MOCA has invited artist Emmanuel Osahor to create an exhibition that includes a new painting, a photographic wallpaper and ceramic works for the museum’s North End Gallery.

Osahor’s artwork engages with beauty as a necessity for survival and a precursor to thriving. His paintings depict natural spaces as complicated sanctuaries in which manifestations of beauty and care are ever present. By means of energized brushstrokes, he draws the viewer into these fictional garden scenes, offering imaginary but recognizable spaces as potential sites for contemplation and wellbeing.

Specifically for MOCA, Osahor has composed an installation that brings the sky, in a multiplicity of hues, into focus as a site of wonder and possibility. In dialogue with his uninhabited painting, a series of palm-molded ceramic birds add life and whimsy, as well as an additional reference to the importance of the artist’s hand for his craft. 

These days is a rumination on the prospect of a good future and an invitation to engage in a sustained meditation on the individual and collective processes necessary for meaningful shared experience.