Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce the opening of STAGED, the first solo exhibition by the musician/composer/artist Jason Moran, in our Bushwick gallery. Moran's rich and varied work in both music and visual art mines entanglements in American cultural production. He is deeply invested in complicating the relationship between music and language, exploring ideas of intelligibility and communication. In his first gallery exhibition, Moran will continue to investigate the overlaps and intersections of jazz, art, and social history, provoking the viewer to reconsider notions of value, authenticity, and time.

STAGED will include a range of objects and works on paper, including two large-scale sculptures with audio elements from Moran’s STAGED series that were recently exhibited in the 56th Biennale di Venezia. Based on two historic New York City jazz venues that no longer exist (the Savoy Ballroom and the Three Deuces), the sculptures are hybrids of reconstructions and imaginings. Works on paper and smaller objects will be in dialogue with the stage sculptures on many levels: citing performance and process, employing sound, and exploiting the visual history of jazz in America.

Moran was born in Houston, TX in 1975. He was made a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and is currently the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center in Washington DC; he also teaches at the New England Conservatory in Boston, MA. Moran’s activities comprise both his work with masters of jazz such as Charles Lloyd, the late Sam Rivers, Henry Threadgill, Cassandra Wilson, and his trio The Bandwagon (with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen) as well as a number of partnerships with visual artists, including Stan Douglas, Theaster Gates, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Adam Pendleton, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker. Commissioning institutions of Moran’s work include the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Dia Art Foundation, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York, and Harlem Stage, New York. Moran has a long-standing collaborative practice with his wife, the singer Alicia Hall Moran; as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, they created BLEED, a five-day series of live performances that crossed genres and cultural barriers. He is currently curating the Artists Studio, series of performances in the Veterans Room of the Park Avenue Armory, New York City, which will run throughout 2016. Moran also recently launched his own recording label, Yes Records, which will release his work as well as that by Ms. Hall Moran. In Spring 2018, Moran will have his first solo museum exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN.