MoMA - Artist’s Choice: Arthur Jafa—Less Is Morbid
Wed, Nov 19
|MoMA
Arthur Jafa disrupts convention in this striking new curation at MoMA. Less Is Morbid redefines minimalism, emotion, and identity across nearly 100 works.
Time & Location
Nov 19, 2025, 7:00 AM – Jul 05, 2026, 11:00 PM
MoMA, 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA
About the event
November 19, 2025 – July 5, 2026
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Visit MoMA.org
For the latest installment in MoMA’s Artist’s Choice series, award-winning filmmaker and conceptual artist Arthur Jafa presents Less Is Morbid—a deeply charged visual dialogue on mortality, identity, and representation. The show challenges the modernist dogma of “less is more” by exploring what Jafa calls the “affective capacity” of images—their raw emotional power.
With nearly 100 selections from MoMA’s permanent collection, Jafa sets up unexpected relationships between artists and genres: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cy Twombly, Cady Noland and Mark Rothko, Roy DeCarava and Piet Mondrian. He tears down the binaries of minimalist vs. maximalist, order vs. chaos, restraint vs. expression. The result is a sweeping, unpredictable assemblage that invites viewers to reflect on the hierarchies embedded in art history—and who those hierarchies have excluded.
The title, Less Is Morbid, is a biting inversion of Mies van der Rohe’s…