Jason Moran’s “STACKS” at Luhring Augustine, New York: Two Pianos, One Tower of Jazz History

What does a jazz chord look like when the room has gone quiet? Jason Moran has been answering that question for years, and his newest attempt is literally towering. Jason Moran’s “STACKS” at Luhring Augustine in New York — his third solo exhibition with the Chelsea gallery, on view from 6 November to 19 December 2026 — places two small upright parlor pianos one on top of the other and asks us to look at the instrument as a building, a family heirloom and a monument all at once.

A musician who thinks like a sculptor

Moran, born in Houston in 1975, is best known to most audiences as a pianist and composer: leader of the trio The Bandwagon on Blue Note, founder of the label Yes Records, a 2010 MacArthur Fellow and, from 2011 to 2025, Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center. But for more than a decade he has also built a parallel career as a visual artist. A 2018 survey that began at the Walker Art Center travelled to ICA Boston, the Wexner Center and the Whitney, and his project Black Stars: Writing in the Dark was on view at Mass MoCA from 2022. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.

What links the two careers is a fascination with the relationship between music and language — and with the objects, gestures and histories that carry jazz from one generation to the next. Moran works the way improvisers do: in dialogue with predecessors, testing a phrase, letting the result surprise him.

The stacked pianos: domestic object, monumental form

The parlor upright is the most ordinary of pianos — the one in the living room, in the church hall, in the rehearsal room where so many jazz musicians first learned to play. By mirroring and inverting two of them into a single vertical column, Moran turns that familiar instrument into what the gallery describes as “a monumental architectural form.” The gesture is simple, but it carries a lot. A stack implies accumulation: generations of players resting on the shoulders of earlier ones, the weight of a tradition that is passed down rather than invented from nothing. It also makes the piano unplayable in the usual way, shifting attention from sound to structure.

Drawing with the keyboard

The works on paper may prove the most intimate part of the show. Moran coats a piano keyboard in powdered pigment and presses it onto thin Japanese Gampi paper — a fibre prized for its strength and translucency. Each sheet keeps a record of a performance: its tempo, its pressure, its hesitations. Chords register as clusters of colour; repeated figures build into dense passages; rests remain as open, untouched paper. For painters, this is an elegant reversal of the old ideal of “visual music”: instead of a painter imagining sound, a musician lets sound leave its own trace.

Ephemera and a new film

Moran also brings objects from his personal collection of jazz memorabilia into the gallery. Among them, according to the gallery, are a handmade flag connected to the Harlem Hellfighters — the Black infantry regiment whose band helped introduce jazz to Europe during the First World War — and a sheet of Thelonious Monk postage stamps. These are not decorative props; they anchor the sculptural and printed work in a specific social history. Completing the installation is a new video by photographer and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos, made in collaboration with Moran, which explores the textures of sound and image together.

Luhring Augustine and the Chelsea context

Luhring Augustine has represented Moran for several years, and “STACKS” is his third solo presentation there. The gallery’s West 24th Street space sits in the heart of Chelsea’s blue-chip block, so the show is easy to fold into a wider November gallery walk. Its timing is also notable: the season in New York is crowded with painting, and a show built around instruments, pigment and archival material offers a different rhythm.

Why it matters

• For collectors: unique pigment works on paper and sculpture by an artist whose museum profile — Walker, Whitney, Mass MoCA — keeps growing.
• For painters and printmakers: a rigorous example of indexical mark-making, where the gesture of performance itself becomes the image.
• For music lovers: a rare chance to see jazz history handled as material — objects, structures and traces rather than recordings.

Visiting information

Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011. 6 November – 19 December 2026; opening reception Thursday 5 November, 6–8pm. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–6pm. Phone +1 212 206 9100, email [email protected]. See our Jason Moran: STACKS listing, the official Luhring Augustine exhibition page, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.