John Cage passed away while working on this exhibition project, in planning for three years with MOCA curator Julie Lazar. Rolywholyover A Circus comprised a composition, or score, based on chance operations. Of its three sections, one presented works selected at random from local museums; one featured watercolors, musical scores, and other works by Cage; and one pulled from a list of artworks, each selected by Cage or Lazar for its relevance to the artist’s life, using a computerized function based on the I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes). Artists in the latter section included William Anastasi, Dove Bradshaw, Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman, and Robert Rauschenberg, many of whom were collected by Cage himself. Rolywholyover A Circus traveled to The Menil Collection, Houston; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Art Tower Mito Contemporary Art Center, Japan; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue.
Rolywholyover A Circus was organized by Julie Lazar, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.