The Courtyard Commission series is a major new program that invites an artist to transform the museum’s courtyard. For the inaugural Courtyard Commission, Precious Okoyomon (Nigerian-American, b. 1993) will produce a living forest featuring a large-scale, interactive bear sculpture—the artist’s signature motif—which resembles an oversized children’s toy. The forest, developed in collaboration with the nursery issima, will grow into an ever-morphing woodland of trees, exotic flowers, weeds, and boulders. Visitors are invited to venture into the bear’s body, where they can experience a multi-sensory installation before exiting through its mouth.

This fall, MoMA PS1 will present Hard Art, a major exhibition that examines the legacy of abstract painting by Black artists in the US from 1969 to today. Hard Art features over forty artists and juxtaposes historical paintings by practitioners who came to prominence in the 1970s with recent conceptually driven practices that incorporate sculpture, video, sound, and painting. Organized thematically, the exhibition traces the legacy of three generations of artists including Frank Bowling, Mark Bradford, Peter Bradley, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ed Clark, Melvin Edwards, Jennie C. Jones, Joe Overstreet, and Raymond Saunders, alongside new and recent works by Aria Dean, Torkwase Dyson, Nikita Gale, Suzanne Jackson, Rindon Johnson, Caroline Kent, Carolyn Lazard, Eric N. Mack, Charisse Pearlina Weston, and SoiL Thornton, among others.