project. Merchery started the process from the identity itself. “We did not start with a fixed list of products and then look for places to add the artwork,” explains Michael Lindberg, Project Manager at Merchery, who led the collaboration on the sales and project management side. “We started with the colours, the scale of the graphics and the overall energy, and thought about which objects could carry that properly.” The ambition was to create a collection worthy of the iconic institution – designed to be kept and true to PORTO ROCHA’s ‘PS1 is Your Place’ concept. “People have been asking for it for years,” adds Molly Kurzius, Chief of External Affairs at MoMA PS1, who saw the anniversary as the right moment “to create something lasting.” Where Merchery’s extensive catalogue was already suitable, the team opted to utilise products from it. The caps worked as they were and could be adapted through embroidery, and the Ciklo pens – locally made in Quebec from post-consumer recycled plastic – already had the right design and quality. The catalogue, however, didn’t immediately align on colour. “It was such a big part of the new identity that using standard stock colours would have weakened the result,” Lindberg notes, so the tote bags, water bottles and notebooks were developed from scratch with a partner factory and Pantone-matched for control over their materials, colours and finish. Consistency was the hard part: the same Pantone reference looks different on cotton, paper, metal or a coated surface, so each product was handled separately, worked through with the factories over samples and colour matching. The tote bags proved the most demanding, with both the bags and their large full-bleed prints being custom matched.