iMuseum of Modern Art (MoMA)Midtown Manhattan
Odili Donald Odita: Songs from Life
A large-scale, site-specific commission in MoMA's lobby: a floor-to-ceiling kaleidoscope of bright colors and abstract patterns, painted over six weeks and inspired for the first time by music.
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Come in from 53rd Street, get through bag check, and the wall you pass under starts as a loose pattern of diamonds and cubes, then tightens into regimented stripes as the yellow gets stronger. Odita and his team painted the whole lobby, floor to ceiling, in 192 custom Benjamin Moore house-paint colors.
It is split into numbered sections, each tied to songs from the artist's 23-track playlist, from Led Zeppelin and Fela Kuti to Bill Withers and Miles Davis. You scan a QR code and listen on your phone. Near the coat check, a staircase of colored angles is his nod to Duchamp.
The Brooklyn Rail's Joe Fyfe praised its "general absence of the spectacular", and noted that in four visits he never saw anyone paying it much attention. It pays back the visitor who stops: the longer you study one section, he wrote, the more complex it gets. The lobby is free and open to all, so you don't need a gallery ticket to see it.
Look for
The 53rd Street entrance wall
Look up as you walk under it: a loose diamond-and-cube pattern tightens into regimented stripes as the yellow intensifies.
The two-story west wall
Long vertical stripes are cut by elongated diagonal planes, with a few discreet wedges of lime green as the surprise.
The square columns by the ticket counters
One side is variegated color and the other mostly tan bands, so where the two edges meet they read like a mirror.
The Duchamp staircase near the coat check
Instead of filling the biggest wall, Odita painted a diagonal of stepping multicolored angles as a homage to Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2).
Good for
- An Hour Or Less
- Cheap Culture
- Going Solo
- Rainy Days
Skip if
You want a spectacle: even its admiring critic praised its "general absence of the spectacular".
Also at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
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Image credits
6
- Odili Donald Odita: Songs from LifeCourtesy of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
- Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450-1500The Frick Collection
- Splendido, As Seen by Chris RhodesCourtesy of Aperture
- Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)hibino via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
- The Frick CollectionJim.henderson / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
- The Morgan Library & MuseumMike Peel, CC BY-SA 4.0