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JACK SHAINMAN - Radcliffe Bailey

842 views · Published 17 January 2014 · 4:38 · Indexed 8 November 2026

Channel: NYC GALLERY OPENINGS · 2014 · Entertainment

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Radcliffe Bailey
Maroons

January 16th - February 15th, 2014
Opening: January 16th 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM


Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce Maroons, an exhibition 
of new works by Radcliffe Bailey. Bronze, steel, wood, rubber, paint, 
soil, glass and found objects are among the many materials Bailey 
employs in his multidisciplinary practice.

Moving primarily between the mediums of sculpture and painting, 
Bailey explores the complexity of history, memory and contemporary 
identity. Referencing the Maroon communities of escaped African 
slaves who traveled throughout the Americas to form free settlements 
as a means to probe diasporic displacement and migration, he builds 
material for new narratives and projections of the past.

In Clotilde, Bailey layers shapes and cutouts of ladders, train tracks, 
paddles and machetes under heavy coats of black sand, conjuring tools 
and symbols of resistance and movement. A spherical piece of coral 
marks the site of a heavy directional pull, at once making inference to 
the deep sea, specifically the Trans-Atlantic waters, land and the 
galactic expanse of a sparkling sky. Bailey uses the seductive beauty of 
the object as a point of entry into an entanglement of narratives.
Pensive is a bronze sculpture of writer, scholar and activist W.E.B. Du 
Bois sitting on roughly cut blocks of wood in the position of Auguste 
Rodin's iconic work The Thinker. It is a meditation on "double 
consciousness," a term coined in the section titled "Of Our Spiritual 
Strivings" in Du Bois' seminal work, "The Souls of Black Folk," that 
describes a second sense of self that is seen through the eyes of others. 
Like a Blues musician, Bailey weaves together an amalgamation of the 
spiritual, cathartic, prophetic and devotional.

Bailey describes his process of working as a simultaneous exploration 
into the past, present and future. Using elegant formalism as a 
mechanism to address questions of social and historical concerns, he 
employs what Carol Thompson describes in "Memory as Medicine" as 
an aesthetic action with a poetic resonance.

Radcliffe Bailey lives and works in Atlanta, GA. A solo traveling 
exhibition of his work, Memory as Medicine, was exhibited at the High 
Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2011). It then traveled to the Davis 
Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; and the 
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. Other selected exhibitions 
include Du Bois In Our Time, University Museum of Contemporary Art, 
University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2013); Neo-HooDoo, organized 
by The Menil Collection, Houston, TX, at Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL 
(2009); and traveled to MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City, NY (2009); 
Radcliffe Bailey, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH (2007); and 
New/Now: Radcliffe Bailey, New Britain Museum of American Art, New 
Britain, CT (2004). Bailey's work is included in the collections of the 
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Smithsonian Museum 
of American Art, Washington, D.C.; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 
Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Nelson-
Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; and the High Museum of Art, 
Atlanta, GA among others. Maroons will be Bailey's sixth solo show at 
the gallery.

Music by:
Chill Carrier - A New Day

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