Jamaal Peterman’s DJ Booth Design

Some trivia for you Warm-Up-heads: Each year as part of our signature music series, we invite different artists to design the stage for the performers, a nod to the many cross-disciplinary exchanges among MoMA PS1’s community of artists. For Summer Fridays, our curated series of DJ sets this August, we continued the tradition with a specially designed DJ booth wrap by artist Jamaal Peterman. The design maps out the museum’s complex ecosystem in relation to the surrounding geography of Long Island City and New York. The banner beside the booth also responds to our space, rhyming with the schoolhouse windows punched into the brick walls that frame the Courtyard. The additional layer of pulsing sound provided by the music series creates a fourth dimension for Jamaal’s ephemeral installation—transforming both set pieces into a sonic relay for shared rhythms.

Below, take a look at Jamaal’s paintings, which enliven the hard surfaces of urban life—brick, concrete, stucco, pavement—dramatizing scenery that might otherwise be perceived as bleak, brutal, or worse yet, drab. His sharp geometries and bold color-blocking distort the boundary between internal and external, providing new perspectives on the built environment and existing urban systems