The Libeskind design is unusual within the Studio Libeskind catalog. At 3,100 square meters of floor area and 17 meters tall, MO is one of the smallest projects the firm has built. Libeskind has said it is also one of his favorites, and it contains his first use of a circular form - the spiral staircase that anchors the interior and that visitors photograph more than any other feature. The siting was deliberate: the building sits between Vilnius's medieval Old Town and the New Town that grew up in the 18th century, and it was conceived as a symbolic gateway between those two epochs of the city. A time capsule was buried under the foundations at the construction kickoff in 2009. Italian news agency ANSA included MO in its top ten 21st-century museums to visit. The Lithuanian architecture studio Do Architects served as local partner.

The art inside tracks something that older state museums could not, or would not, document fully. The MO collection focuses on Lithuanian work from the 1950s onward - the period when the Stalin era ended and a slow, partial cultural liberation began under Soviet rule. The core is painting, with works by approximately 250 artists, beginning with the modern interwar masters Antanas Gudaitis, Leonas Katinas, and Algirdas Petrulis. The collection moves through the colorful, decorative, deliberately counter-social-realist painting of the 1970s by Jonas Svazas, Vincas Kisarauskas and others; the neo-expressionist work of the 1980s by Antanas Martinaitis, Algimantas Jonas Kuras, and Kostas Dereskevicius; the abstraction of Linas Katinas, Eugenijus Cukermanas, and Laima Drazdauskaite. Work by Stasys Eidrigevicius, the Lithuanian poster artist who built an international career from Warsaw, is also held. The newer painting includes neo-expressionist, neoromantic, neo-academicist, and conceptual realist work, much by artists in their 30s and 40s.

The graphics and photography holdings include the humanist street and rural photography of Antanas Sutkus, Aleksandras Macijauskas, and Romualdas Rakauskas - the so-called Lithuanian school whose 1960s and 1970s work earned international recognition for its intimate, dignified portraits of Soviet-era Lithuanian life. Later photographers including Alfonsas Budvytis and Vytautas Balcytis carry the documentation forward. The video art collection ranges from the social-realist documentary mode of Arturas Raila and Robertas Antinis to the surrealist-personal work of Jurga Barilaite and the duo Svajone and Paulius Stanikai. The sculpture holdings include work by Petras Mazura, Mindaugas Navakas, and Gediminas Akstinas. A separate young artists section features Andrius Zakarauskas, Linas Jusionis, Adomas Danusevicius, Egle Karpaviciute, and others working today.

MO is unusual for taking the city as part of its program rather than treating exhibitions as the only output. The Literatu Street project, in collaboration with curator Egle Vertelkaite and over 100 artists, installed more than 200 small art plates along the wall of Literatu Street in the Old Town - each plate dedicated to a Lithuanian writer or literary work, turning a quiet medieval lane into an open-air anthology of national literature. The Vilnius Talking Statues project, launched in 2015, made 15 of the city's monuments interactive: visitors can use their phones to hear scripts written by famous Lithuanian writers and voiced by professional actors, turning Vilnius into the fourth city in an international Talking Statues network alongside New York and Copenhagen. From above, MO appears as a low, white, slightly cantilevered geometric shape pressed between the older buildings of central Vilnius - a 21st-century intervention of unusual restraint, by an architect more often associated with sharp angles than with quiet ones.