“Home is stage, stage is home.” —Moki Cherry
Step inside The Living Temple—a vibrant retrospective celebrating the boundary‑breaking Swedish artist Moki Cherry (1943–2009), whose life was her canvas. From colorful textiles, costumes, and posters to ceramics, video, and sound, Moki’s work dissolves the line between home and stage, art and everyday life.
Moki Cherry began her decades-long career as a practicing artist in the mid-1960s, living and working between Sweden and New York until her death in 2009. Moki’s collaborations with her partner, legendary composer Don Cherry, turned ordinary spaces into joyful happenings—art that moved, sang, and celebrated life as a creative act. Beginning in the 1960s, and continuing for nearly two decades, their alliance entwined music, theater, performance, and art in experimental ways, forging hybrid audiovisual spectacles brimming with life and social consciousness. They coined the terms “Movement Incorporated” and “Organic Music,” evoking both new experiences and their roots in the natural world. Together, they challenged hierarchies embedded within contemporary music and art and created a total experience that defied genre.
Shaped by an itinerant life, Moki’s work integrated global artistic traditions without being confined to a singular cultural lineage. Explore Moki’s radical vision through tapestries, paintings and drawings, concert posters, clothing and costumes, sculpture, music, video, and archival materials. Discover how the artist’s collaborative and disruptive model of working fluidly across materials and sensibilities transformed unremarkable spaces into extraordinary settings.
Complementing The Living Temple is new work by Chicago-based artist Lisa Alvarado, whose approach to artmaking and music shares affinities with Moki’s. Alvarado is known for her free-hanging abstract textile paintings that function as both artworks and mobile stage sets for musical performances by her band, Natural Information Society (NIS). Working in residence with the FWM Studio, Alvarado will develop new works on fabric for an immersive environment, presented alongside a season of live performances curated by Ars Nova Workshop.
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