Jason Moran: STACKS at Luhring Augustine, Chelsea

Jason Moran, born in Houston in 1975, is a jazz pianist, composer, and visual artist. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. He served as Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center from 2011 to 2025 and is now Curator at the Park Avenue Armory. With his trio The Bandwagon he has built a discography for Blue Note Records, and he runs his own label, Yes Records. His collaborators among visual artists include Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Stan Douglas, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker.

STACKS is his third solo show at Luhring Augustine and gathers new and recent work in sculpture, works on paper, and video. It continues his study of the histories, objects, gestures, and ideas that make up jazz and its surrounding culture. His practice rests on the relationship between music and language, moving among sound, image, performance, and material through improvisation and in conversation with the musicians and artists who came before him.

At the center of the exhibition is a new sculpture of two small upright parlor pianos, stacked precariously and mirrored so that one is inverted against the other. A familiar instrument becomes a monumental, almost architectural form, pointing to the piano's place in jazz history and to the weight of layers accumulating across generations.

The works on paper are made by coating a piano keyboard with powdered pigment, laying thin Japanese Gampi paper over it, and playing. The pigment records the pace, pressure, and pauses of his fingers: chords appear as clusters, repeated phrases as dense accumulations, and silences as open space, echoing the way sound lingers and fades.

The show also presents a selection of jazz ephemera Moran has collected over the years, from a handmade flag made by the Harlem Hellfighters to a sheet of stamps bearing an image of Thelonious Monk. Arranged together, the objects seem to improvise with one another. A new video by photographer and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos, made in collaboration with Moran, explores their shared interest in the relationship between sonic textures and images.