The Brooklyn Rail

The twelve-foot bronze of a Black man in a hoodie and sweatpants commands attention; viewers can’t quite meet his steely gaze and his personhood feels accessible and opaque all at once. Thomas J Price’s Within the Folds (Dialogue 1) (2025) is not quite the first sculpture that greets viewers in the gallery, but it is the tallest. With Resilience of Scale, Price has assembled five of his immense bronzes—three women and two men, each a Black person, unconcerned in their own way with the world around them. These bronzes are immediately striking not only for their size, but also for their casual attire and relaxed postures. Composites of figures who one might glimpse on the street, they call to mind the quotidian textures of Blackness. Note, however, that I do not say represent. Though these might be said to be portraits, they are of fictional people alerting us to but one of the complications around representation that Price is enacting.

It would be easy to argue, for example, that Price is elevating the status of everyday Black people to the monumental with these works. The details on the sculptures, which have been produced through a combination of digital sculpting and lost-wax casting techniques, are breathtaking. In the gallery, one can get close enough to Within the Folds (Dialogue 1) (2025), to see the elastic ribbing on the bottom of the figure’s joggers as well as the slight bulge that might be a phone in his back pocket. Similar attention to As Sounds Turn to Noise (2023) reveals the fabric folds and skin indentations that suggest the snug fit of exercise attire and intricate waist-length braids. These details situate the sculptures in the contemporary moment—we recognize fashions and orientations to technology (several subjects are holding their phones)—making space for visions of contemporary Black people at ease in the world, and connecting the viewer to the sculptures. They make palpable the ways in which Price is constructing a version of vernacular Black life that is unspectacular yet valued.

Yet, there are uncomfortable tensions around the presence of Blackness in a public space that Price also explores. First, there is the question of matter. Here, I don’t exactly mean bronze as a material but the way that these bronzes occupy space. Unlike many other large-scale sculptures, these bronzes do not sit on plinths, they stand on their own two feet, and they do so in their own idiosyncratic ways—bearing more weight on one leg or hip, turning away, or tensing with anticipation. Aggregated, these differences say something about gendered modes of standing while also inviting contemplation of what it is to distill what is usually a fluid set of movements into one still and enduring posture. Disparate ways of standing become suggestive of alternate ways of moving through the world and different forms of liveliness, all of which Price captures and each of which invites us to imagine worlds for these imaginary subjects. Importantly, these moments of projection are emblematic of the way that Price has arranged for viewers to produce their own intimacy with the sculptures, a process that becomes further complicated when we consider the relations that are permitted in the absence of the plinth, which removes yet another barrier between viewers and the sculptures. Most immediately, this proximity to the sculptures allows visitors to make comparisons to their own bodies or those of people that they know. It enables closer study (and though the prohibition exists, the desire to touch persists); and, in these ways, it makes the bronzes vulnerable. One does not quite know what kind of emotion or action they will incite. On the one hand, this uncertainty allows for a certain frisson in the air. One is not only looking at the bronzes but also looking at how others approach them to imagine what kinds of connections they are making. On the other hand, given the burden of expectations that public Black bodies are given to bear, this accessibility can incite anxiety that these sculptures will hold up a terrifying mirror to the world around us. In these ways, I think we might perhaps consider the explicit fictional status of these subjects and the impossibility of making eye contact with them to be Price’s way of providing a modicum of protection via the workings of opacity for the sculptures, even as they may be meant to provoke.

This question of activation hovers around the exhibition. Price’s sculptures are usually installed individually, outside in public spaces where they might more easily be stumbled upon by people who are not specifically looking for art but who may be going about their everyday lives. The chance that a woman in a sports bra and leggings will find a particular type of connection with a sculpture of the same, perhaps introduces an aura of the surreal because the largeness of the sculpture is felt more viscerally. A component of the unexpected is also galvanized when these sculptures touch dirt and become part of the landscape—grass might grow around their feet, small animals might climb upon them—they become lively in a way that is impossible in a gallery. The sculptures’ other lives and other publics haunt the current installation, offering insight into what these more unruly possibilities might be. But seeing these sculptures together as a group invites its own distinct set of questions—might they be bringing these other places and other futures into the conversation? More pertinently, what kinds of conversations might they be having above everyone’s heads? And, what might it mean to imagine but never be able to know?