Summer 2026 Midnight Moment Program

Sonia Boyce, Transform, 2026. Video still courtesy of the artist.

Featuring Sonia Boyce (June), Tromarama (July), and Maia Chao (August)

Nightly from 11:57pm–12am
Times Square | Between 41st and 49th Streets

Times Square Arts, the largest public platform for contemporary performance and visual arts, is pleased to announce its Midnight Moment Summer 2026 Season featuring works by multidisciplinary artists Sonia Boyce (June), Tromarama (July), and Maia Chao (August). 

Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running public digital art exhibition, synchronized on nearly 100 electronic billboards throughout Times Square, nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. The Summer 2026 program includes a kaleidoscopic portrayal of movements guided by the ancestral principles of sun energy and animals represented throughout Andean cosmology; an examination of how technology reshapes every day experience, alters our sense of reality, and mediates our relationship with the environment; and a choreographic score of public behavior in one of the world’s most iconic and most photographed urban spaces. 

Sonia Boyce | Transform
Presented in partnership with the Queens Museum
June 1–30, 2026 | Nightly 11:57–Midnight

Presented in partnership with the Queens Museum on the occasion of her commissioned installation Demonstrate, Sonia Boyce presents Transform. The film features fellow artist Koyoltzintli performing a series of Andean ancestral movements centered on absorbing the sun’s energy sharing embodied knowledge that connects us to animal relatives across three spheres: the condor in the sky world, the ocelot in the earth world, and the snake in the subterranean world. Transform points simultaneously in two directions: the transformative intentions of symbolic rituals, and the way that the moving image itself can shapeshift and take on an otherworldly quality through repeated pattern as transmutation. 

Exploring the power of repetition, mirroring, and geometry, Boyce’s film embarks on an exploration of the sensorial impact of kaleidoscopic movement.

Tromarama | Turn On #2
Presented in partnership with The Kitchen
July 1–31, 2026 | Nightly 11:57–Midnight

Indonesian art collective Tromarama’s Turn On #2 examines how technology reshapes everyday experience, alters our sense of reality, and meditates our relationship with the environment. The work unfolds as a continuous, choreographed loop in which electric fans appear to activate shifting images and familiar scenes from daily life. What initially feels like a clear chain of cause and effect slowly unravels, disrupting expectations shaped by lived experience and raising questions about memory, association, and authenticity in a hyper-connected world. By positioning the screen as a site of continuous negotiation, Turn On #2 reflects on how contempo­rary technologies collapse distinctions between the real and the digital. Across a sequence of interconnect­ed scenes, the work foregrounds how identity, memory, and meaning are increasingly mediated, circulated, and reassembled, re­vealing a reality that is perpetually in motion-produced through systems we both inhabit and attempt to control.

The video is presented in partnership with The Kitchen, where the collective uses video, installation, and algorithmic processes to investigate the boundaries between virtual and physical worlds. The project traces how information, images, and sound move across digital and physical networks, reflecting on the entanglements of technology, consumer culture, and daily life; they highlight how intelligent systems shape the way we see, listen, and participate.

Maia Chao | Studies for American Idle
August 1–31, 2026 | Nightly 11:57–Midnight

Studies for American Idle presents material from an hour-long, site-specific performance staged in the plazas of Times Square in 2025. The choreography draws from two sources: the everyday movements of tourists in Times Square and the looping gestures of 3D figures animated in crowd-simulation software—tools used to predict and regulate how people move through public space. Moving between these two registers, the work blurs the line between spontaneous action and conditioned behavior.

Studies for American Idle examines how collective behavior is shaped by visibility. Under the ever-present camera of contemporary spectacle, one’s experience is performed as much as it is lived, and individuality blurs into type. As gestures from the plaza appear on billboards, the work introduces another layer of mediation, feeding source material back to its environment. Studies for American Idle explores the copy as an increasingly pervasive condition of—and threat to—contemporary life, while also tracing the human impulse to mimic, resemble, and belong.

ABOUT SONIA BOYCE 
Sonia Boyce (DBE, RA) is an interdisciplinary artist working across film, drawing, photography, print, sound, and installation. In 2022, she presented FEELING HER WAY, a major commission for the British Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Boyce came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning Black Arts Movement with figurative pastel drawings and photocollages that addressed issues of race and gender in Britain. Since the 1990s, Boyce has shifted significantly to embrace a wider social practice that invites improvisation, collaboration, movement, and sound with other people.

In 2016, Boyce was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London and in 2023, she was elected as an Honorary Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Science in Boston. In 2014, she became a Professor at University of the Arts London, where she holds the inaugural Chair in Black Art & Design. In the 2024 King’s New Year Honour’s List, Boyce was awarded a Damehood. Her works are held in many UK and international museum collections including TATE, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Arts Council Collection of England, London; British Council, London; Government Art Collection, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington.

ABOUT THE QUEENS MUSEUM
The Queens Museum is dedicated to presenting the highest quality visual arts and educational programming for people in the New York metropolitan area, and particularly for the residents of Queens, a uniquely diverse, ethnic, cultural, and international community. The Museum fulfills its mission by designing and providing art exhibitions, public programs and educational experiences that promote the appreciation and enjoyment of art, support the creative efforts of artists, and enhance the quality of life through interpreting, collecting, and exhibiting art, architecture, and design. 

The Queens Museum presents artistic and educational programs and exhibitions that directly relate to the contemporary urban life of its constituents, while maintaining the highest standards of professional, intellectual, and ethical responsibility.

ABOUT TROMARAMA 
Tromarama is an artist collective founded in 2006 by Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans, and Ruddy Hatumena. Using wit and humor, they explore how digital technology blurs the line between what is real and what is virtual, and how people connect across physical and online spaces. Their work combines video, installa­tion, and computer programming to examine how digital media shapes everyday behavior and perception. They live and work between Jakarta and Bandung, Indonesia. 

ABOUT THE KITCHEN
Founded in 1971 as an artist-driven collective, The Kitchen today reaffirms and expands upon its originating vision as a dynamic cultural institution that centers artists, prioritizes people, and puts process first. Programming in a kunsthalle model that brings together live performances, exhibition making, and public programming under one roof, The Kitchen empowers its audiences and communities to think creatively and radically about what it means to shape a multivalent and sustainable future in art. The Kitchen seeks to cultivate and hold space for wild thought, risky play, and innovative and experimental making, encouraging artists and cultural workers alike to defy boundaries and sending them into the world to remake art history and catalyze creative change. Among the artists who have presented significant work at The Kitchen are Muhal Richard Abrams, Laurie Anderson, ANOHNI, Robert Ashley, Charles Atlas, Kevin Beasley, Beastie Boys, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Julius Eastman, Philip Glass, Leslie Hewitt, Darius Jones, Joan Jonas, Bill T. Jones, Devin Kenny, Barbara Kruger, Simone Leigh, Ralph Lemon, George Lewis, Robert Longo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sarah Michelson, Tere O’Connor, Okwui Okpokwasili, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Sondra Perry, Vernon Reid, Arthur Russell, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Spiegel, Talking Heads, Greg Tate, Cecil Taylor, Urban Bush Women, Danh Vō, Lawrence Weiner, Anicka Yi, and many more. Website: thekitchen.org Instagram: @TheKitchen_NYC 

ABOUT MAIA CHAO
Maia Chao is an artist who works collaboratively in performance, film, and social practice. She is co-creator of the social practice project, Look at Art. Get Paid (2015-20) with Josephine Devanbu, which piloted at the RISD Museum. She has since made collaborative works with artists Ethan Philbrick, Fred Schmidt-Arenales, and Ree Bradley. Chao has created commissioned films and performances for the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, The Shed, and MoMA Education. Her work has been presented at the Bronx Museum, Cuchifritos Gallery, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Boston Center for the Arts, Tufts University Art Galleries, Smack Mellon, and Oregon Contemporary. She has completed fellowships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center, Pioneer Works, and Queer|Art. In 2022, she was named a Pew Fellow and in 2023, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Based in Philadelphia, Chao is an artist-member of the art collective and DIY space, Vox Populi. She holds a BA from Brown University, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently full time faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

ABOUT TIMES SQUARE ARTS
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world’s most iconic urban places. Through the Square’s electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance’s own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators, such as Charles Gaines, Joan Jonas, Jeffrey Gibson, Pamela Council, Mel Chin and Kehinde Wiley, to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a cultural district and place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the arts program ensures these qualities remain central to the district’s unique identity.

Support for Midnight Moment is provided in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; and the Times Square Advertising Coalition.

Midnight Moment is made possible by the Times Square Advertising Coalition, ABC SuperSign, American Eagle, Big Outdoor, Branded Cities, Clear Channel, Coca-Cola, Diversified, Express, Heritage Outdoor Media, KEVANI, Levi’s, LG, Line Friends, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Midtown Financial, Morgan Stanley, New Tradition, Outfront, Paramount, Prudential, RXR, Sensory Interactive, Sephora, Sherwood Equities, Show + Tell, Silvercast, Swatch, TSX, and T-Mobile.