"This axiom also extended to the way art institutions valued supposedly rational cultural disciplines over forms of life—Black, queer, and feminine, for example—imagined as excessive and chaotic. In response, Jafa suggests, “The answer to disorder in the universe is not genocide. The answer is in how we coexist.” "
Arthur Jafa—Less Is Morbid
Museum of Modern Art, New York through July 5, 2026
Museum of Modern Art, New York through July 5, 2026
For this exhibition—the latest in MoMA’s Artist’s Choice series—Jafa has selected over 80 objects from the Museum’s collection. Placing things beside one another, he creates relationships between pictures and between their makers: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cy Twombly; Lygia Clark, Roy DeCarava, Kase2, and Ming Smith; Piet Mondrian and Lutisha Pettway. Many of the works share an allover approach to composition in which the picture exceeds its physical frame. Seen together, the installation of works collapses typically opposed ideas and approaches—minimalist/maximalist, sparse/dense, atomic/cosmological, individual/collective—as well as the hierarchies that emerge from this kind of binary thinking.
On view through July 5, 2026.
Frank Mitchell is an artist, arts advocate and Art Coterie contributor
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5825