Brooklyn's Pageant Takes Over MoMA With a 25-Act Performance Marathon
On 21 August 2026, the Museum of Modern Art in New York handed its fourth-floor Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio over to a Brooklyn dance collective for a daylong marathon of 25 ten-minute performance works. The event, titled "Pageant Presents Pageant," was the finale of a residency that brought the grassroots energy of an East Williamsburg performance space — a venue styled in capital letters as PAGEANT — into one of the world's most visited museums. (Artnet)
PAGEANT is an artist-run, dance-focused performance space founded in 2022 by Sharleen Chidiac, Lili Dekker, Jade Manns, Owen Prum, and Alexa West. According to MoMA's exhibition page for the residency, the collective prioritizes art that is "rigorous, messy, and spectacular," encouraging experimentation and risk-taking. For the residency, the founders asked 20 artists from their network — all veterans of the Brooklyn space — to present ten-minute works, combining new pieces with excerpts of existing ones. (MoMA)
The result was a lineup that moved freely between the playful and the absurd. Chinese-born, U.S.-based artist Cherrie Yu contributed "Four Little Swans Study," in which four performers handled corn dogs while moving to a passage from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (1875–76). Blaze Ferrer's "No Service," performed with Charles Gowin and Paulina Menesen, also featured in the marathon. Both works were reported by Artnet on 25 August 2026. (Artnet)
MoMA's official event listing described the marathon as 25 short pieces that invited viewers to drop in and out, experiencing the lineup at their own pace. The Kravis Studio — a glass-walled performance space on the museum's fourth floor, designed for live programming — served as the container for a format more commonly found in small Brooklyn venues than in a major institutional setting. (MoMA)
What makes the pairing click is the contrast. A collective that has been running for only four years, operating out of a single East Williamsburg room, brought its catalogue of short-form performance — the kind of work that typically lives in warehouses and artist-run spaces — to a museum whose collection spans more than a century. The residency format let MoMA frame risk-taking and messiness not as a departure from institutional programming but as a temporary extension of it.
The 25-act, ten-minutes-each structure kept the pace brisk. Visitors could arrive mid-marathon, stay for a few pieces, and leave. That drop-in model, standard for fringe performance festivals, is less typical inside a museum whose galleries operate on a quieter register — and the Kravis Studio's glass walls let passersby on the fourth floor catch fragments without committing to the full day.
Whether the format travels beyond this residency, or stays a one-off exchange between a Brooklyn space and a Manhattan museum, is not yet clear. What the marathon did establish is that a four-year-old, artist-run collective can fill MoMA's programming calendar — 25 acts deep — on its own terms.
