Odili Donald Odita: Songs from Life at MoMA

Odili Donald Odita has been commissioned to create a site-specific work at MoMA that  surrounds the museum’s entire main lobby with bright planes of interweaving color. 

 

 

Odita takes much of his inspiration from music. Visitors to the exhibit can scan a QR code to listen to the music that inspired the works. Odita’s playlist includes songs by Led Zeppelin, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Talking Heads, Bill Withers, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, and many more, reflecting the diversity of the visitors to the museum.

 

“I am inspired by a wide range of cultural and personal references, drawing from both African and Western aesthetics, historical associations, and contemporary design and architectural influences,” said Odita. “Through abstraction, I aim to reflect the complexities of the human experience, creating patterns and rhythms that resonate on both visual and emotional levels to get the viewer to reflect upon their own circumstances with respect to the artwork’s engagement through theme and construction.”

 

Odita was born in Nigeria in 1966. He received his BFA with distinction from Ohio State University and his MFA from Bennington College. Since 1998. Odita has been a professor of painting at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia.

 

Odita’s work is in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Pérez Art Museum in Florida; Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Sheldon Museum of Art in Nebraska, the Studio Museum in Harlem,

and the United States Mission to the United Nations in New York.

 

Odili Donald Odita: Songs from Life will be on view at MoMA through April 30, 2026

 

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Paintings and drawings that Henri Matisse (1869-1954) made of his oldest daughter, Marguerite (1894-1982), over a fifty year period, are the subject of an exhibit at Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris.

 

 

Marguerite was born to Matisse and Caroline Jobland, who modeled for Matisse. The couple were not married. Four years after Marguerite was born, Matisse married Amélie Noellie Parayre. They raised Marguerite and had two sons of their own, Jean and Pierre. 

 

Marguerite was an extraordinary young woman.  During the second World War, she joined the Resistance, and was caught in the northern town of Rennes by the Gestapo. She was put on the last train to the death camps in 1944. The train got derailed at the French/German border and she survived.

 

Matisse made two drawings of Marguerite in 1945, after her escape. Marguerite spent much of her life cataloguing the work of her father and collaborating with students of his work.

Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father’s Eyes is on view at Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris through August 24, 2025. 

 

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Please contact us if you would like more information about the work of  Odili Donald Odita or Henri Matisse available at VFA.

 

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May 7, 2025