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(b. 1985)

Kevin Beasley is a Virginia-born, New York-based artist who works across sculpture, performance, and sound. The beginning of his career in the early 2010s coincided with the growing presence of ephemeral media in the museum. In his sculptural works, found materials like Air Jordans, military uniforms, and raw Virginia cotton become conduits for explorations of land, race, and embodiment in the American South and beyond. His contribution to the Renaissance Society’s 2016 group exhibition Between the Ticks of the Watch, for example—an exhibition that considered “doubt as both state of mind and pragmatic tool” at the end of the Obama presidency—reinterpreted objects of state violence through its use of police equipment like megaphones and gas masks.