MoMA - Odili Donald Odita: Songs from Life
Tue, Jun 03
|MoMA
Color becomes rhythm in Odili Donald Odita’s Songs from Life, a vibrant, music-inspired mural transforming MoMA’s lobby into an immersive expression of community and change.
Time & Location
Jun 03, 2025, 7:00 PM – Mar 31, 2026, 11:00 PM
MoMA, 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA
About the event
On view through Spring 2026
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Lobby
Visit MoMA.org
What if paintings moved like music?In Songs from Life, Odili Donald Odita reimagines MoMA’s lobby as a communal stage where color, pattern, and sound converge. This monumental mural—painted directly onto the museum’s walls and columns over six weeks—is Odita’s largest New York commission to date, and the first in his practice where music serves as the central catalyst.
Using vibrant, flat acrylic hues in angular, cascading formations, Odita draws from a personal and cultural playlist—each section of the mural is linked to a specific song, creating a lyrical dialogue between visual and auditory experience. The installation celebrates the museum’s public space as a place of movement, mixing, and meaning—where visitors from all walks of life gather, like melodies in a composition.
Odita’s colors are not only formal elements—they are gestures of liberation, frequencies of emotion, and symbols…