NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art announces a year of programs slated for 2026 in the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, a state-of-the-art space in the heart of the Museum dedicated to MoMA’s ongoing presentation of live and experimental works. The dynamic lineup, featuring leading contemporary artists working in media and performance, includes Samora Pinderhughes: Call and Response (January 24 February 15, 2026); Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: Lugar de Consuelo (Place of Solace) (March 28– July 5, 2026); Studio Residency: Pageant (August 8–30, 2026); and Na Mira: NO SMOKINTh (November 14, 2026–February 15, 2027).

“How can theater, music, movement, and moving images expand how we come together to engage with complex historical narratives and to forge new spaces for culture? This year’s Kravis Studio program draws together a range of international artists whose bold work will transform the space through inspiring sound, action, and immersive media,” said Stuart Comer, the Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance.

Samora Pinderhughes: Call and Response
January 24–February 15, 2026

The Kravis Studio hosts Call and Response, an exhibition of new work and live performances by composer, filmmaker, and artist Samora Pinderhughes. His multidisciplinary practice addresses structural violence through sonic layering, choral performance, film projection, and audio testimonial. Relying on improvisation and collaboration, Pinderhughes centers performance as a communal practice that can facilitate healing in the face of oppression, racism, and incarceration.

Pinderhughes is the 2025 Adobe Creative Resident at MoMA and the artistic and executive director of the Healing Project, a community arts organization that works directly with individuals impacted by the prison industrial complex to imagine a world based around healing rather than punishment. While in residence at MoMA, Pinderhughes has expanded on this project to develop sonic healing rooms in collaboration with community-based organizations across New York City. The artist is working with participants at each organization throughout the year, using music, language, and portraiture as tools to reclaim narratives about their lives and envision changes they would like to see in society.

Call and Response will feature a series of evening performances in the Kravis Studio and a public program developed with community partners. An installation of Pinderhughes’s new film, REAL TALK, will remain on view during Museum hours. Pinderhughes’s project asks, How do we survive in America? How do we support each other? What if we built a world around community care?

Organized by Martha Joseph, Associate Curator, with Sibia Sarangan, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance, and Hannah Fagin, Associate Educator, Artist Programs, Department of Learning and Engagement. Performances produced by Kate Scherer, Senior Manager and Producer, with Kayva Yang, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Arts.

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: Lugar de Consuelo (Place of Solace)
March 28–July 5, 2026

The Kravis Studio will host MoMA’s first presentation of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s Lugar de Consuelo (Place of Solace) (2020), a multimedia work jointly acquired in 2022 through the Museum’s Latin American and Caribbean Fund and Fund for the Twenty-First Century. Featuring prints, drawings, costumes, sculptures, videos, and a related performance, the work addresses political and personal histories of Guatemala’s civil war (1960–96).

Building upon Ramírez-Figueroa’s archival research on practices of resistance and memory in Latin American theater, Lugar de Consuelo recasts the history of the revolutionary play El Corazón del espantapájaros (Heart of the Scarecrow), written by the Guatemalan playwright Hugo Carrillo in 1962. During the civil war, the Guatemalan government censored the play, which Ramírez-Figueroa learned about from his uncle, who participated in its original performance. Ramírez-Figueroa’s research, drawn from oral accounts, resulted in etchings, drawings, and sculptures that explore both the contents of the play and the events surrounding its censorship. An installation of costumes and props, as well as watercolor sketches and a film of a prior performance staged at the Universidad Popular de Guatemala, will be on view in the Studio.

Organized by Inés Katzenstein, Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, and Julia Detchon, Curatorial Associate, Latin American Art, Department of Drawings and Prints. Produced by Lizzie Gorfaine, Director, with Aminah Ibrahim, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Art.

Studio Residency: Pageant
August 8–30, 2026

The Kravis Studio Residency is an annual program offering space and support for artists to research and develop new work behind closed doors, with special opportunities for the public to experience their works in progress. The 2026 Studio Residency will welcome the founders of Pageant, an artist-run performance space located in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Pageant was cofounded in 2022 by Sharleen Chidiac, Lili Dekker, Jade Manns, Owen Prum, and Alexa West to support movement based performance, prioritizing art that is rigorous, messy, and spectacular. With a focus on presenting new performance work while also hosting workshops, rehearsals, and gatherings, Pageant maintains a local performance community in which artists support artists, and experimentation and risk- taking are possible.

While Pageant is in residence at MoMA, the Kravis Studio will alternate between a rehearsal space and a live stage, creating an environment of shared labor and experimentation, with key moments of visibility to the general public. The group will present a Performance Marathon, inviting viewers to drop in to experience a continuous lineup of new short works by Pageant veterans. Additionally, the residency will feature a work-in-progress showing of the first performance co-authored by Pageant’s founders, developed onsite during the residency. The performance will be followed by a moderated conversation, reflecting the collaborative ethos of the collective and the porous boundaries between rehearsal, production, and presentation.

Organized by Martha Joseph, Associate Curator, with Luiza Repsold França, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance. Thanks to May Makki, former Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance. Produced by Lizzie Gorfaine, Director, with Monica Nyenkan, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Art.

Na Mira: NO SMOKINTh
November 14, 2026– February 15, 2027

Drawing on ritual practices of Korean shamanism and on media histories rooted in structural filmmaking, Na Mira explores language, memory, and image-making systems. Mira’s sculptural and site-responsive installations are made with radio frequencies, infrared heat, and holography, which ground the artist’s reflections on the borders of body and state. “I work with what is hard to see,” the artist has noted. “My research reckons with military landscapes, diasporic time and thresholds of consciousness. Operating through negation—not film, not video, not performance, not text—tuning into the materiality of the signal and the animism of transmission.”

For Mira’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, the artist is developing a newly commissioned media installation. To produce this new work, Mira records footage at sites of personal and historical significance through a creative process that embraces chance and desire, resulting in phantasmagoric projections presented across the Kravis Studio. Mira’s approach aims to rupture the fidelity of the image on which soft power, propaganda, and other forms of statecraft often rely. NO SMOKING engages spaces at the edges of perception where optics shatter, multiply, and disappear in plain sight.

Organized by Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator, Department of Film.