The Brooklyn Rail

A visitor enters the new ground floor of the Modern, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and after handbag check is again briefly stalled by the guards. The light coming in from outside immediately hits the wall above as one steps up past security into an area about ten feet high, with round columns and rows of recessed ceiling lights. Toward the left there are some squared columns near the ticketing line. Under the lowered ceiling, the visitor’s movement into the museum feels compressed, but then the lobby opens to its full height in the core interior of the building.

Toward the north side is another lowered wall of tinted glass enclosing the second-floor bookstore. It dims the daylight from 54th Street. Off to the right one enters the museum proper, past a digital program on a full-height screen and the famous garden beyond. Many have criticized the Modern for becoming “too corporate”: it’s blank, banal, impersonal, bulky, and distracting. Like a lot of twenty-first-century architecture it feels more virtual than actual. And it’s too public.

But in the lobby, the painter Odili Donald Odita has taken on the difficult task of executing an installation to occupy that underwhelming space. Titled Songs from Life (it is made up of various numbered sections, which a visitor can view one by one on their iPhone, accompanied by a soundtrack provided by the artist) it will remain in place for a year. Exhibition didactics tell us that Odita sees the painted murals he has executed for this space as communal and “a gathering space for people from different walks of life confronting life’s challenges and finding redemption.”

I first saw Odita‘s work at Florence Lynch Gallery in Chelsea twenty-five years ago, and he was already adapting a somewhat outmoded painting style—hard-edge, color field, “post-painterly” abstraction—to what the artist later described to BOMB magazine as a depiction of Africa as an “‘interior geography’ to be defined through pattern and color.” This transformation was immediately apparent in the unusual airiness of Odita’s compositions and the continuous blending of tans and browns throughout the purples, raspberries, and off-blues of the stretched-out triangular, horizontal stripes in that show. Within a few years, stylized visions of the African landscape appeared, and then he returned to varied geometric patterning.

In addition to his paintings, Odita has made a good number of murals, some of them in less-than-promising spaces. As he reached back from the sixties to the Bauhaus, Cubism, and beyond, one of the things that has been impressive about Odita is his adherence to what Richard Roth, his teacher as an undergrad at Ohio State University called “vernacular modernism” or familiar design qualities. This is not an easy task: in the realm of artistic challenges the well-known might offer as much resistance as the unknown. The current context of his work might be understood in passing as institutional decor, but one discovers that Odita has infused his mural with a wealth of content: African fabrics and landscapes, contemporary African art, and his own particular transnational experience and heritage are all present here. Odita stated in the BOMB oral history that what he calls “the vessel of pattern” has helped him to explore color “in an emotional, intellectual, and cultural manner that connects to and expands from the history of painting in the West and Africa.”

Odita, whose father was an art historian specializing in African art, is of the Igbo people, who were subject to a pogrom during Nigeria’s Biafran war of 1967–70. Odita came to the US when he was six months old. In The Years of Theory, Fredric Jameson observed that “what we call our identity is molded by the past, by the way we see ourselves in a certain continuity of development, the way we attach our childhood to the present.” Odita has returned to Nigeria and other parts of Africa a number of times and has been continually involved with artists there as well as with the previous generation of African-American painters.

He explained to BOMB that “nka, the Igbo word for art, is understood as a thing of permanence, versus painting which was traditionally done on walls and in houses, hence transient … having a greater correlation to performance, ritual, and time.” Odita’s mural work exists on a fulcrum that accepts this impermanence, but he practices it with the same willful intensity he brings to conventional (read: permanent) easel painting. The entire installation for MoMA was planned out over a long period, partially while the artist was in residence at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, through dozens of drawings and later a computer program. The lobby was open to visitors during the installation, and they could watch as assistants taped off areas in sequences that allowed for the drying times of Odita’s precisely shaped shards of color. There were 192 different Benjamin Moore custom colors in total.

MoMA’s 53rd Street entrance has the two largest murals. On the facing wall that visitors must pass beneath, a loose diamond and cube pattern tightens into more regimented stripes as the color yellow intensifies. To the left, on the two-story high west wall, long vertical stripes are bisected by elongated planes of diagonals. In each sector some color adds an odd surprise. Here, it is a few discreet wedges of lime green.

Odita is very good with corners. On the square columns near the ticket counters, he contrasts a variegated color side with one dominated by many tan bands that, as the two edges meet, creates a mirror effect. Beyond that, near the coat check, Odita didn’t fill the largest wall completely but painted a diagonal of stepping multicolored angles that he envisioned as a homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912). Every area, including the obscure far corner walls of the 54th Street entrance, was considered in relation to place and proportion. The four times that I visited, though, I didn’t see anyone paying much attention to any of the paintings. This has nothing to do, however, with what I consider the great success of the project.

Songs from Life reminded me of two experiences. One was a time waiting in the airport in Palermo for a flight back to the United States: I contemplated a decorative color grid on a wall in the waiting area that seemed to display an unexpected degree of thoughtfulness and artistic intelligence. The second was a walk through Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates in Central Park in the snow. What struck me then was the surprising unpretentiousness with which the individual gates were constructed, and the way the installation worked with the givens of the site. What I’m trying to say is that in art, an experience of reasonableness is to be cherished. It is rare, but that’s what I was having in MoMA’s lobby.

In this way, the subtlety and general absence of the spectacular in Odita’s project was very special. The work is made for people that choose to look at it despite the fact that it does not insist on confronting them. Like a good painting, the more time one spends scrutinizing any section of the installation, the more visually rewarding and complex it becomes. All the artist’s history is distilled here: his earlier photographic juxtapositions, his address of the Black body, a certain filmic montage, an architectural investigation. The playlist that Odita provides quite deliberately runs the gamut from Led Zeppelin to Skeeter Davis to Miriam Makeba and Miles Davis. It is deliberately as inclusive a list as possible.

The exclusive use of Benjamin Moore housepaint lends an aridity to every color. The murals have a tonal hum: the color continually modulates, it never quite leaps, making me think of the Miles Davis cut from “In a Silent Way” that’s included in the artist’s playlist, a milestone in modal jazz. Similarly, Odita’s walls stay in a mode. As variegated as they are, in their own way they are also steady and unobtrusive; their rhythms don’t jump so much as progress. Though Odita’s soundtrack is largely pop music, his work here is more like jazz—music you have to really listen to in order to understand. To perceive the structure and thoughtfulness of these Songs from Life, you have to spend time looking at them.