Visita

Artist and poet Precious Okoyomon (Nigerian-American, b. 1993) transforms the MoMA PS1 courtyard into a living forest of plants, interactive sculpture, and sound in our inaugural Courtyard Commission. Among the Flowers I Learned to Love: A Garden of Decreation is Okoyomon’s largest outdoor installation to date and cultivates a world of grasses, flowers, weeds, sedges, pollinators, and vines. This ever-growing woodland brings together species often perceived in opposition, but which in reality co-exist: native and invasive plants, annuals and perennials, cultivated and wild growth.

Artists Against the Bomb (AATB), an international artistic campaign supporting the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), will present an exhibition in Homeroom. Rooted in an urgent belief that meaningful change arises through collective action and public refusal, AATB’s calls to action span posters, design, film, photography, literature, music, sculpture, and ephemera in support of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which has been endorsed by a growing number of countries.

Opening this fall, New York Fashion at PS1, 1980–1984 revisits the museum’s fashion program, initiated in 1980 as part of its wider Multi-Disciplinary Program, which spanned sound, performance, poetry, film, and architecture. Featuring notes, correspondence, photographs, and ephemera drawn from the MoMA PS1 archives, among others, the exhibition focuses on projects realized at the museum by independent curator Hollywood Di Russo (1946–2005) with designers in the city. A stylist and make-up artist, Di Russo aimed to highlight fashion’s influence on visual culture and the arts, outside the commercial realm and the formal conventions of costume display.

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.

The first US museum exhibition to highlight the singular practice of Masao Gozu (Japanese, b. 1946), Windows and Bars presents a focused selection of his photographs dating from the 1970s through today. The exhibition highlights key works from Gozu’s Windows and Harry’s Bar series, opening apertures onto the city’s past and offering a quiet rumination on the sweep of time. Born in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, Gozu emigrated to New York City in 1970. Walking the city streets, he began to photograph the city’s inhabitants through the windows of tenement buildings, from Bay Ridge to Little Italy. An extended architectural study, the series suggests the window as a proscenium through which to glimpse the theater of everyday life. Gozu’s subjects rarely meet the gaze of the camera; ambiguous protagonists, they watch scenes unfolding outside of the frame. Gozu continued this series until 2004, taking thousands of images. He recently began returning to these locations to photograph them anew, capturing dramatic shifts and, in some cases, surprising continuity in the city’s built landscape.

Fred Wilson’s sculpture To Die Upon A Kiss (2011) takes its title from the final lines spoken by Othello in William Shakespeare’s play. Set in sixteenth-century Venice, Othello traces the Black general’s path to a tragic fate. Invited to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2003, Wilson took inspiration from the many people of African descent who appear in artistic depictions of Venetian life across the centuries, figures whose first-person accounts remain absent from the historical record. He collaborated with glassblowers on the Venetian Island of Murano to create elaborate chandeliers using black glass, titling each after a line from Othello’s closing monologue.