MOCA - Erik Brunetti Foundation for the Arts

Art in the Streets: MOCA Installation

Lost (Black Female). Original mixed-media installation constructed from collected printed materials. First exhibited at OK Harris, New York (1996); later featured in Art in the Streets, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (2011). Privately held.

This site-specific work was included in MOCA’s landmark 2011 exhibition Art in the Streets. It featured Erik Brunetti’s monumental assemblage Lost (Black Female)—a visual field composed of hundreds of found Xerox copies of lost-animal flyers. These fragments of urban ephemera were collected over years of street-level documentation and graffiti writing.

The work presents a raw vernacular portrait of civic emotion. Each flyer becomes a dispatch of absence, lament, and public hope. Brunetti interprets these documents not as aesthetic gestures, but as unfiltered expressions of emotional necessity. Assembled at immersive scale, the work translates individual acts of longing into a collective visual dirge.

Curatorial Notes:

– Medium: Found Xerox flyers

– Dimensions: Variable / site-specific

– First exhibited: OK Harris, NYC (1996)

– MOCA presentation: Art in the Streets, 2011

– Collection status: Documentation held; physical installation not extant

– Availability: Eligible for institutional reconstruction or research access by inquiry

This work exemplifies the Foundation’s mission to preserve ephemeral cultural forms that fuse emotional immediacy with conceptual permanence—bridging the urgency of lived experience with the architecture of memory.