Jason Moran
Sept 20, 2019–Jan 5, 2020
Collaborations
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Collaboration has been central to Moran’s experiments, and among the many artists with whom he has collaborated include The Bandwagon (Tarus Mateen and Nasheet Waits), Stan Douglas, Lizzie Fitch, Theaster Gates, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Ashland Mines (Total Freedom), Alicia Hall Moran, Adam Pendleton, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Ryan Trecartin, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems.
Julie Mehretu and Jason Moran
Excerpt from MASS (HOWL, eon), 2017
Julie Mehretu and Jason Moran, performance still of MASS (HOWL, eon), 2017. Cornet and effects: Graham Haynes; drums: Jamire Williams; piano and compositions: Jason Moran; paintings by Julie Mehretu; production: Esa Nickle and Raul Zbengheci (associate producer); sound engineering: Sascha Von Oertzen; editing: Charles Cohen; video engineering: Brendan Bercik; lighting design: Wild Dogs International; set fabrication: Standard and Supply. Performa 17 Commission as part of AFROGLOSSIA; courtesy the artists and Performa, New York. Photograph © Paula Court. Paintings © Julie Mehretu
Just after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, visual artist Julie Mehretu temporarily moved her studio to a neo-Gothic former parish in Harlem. There she created a pair of monumental paintings titled HOWL, eon (I, II), which had been commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The abstract works are based on distorted images of contemporary land and racial protests as well as mid-nineteenth-century depictions of the American West. Mehretu invited Moran to join her while she worked on the massive paintings. In winter and spring 2017, he composed and improvised a set of phrases and gestures that respond to Mehretu’s mark-making, exploring fragments of hymns, erasure, and repetition. The collaboration expanded into a Performa commission titled MASS (HOWL, eon), which premiered in the same space where it was conceived. Moran performed an hour-long score, with musicians Graham Haynes and Jamire Williams, as videos animating details of Mehretu’s paintings were projected onto two screens that surrounded the ensemble.