Casey Kaplan
The New Yorker – Goings on about town
Kevin Beasley
By Jennifer Krasinski | July 5, 2023
At the heart of this prodigious show of sculptures by the thirty-eight-year-old artist is “In an effort to keep,” an audio installation built inside a small, enclosed room in the gallery. In Beasley’s hands, preservation is an act of perception, as full of grace as it is quixotic, even twisted. (I recall the gutting sight of hooded sweatshirts at once memorialized and mummified in resin in “A view of a landscape,” his 2018 exhibition at the Whitney Museum.) To create the sixteen-hour soundscape presented here, Beasley invited five performers—among them the choreographer-artist Ralph Lemon and the instrumentalist-composer L’Rain—to spend two days together, then recorded their conversations and the ambient noises of their shared space. One of the work’s many feats is how it casts its audience as both silent confidants and interlopers. All thoughts and feelings about what it means to eavesdrop on Black people will depend on who’s listening, and on what they think they overhear. Plan to sit and stay awhile.