Lygia Clark & Lutisha Pettway
in ‘Artist’s Choice: Arthur Jafa–Less Is Morbid’, MoMA, New York
20 November 2025 – 6 July 2026
Installation views of “Artist’s Choice: Arthur Jafa—Less Is Morbid,” on view at The Museum of Modern Art from November 19, 2025, through July 5, 2026. The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Installation views of “Artist’s Choice: Arthur Jafa—Less Is Morbid,” on view at The Museum of Modern Art from November 19, 2025, through July 5, 2026. The Museum of Modern Art, New York
‘Less Is Morbid is a counter death wish’, says artist Arthur Jafa. Originally from Tupelo, Mississippi, and trained as an architect and cinematographer, he has become well-known for his collages, montages, assemblages, and installations – combining images imbued with what he calls ‘affective capacity’, or the emotional power of association.
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: Lygia Clark, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cy Twombly; Roy DeCarava, Kase2, and Ming Smith; Piet Mondrian and Lutisha Pettway.
Jafa’s exhibition title puns on “less is more,” an expression attributed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose steel column – a pillar of modernist architecture – is included in the exhibition. In the 20th century, this equation of simplicity with beauty and removal with order governed the collecting and display of art at places like MoMA. 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.’