Raque Ford’s set design for Warm Up 2023

Raque Ford (American, b. 1986)
You help me forget, 2023
Plexiglass, lyrics, metal hardware, and plywood
Set design for Warm Up at MoMA PS1
Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

Two parts:
Your Laugh, 2023
Setting for turntables

My words they still exist and need (reprise), 2022–23
Dancefloor

The 2023 Warm Up season takes place on a custom set, You Help Me Forget, designed by artist Raque Ford. The artist playfully inlays found, authored, and overheard language in her mirrored acrylic tiles–here enveloping the DJ booth–to subvert the rigor of grid systems and expand upon themes she explored in Greater New York 2021. Blurring the public character of language and the personal tone of address, Ford invites attendees to see themselves, fellow dancers, and the surrounding PS1 Courtyard in dynamic reflections that evolve through the evening as the crowd coalesces and the sun sets.

You Help Me Forget expands on Ford’s most recent body of work, exploring the style and spatial organization of clubs and nightlife venues designed to encourage communion and collective expression. The artist’s first outdoor project in public space, the sculpture draws on a variety of references, from the austere geometries of postwar minimalism to the synthetic saturation of digital space, with nods to the funkier edges of 1980s Italian interiors and dancehall vernacular.

To mark the opening of Warm Up 2023, a special presentation of Ford’s modular, checkerboard My words they still exist and need (reprise) (2022–23) encouraged audience interaction as a platform for dance, relaying the ethos of the iconic music series. As the lingering physical centerpiece of the extended season, the jeweled music box Your Laugh creates a reverberant setting for DJs and performers, imbued with the imagery and élan of attendees. Ford’s large-scale plexi work crystallizes atmosphere as environment, giving form to the electricity of the music, and the unforgettable energy of Warm Up.

Raque Ford (b. 1986, Columbia, Maryland) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo presentations include Good Weather, Chicago (2023); Greene Naftali, New York (2022); 321 Gallery, Brooklyn (2019); CAPITAL, San Francisco (2017); and Shoot the Lobster, New York (2017). Significant group shows include Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo (2022); MoMA PS1, New York (2021); Morán Morán, Mexico City (2021); Greene Naftali, New York (2020); Kai Matsumiya, New York (2019); Roberta Pelan, Toronto (2017); SculptureCenter, Queens (2016); and Division Gallery, Montreal (2016). Ford’s work is in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.