Blending rhythm, colour, and cultural memory, the artist reimagined MoMA’s lobby as a democratic space of emotion and encounter.
Installation view of ‘Odili Donald Odita: Songs from Life’, on view at The Museum of Modern Art from April 8, 2025 – April 2026. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © 2025 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Jonathan Dorado.
In 2025, the Museum of Modern Art in New York welcomed visitors with a dazzling burst of colour and sound. ‘Odili Donald Odita: Songs from Life’, a yearlong, site-specific commission, transformed the museum’s main lobby into a vibrant and immersive environment. Stretching floor to ceiling in radiant stripes of interlacing colour, the work enveloped audiences in a visual symphony—at once a celebration of abstraction, music, and multicultural connection.
Commissioned by MoMA and curated by Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi with Elizabeth Wickham, ‘Songs from Life’ marked the largest installation of Odita’s career. The usual hum of museum activity did not just greet visitors arriving between April 2025 and April 2026, but by a full-body encounter with colour and rhythm. And for those present during its creation, the experience was even more immediate—Odita and his team worked on-site from February through April, inviting the public to witness the slow crescendo of forms come to life.
Painted in flat acrylic latex, the sprawling installation played with movement and light across architectural contours, wrapping the lobby in geometric planes of chromatic intensity. Yet this was no purely formalist exercise. For Odita, colour is a political and emotional force—“an expression of freedom and change.” Drawing from African and African American textile traditions, Western abstraction, and the indigenous mural art of his Nigerian heritage, he offered a language of visual harmony through multiplicity.
The installation’s beating heart was its soundtrack. Music served not only as inspiration but also as structure, with each section of the mural anchored by specific songs. Visitors could scan a QR code to access a playlist spanning artists such as Fela Kuti, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Bill Withers, Led Zeppelin, and the Talking Heads—an eclectic mix reflecting Odita’s transcontinental sensibilities and his belief in music as a mode of thinking. These selections shaped both the title and conceptual framework of the project: the song as personal history, cultural lineage, and shared atmosphere.
“Odita’s work reflects the history of abstract painting, African and African American textile traditions, and the indigenous mural art of his Nigerian heritage,” said Nzewi. “He transforms MoMA’s main lobby into a grand opera of brilliant colors and geometric patterns that enrich the museum visitors’ experience.”
For Odita, the lobby’s function as a threshold—between street and gallery, public and private, local and global—was essential. His goal was to reflect the complexities of contemporary life and utilise abstraction as a tool for emotional resonance and civic engagement. The music-driven composition served as a call to empathy and imagination, inviting each viewer to bring their narrative to the space.
Born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1966 and based in Philadelphia, Odita has long explored themes of diaspora, identity, and visual culture through abstraction. A professor at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art since 2006, he has exhibited widely across the U.S. and internationally. His work is held in significant collections, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
With ‘Songs from Life’, Odita expanded not only the scale of his practice but also its reach. By situating this vibrant and generous work in MoMA’s most accessible space—free and open to all—he activated abstraction as a gesture of democratic inclusion. In a time of fractured discourse and heightened division, Odita offered viewers a different rhythm: one of colour, memory, and shared possibility.
The exhibition opened on April 8, 2025, and is on view through spring 2026. For more information, please visit MoMA.
