In conjunction with the exhibition Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa, join us on December 11 for a pop-up performance in the exhibition galleries as part of UNIQLO Friday Nights. The performance will occur three times throughout the night at 6:00 p.m., 6:45 p.m., and 7:30 p.m., each performance lasting 15 minutes. No registration or RSVP is required to attend.
When newly independent African nations built their capitals, they designed buildings that breathed. Perforated walls. Facades carved with ancient fertility figures. Spaces, in the words of architect Henri Chomette, "where the population recognizes its own values and feels at home."
Poet Antoinette Cooper's ceremony series UNRULY: The Body as Altar centers the Black female body as an act of self-possession. Through voice, lyric, and a soundscape with sound bowls, Cooper opens a ceremony of witness in which the body itself becomes the structure. Unruly poems dissolve into mantra and song while metabolizing centuries of Black women's lives and her own: named, unnamed, survived, still becoming. The historical and the intimate are not two different rooms. They are the same body. Releasing. Building. Belonging as sovereign architectures. Architecture as an act of self-possession.
These pop-up performances are part of UNIQLO Friday Nights, when MoMA is open late every Friday night and admission is free for all New York State residents.
Antoinette Cooper is a Jamaican-born, New York-based poet, trained collective trauma facilitator, and student of Somatic Experiencing® whose work lives at the intersection of poetry, ceremony, and collective healing. Her debut collection UNRULY (Legacy Book Press, 2025), endorsed by m. nourbeSe philip and Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens, reached #4 on Amazon's Black Poetry bestseller list. She holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University.
A funded artist through NYSCA and LMCC, Cooper has led workshops at MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Poets House, and the Poetry Foundation. She is the founder and Executive Director of Black Exhale, a nonprofit creating sanctuary spaces for healing intergenerational trauma in Black communities. Her ceremony series, The Body as Altar, debuted at the African Burial Ground National Monument and comes to MoMA this December.
Major funding is provided by the Agnes Gund Education Endowment Fund for Public Programs, the Jeanne Thayer Young Scholars Fund, and the Annual Education Fund.