A Philadelphia artist has replaced Andy Warhol on MoMA’s walls

On entering New York’s Museum of Modern Art, one is no longer greeted by Andy Warhol’s kitschy cow wallpaper. Instead, there is a collection of bright angular shapes playing Tetris with our eyes. Look into the lobby to see a painting of sharp wedges splayed out on a high wall; the bright blue and yellow mellow out as it moves right, gradually settling into earthy tones of maroons, blues, and browns.

Similar paintings grace pillars, columns, and walls across the museum’s first floor and is part of the ongoing “Songs from Life” exhibit featuring paintings by artist Odili Donald Odita, professor of painting at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

Back in 2021, Odita’s Walls of Change was the first thing museumgoers saw when entering the newly renovated Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2019, his mural Our House was on view at 728 S. Broad St.

MoMA’s entrance is both inside and outside of the main museum; an in-between that greets visitors with Odita’s paintings. When one looks long enough, shapes begin to emerge out of patterns. Sometimes a mountain, sometimes a face, and sometimes origami cranes.

For six weeks before the show opened on April 8, museumgoers could see members of Odita’s team on scissor lifts, taping and painting the walls of the museum. Even before that, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, the show’s curator, said the pieces took shape in Odita’s studio — with graphs and charts, and meticulous playing around with numbers, measuring and re-measuring the space and its orientation.

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The monthslong process of creating “Songs from Life” used 192 cans of Benjamin Moore paint that were mixed and remixed to create 10,000-12,000 unique shades. While an artwork’s journey is never quite done, the “final version of the final version” (as Odita puts it) ended with him and Nzewi lying on their backs on the museum’s second floor, making sure the edges of the paintings aligned perfectly with the edges of the wall.

When thinking of artists who could paint the lobby, Nzewi instantly thought of Odita. His art, the curator said, welcomes visitors into the museum and establishes it as a “safe space where people can interact, socialize, and then enjoy the greater beauty of arts and culture.”

Both Nzewi and Odita are Nigerian by birth. While Nzewi came to the U.S. as an adult artist, Odita’s family moved to Columbus, Ohio, in 1967, fleeing the Biafran war. He moved to Philadelphia in 2006 to teach at Temple and now lives in Conshohocken.

The city, for him, is “a collection of cultures that have continued to contribute to the bedrock of culture, science, music, art.” But it has to be better at knowing its greatness, he added.

“New York City will know how to advertise itself from day one but in Philadelphia, it takes a second or two to recognize the greatness. Suddenly you realize, ‘Oh my God! John Coltrane lived in that house. Sun Ra lived in that house right there, and I didn’t know that!,’ but people in Germany, Amsterdam knew about it. It’s like the tough brother or tough sister at the family table of greatness.”

Zooming out to look at the larger country, Odita recalls America to be a strange but welcoming space growing up. His parents (Nzewi called his father, the artist Emmanuel Odita, “one of the key figures of modern art in Nigeria”) attended graduate school while raising a family and took up side jobs to aid Biafran war efforts. They petitioned and protested — “doing things that students do normally, because they’re very passionate at that time of their lives,” Odita said.

Creating a safe, welcoming space in a museum, within a country witnessing an uptick in the deportation of immigrants, is a tall task.

“My parents have said to me that they were welcomed by the people of this country and that people were generous to them,” Odita said. “Other people have the same story. We all have this story, because this is the story of the world. I want to talk about this in a synonymous way; what it means to come as a stranger, or the one who wants to visit the sanctuary of art, and know that this is a safe place for you to look at the same thing with other people.”

This shared communal exercise in the museum is not just anchored in Odita’s art but also in music. His playlist, accessed by scanning a QR code, becomes a guide that walks people through the narrative his seemingly impenetrable sharp-edged shapes build.

The songs, he said, “create a particular rhythm. … If you listen closely, you’ll hear another subtext of movement and ideation that’s going from one side to the other,” much like the lines in his paintings.

The first wall is named after Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” and Fela Kuti’s “Roforofo Fight.”

“I liked this idea of the entry, and the idea of migrating, the immigrant coming into the space. ‘Roforofo Fight’... it’s pidgin English for a rough situation. Because it’s not easy for a stranger to come into a place they may not feel immediately familiar with.”

The traveler persists, passing through checkpoints quite like the ones in the museum, and gets familiar. “There’s a process that’s relational to this idea of passing through a border,” Odita said.

With the playlist as a guide, the viewer walks through the MoMA lobby, surrounded by Odita’s art. There’s a story in there with singing narrators — Pastor T.L. Barrett And the Youth For Christ Choir, Talking Heads, Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Bill Withers. When you’re done taking the journey, stopping at the museum’s 54th Street entrance, the remastered version of “Brand New Day” comes on.

“Another day is over

For a new day will begin…

I won’t be sad

I won’t be destroyed.”

“Odili Donald Odita: Songs from Life” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Through April 2026. moma.org