Which New York museum displays Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 emoji work?

The Museum of Modern Art displays Shigetaka Kurita’s 1999 emoji work. MoMA added Kurita’s original set of 176 pictograms to its collection in 2016 and presented it in the exhibition “Inbox: The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita.”

Kurita designed the set for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile internet service in Japan. Each symbol was built on a tiny 12-by-12-pixel grid, with ideas drawn from manga, weather symbols, street signs and Chinese characters. The designs helped establish the visual language now associated with emoji.

A common mix-up is calling Kurita the sole inventor of all emoji. Earlier graphic symbols existed, and today’s emoji are standardized through Unicode and rendered differently by Apple, Google and other platforms. Kurita’s 1999 set is historically important because it helped popularize a coherent, mobile-friendly pictogram system.