EventsThe New Social Environment#173

Monuments Now: Jeffrey Gibson, Paul Ramírez Jonas, and Xaviera Simmons

Friday, November 13, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Artists in the Socrates Sculpture Park exhibition Xaviera Simmons, Jeffrey Gibson, and Paul Ramírez Jonas will join curator Jess Wilcox to discuss the role of monuments in society and commemorate underrepresented narratives such as diasporic, Indigenous, and queer histories. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from writer, organizer, and educator Jive Poetic.

In this Talk

In this turbulent moment when we find ourselves reevaluating American identity and values, the MONUMENTS NOW exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park seeks to address the role of monuments in society and commemorate underrepresented narratives such as diasporic, Indigenous, and queer histories.

MONUMENTS NOW evolves over three cumulative parts. Part I opens opens summer 2020 with major new commissions for contemporary monuments by acclaimed artists Jeffrey Gibson, Paul Ramírez Jonas, and Xaviera Simmons. Then Part II and Part III of the exhibition open together on October 10, 2020. Part II encompasses ten monument sculptures by the Park’s 2020 Artist Fellows and Part III features a multi-faceted monument project collectively realized by high school students. All three parts of the exhibition remain on view through March 2021.

In response to MONUMENTS NOW, the Park’s Broadway Billboard will also feature a monuments-related artwork by artist Nona Faustine. Furthermore, in acknowledgment of how monuments are shaped by society as well as by artists, the public is invited to share their reactions on-site and online over the course of the exhibition.

The exhibition will be documented in an artist-focused publication made possible by the Henry Luce Foundation.

MONUMENTS NOW is organized by Socrates Sculpture Park and curated by Jess Wilcox, Socrates Curator & Director of Exhibitions.

Find out more or plan a visit: https://socratessculpturepark.org/monuments-now/

Jeffrey Gibson

Photo: Brian Barlow

Based in Hudson NY, interdisciplinary artist Jeffrey Gibson is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent. Raised in Europe, Asia and the United States, Gibson developed an interest in notions of cultural translations and the relationship between difference and desire. Remixing and redefining histories of struggle and freedom, his installations and performances especially cultivate shared social spaces of reflection and release. In 2024, he was the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States in a solo presentation at the Venice Biennale.

Paul Ramírez Jonas

Portrait drawing of Paul Ramírez Jonas by Phong H. Bui

Paul Ramírez Jonas was born in Pomona, California in 1965 and raised in Honduras. Educated at Brown University and RISD, Ramírez Jonas, now lives and works in Brooklyn. Over the last twenty-five years Ramírez Jonas has created works that range from large-scale public installations and monumental sculptures to intimate drawings, performances and videos. Through his practice he seeks to challenge definitions of art and the public, engineering active audience participation and exchange. Multiples based on everyday objects such as coins also are a reoccurring motif, allowing the artist to question notions of value, circulation, and societal rituals or behaviors. He is an Associate Professor at Hunter College and is represented Galeria Nara Roesler.

Xaviera Simmons

Portrait of Xaviera Simmons by Phong Bui

Xaviera Simmons’s body of work spans photography, performance, video, sound, sculpture and installation. She defines her studio practice, which is rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, abstraction, present and future histories-specifically shifting notions surrounding landscape-as cyclical rather than linear. In other words, Simmons is committed equally to the examination of different artistic modes and processes; for example, she may dedicate part of a year to photography, another part to performance, and other parts to installation, video, and sound works-keeping her practice in constant and consistent rotation, shift, and engagement.

Jess Wilcox

Jess Wilcox is the Curator & Director of Exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park where she has curated several group and solo exhibitions including ‘Chronos Cosmos: Deep Time, Open Space’; Virginia Overton: ‘Built’; ‘Nari Ward: G.O.A.T., again’; ’The Socrates Annual’ exhibitions; and the Folly/Function architectural competition. From 2011-2015 she worked at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, organizing public programs and public artworks including Agitprop!, an exhibition of historical and contemporary political art. Wilcox has a BA from Barnard College and a Master’s degree from Bard CCS.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

https://www.daostrom.com/

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨