Key Points
- MoMA PS1 launched an annual Courtyard Commission program in Long Island City.
- The inaugural edition goes to Nigerian-American artist and poet Precious Okoyomon.
- Okoyomon's living forest features a large interactive bear sculpture visitors walk through.
- The installation opens July 24, tied to the museum's Warm Up summer series.
MoMA PS1 has launched a new annual Courtyard Commission, and handed the first edition to Precious Okoyomon. The Nigerian-American artist and poet is turning the museum's Long Island City courtyard into a living forest that opens July 24.
The work grows into an ever-morphing woodland of trees, exotic flowers, weeds, and boulders, developed with the nursery issima, and is anchored by a large interactive bear sculpture — Okoyomon's signature motif — built to resemble an oversized children's toy. Visitors can walk into the bear's body for a multi-sensory installation and exit through its mouth. Over the summer, the planting shifts and overgrows, so the piece is never quite the same twice.
Okoyomon, born in 1993, works in ecology and living systems as much as sculpture, and the commission arrives as MoMA PS1 marks its 50th anniversary. It runs alongside Warm Up, the museum's long-running summer music series, so the same courtyard that functions as a dance floor on weekends doubles as a slowly growing artwork. The Courtyard Commission is built to return each year, handing a rotating artist the museum's most public outdoor space.
The read: a living, morphing forest is the anti-blockbuster. Instead of one photogenic object, MoMA PS1 is betting its landmark year on process and decay — an artwork that is supposed to overgrow, wilt, and change while you watch. Okoyomon, whose materials are weeds and living things, is the right choice to make an institution's courtyard feel unstable on purpose, and the new commission gives the museum a recurring reason to hand that space to an artist every summer rather than leave it to the DJs. The forest is on view from July 24 through the season.
Uristocrat has been covering the art world — see our report on MoMA's Seydou Keïta exhibition.
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