Kevin Beasley
b. 1985, Lynchburg, Virginia
Lives in New York
Venues
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, Closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
1741 Forstall Street
1741 Forstall Street, New Orleans, LA 70117
neighborhoods
Downtown / Central Business District (CBD)
About the Project
Kevin Beasley’s work is featured in two Prospect.5 venues, the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) and at property in New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward. Each location holds related parts of an expansive project centered on the purchase of a plot of land in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, an important site for Black life and culture in the city. The project is an outgrowth of time spent on the ground in the city and an extension of the artist’s interest in land stewardship and landscape.
Each of the five drawings on view at the CAC depicts property in the Lower Ninth Ward. They are detailed, handmade translations of photographs the artist took that document these sites. The casual snapshot quality of the images stands in contrast to the intricate, carefully attentive drawings. They are, like the landscapes they show, both quotidian and profound. They simultaneously show us common places and reflect the greater meaning of land ownership and all it can signify for a person––a space of potential, investment, and community. Like many works on view here, the drawings reveal how the physical act of making something is also a way of learning and knowing.
About the artist
Kevin Beasley received a BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit (2007), and an MFA from Yale School of Art (2012). Spanning sculpture, photography, sound and performance, the core of Beasley’s practice rests in the synthesis of objects and materials steeped in personal and generational memory. In gathering clothing, objects, sounds, and studio happenings, Beasley generates a material history—one that is altered, molded, cast, and rebuilt. The artist draws from sculptural tradition through a lens of his own physicality, allowing found materials of personal and cultural significance to regenerate, existing simultaneously as they were and as they will become. His work has been exhibited in recent years at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018–2019); The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018); The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2018); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016–17); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2016); The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015); and MoMA PS1, New York (2015). He has held residences at the Studio Museum in Harlem; Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva Island, Florida; Delfina Foundation, London; and A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa.
Kevin Beasley, 2021–22. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee.