Virgil Abloh's Ojas Speaker at MCA Chicago

A custom horn speaker and a translucent turntable, installed as permanent art in a museum. The moment hi-fi became high art.

The Scene

In 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago opened "Figures of Speech," a career-spanning retrospective of Virgil Abloh's work across fashion, art, music, and design. The exhibit covered everything from his early screen-printed t-shirts to his tenure as artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear. But among the sneakers, the furniture prototypes, and the Off-White collections, one installation stopped visitors in their tracks.

On two white pedestals, spotlit in a gallery otherwise stripped to bare concrete and white walls, sat a custom Ojas 816 horn loudspeaker and a translucent Pioneer DJ turntable. The speaker — raw birch plywood, massive horn mouth, exposed compression driver — stood like a monolith. The turntable, its mechanism visible through a clear acrylic plinth, glowed with internal light. A record spun. Music played. The gear was the art.

The installation was a collaboration between Abloh and Devon Turnbull, documented by Surface Magazine and Hypebeast. It wasn't decorative. It was a functional sound system presented as a museum piece — collapsing the boundary between consumer electronics, sculpture, and listening experience.

The Gear

The speaker in the installation is a custom Ojas 816 — one of Turnbull's larger designs, featuring a horn-loaded cabinet built from Baltic birch plywood. The "816" designation refers to the driver configuration, which uses professional-grade compression drivers originally designed for cinema and live sound reinforcement. The cabinet is unfinished — raw wood, visible joinery, no veneer — consistent with Turnbull's philosophy that the construction is the finish.

Paired with it was a translucent Pioneer DJ turntable — a custom or limited-edition variant of Pioneer's professional DJ decks, modified with a clear acrylic plinth that exposes the motor, tonearm mechanism, and platter bearing. The visual effect is striking: you can see every component working as the record plays. The turntable was internally lit, adding to the sculptural quality.

Together, the two objects made an argument that audio equipment — designed honestly, built with care, presented without pretense — is as worthy of museum display as any painting or sculpture. For Abloh, who spent his career questioning the boundaries between disciplines, the installation was entirely on-brand.

The intersection of music, design, and art isn't a Venn diagram. It's the same circle.— Virgil Abloh (paraphrased from interviews)

Why It Matters

Virgil Abloh passed away in November 2021 at age 41, making the MCA installation — which remains on permanent display — one of his lasting artistic statements. It's also the most visible public display of an Ojas speaker anywhere in the world. Thousands of museum visitors encounter Turnbull's work every year without knowing his name, and a percentage of them go looking for what they saw.

The Pioneer DJ turntable connection matters commercially. Pioneer's PLX-1000 — the professional direct-drive deck that the translucent model is based on — is one of the most popular DJ turntables ever made and has a healthy secondary market. Vintage Technics SL-1200 MK2 decks, the industry standard that Pioneer designed the PLX-1000 to compete with, are even more sought-after.

Abloh's installation framed audio equipment as design objects worthy of permanent exhibition. For a site dedicated to the cultural significance of audio gear, that's the thesis statement.

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