Nyugen E. Smith: The Armory Show, Platform

In recent years we have seen the dismantling, defacing, and replacement of public monuments as a central tactic to decolonizing strategies that look to challenge the glorification of figures and events related to histories of slavery and racism, the attempted extermination of indigenous populations and appropriation of their lands, and the subjugation of women.

These displaced monuments have traditionally been sculptural and figurative in style, depicting their subjects in portrait or allegorical formats. The 2022 Platform section of The Armory Show addresses how these recent revisionist practices, which are part of dramatic cultural shifts occurring throughout the world, are influencing artists’ engagement with sculptural form. The selection seeks to raise questions about how contemporary sculpture and large-scale installations might tell historicizing narratives. It asks: What subjects might we collectively look to venerate now? With which materials? And in what form?

Many of the works presented engage aesthetics historically associated with monuments in critical ways, others celebrate personal subjectivities as counterpoints to grand political narratives. Additional projects use soft or ephemeral materials as anti-monumental gestures, while still others look to specifically present women and nature as subjects deserving honor and commemoration.

Monuments to human ingenuity in the face of political and environmental catastrophes, Nyugen E. Smith’s totem-like sculptures reference shelters built by displaced migrants, refugees, and hurricane survivors. They are models of bricolage houses constructed using whatever resources can be found at hand—what families manage to bring with them, scavenge for near camps, or find left after a natural disaster. These Bundlehouses speak to the capricious circumstances, tenuousness, and overall fragility of both life and home within the contemporary world. The artist’s diverse practice examines universal experiences of memory, trauma, and spirituality within the multifarious impacts of colonialism on the African diaspora. Informed by his personal history as a first-generation Caribbean-American born in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Haitian and Trinidadian parents, Smith’s works seek to connect past upheavals with present political struggles. – Tobias Ostrander