Back in 2018, Kevin Beasley made one of my favorite exhibitions I’ve seen in the last ten years - A View of a Landscape.  In a room on the top floor of the Whitney Museum was a giant steel and glass vitrine that housed a rehabilitated cotton gin, whirring non-stop, it’s connecting wires exiting the vitrine, confirming its signs of life.  Despite the activity, the room was soundless.  The vitrine had been made perfectly sound proof.  I remember seeing this screaming relic of American History and feeling its muteness, its voice snatched.  Outside the room were large, colorful slabs of cotton fabric formed into upright, freestanding sculptural walls, alluding to histories of bass relief sculpture, as much as to color field abstraction.  The room adjacent to the muted motor, was a listening space, activated routinely by collaborators and friends such as Taja Cheek, Eli Keszler, and others.  

For those who wrestle with abstraction, with what it means to take something that has highly specific histories and to move them “elsewhere”, Kevin is an artist for you think deeply about and with. The tension between place and flight, situatedness and departure, context and escape, have long been the genetic buttresses that helix his multifaceted practice together. Through sound, installation, drawing, and even his own way into painting, Kevin has marked a philosophical territory that is all his own. Kevin’s work asks: How do you honor place without becoming a prisoner of it?

For all his rigor, Kevin is wonderfully easy to talk to. He is as kind as he is thoughtful. His eyes are piercing, his smile disarming. He is someone who has worked so hard to build in a multivalent way that I want to know his plans for the future, because I believe that sculpture and exhibitions probably only play one part of it. I want to know what it’s taken to get this far - what the surprises have been. I want to give Kevin a sounding board for us to feel out the conversation together, so that we can find our place, and hopefully let the conversation fly from there.

Please join us on October 13th for the next Forum Talk with Kevin Beasley.

About the Artist
Kevin Beasley (b. 1985) is a New York–based artist whose work across sculpture, sound, and performance draws on the materials of the Black American experience. Rooted in his upbringing in Lynchburg, Virginia, his practice turns to the American South, the histories of land and labor, and the ways objects hold personal and collective memory. Sound is central to his work, treated as a material in its own right.

Institutional highlights for Beasley include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Storm King Art Center, the Whitney Biennial, the Gwangju Biennale, the Liverpool Biennial, and Performa. He was shortlisted for the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize, and his work is held in collections including MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, SFMOMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Tate Modern. His most recent solo exhibition, All I thought / I love, was on view at Casey Kaplan in New York early this year 2026. Beasley received his BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and graduated from Yale University with an MFA in 2012.