Kevin Beasley: PROSCENIUM| Rebirth/Growth: The Watch/Harvest/Dormancy: On Reflection
May 7 – November 10, 2025
Photo by Jeffrey Jenkins
Kevin Beasley (b. Lynchburg, VA, 1985) explores the environmental, cultural, and political dimensions of the American landscape. With PROSCENIUM| Rebirth / Growth: The Watch / Harvest / Dormancy: On Reflection (2024–25), Beasley inaugurates Storm King’s new Tippet’s Field with his largest work to date, measuring one hundred feet long by eleven feet tall.
For this site-specific installation, four triptychs, each formed from three cast-resin slabs, represent the four seasons. Beasley renders each scene with gestural marks in resin, Sharpie, and various casting techniques. Densely layered clothing, plants, farm tools, and seeds form the earth and sky, which meet along a shifting horizon line. On the reverse, a varied topography reveals the artist’s unique method of layering resin and an assortment of collected materials inside the frame to create a three-dimensional composition. The resulting work contains layers of material memory, evoking strata of land. The installation’s curved form recalls that of a proscenium, the space in front of a theater curtain where performance and audience meet. Throughout his practice, Beasley engages sound and performance as a means of channeling the histories and lived experiences embedded in the American landscape. Set within Tippet’s Field, his multisensory work frames and reflects the surrounding landscape, engaging the viewer in a fully embodied experience of place.
For more than a century, Beasley’s family has owned land in Valentines, Virginia—a remarkable inheritance for a Black family and a lens through which the artist reflects on land stewardship, farming, and the legacies of colonialism. At Storm King, his engagement with the local landscape converses with and complicates the work of the Hudson River School, a group of artists who produced idealized landscape paintings in the nineteenth century. “Landscape is a word to ask questions around,” says Beasley. “For some folks it means freedom, and for others it means something you can’t access . . . [it] tells a deep story and speaks in ways that encourage us to absorb experiences.”
Kevin Beasley will activate the exhibition with a collaborative performance, Growth: The Watch, on Saturday, July 19, and Sunday, July 20. Please visit stormking.org for more information.
This exhibition is organized by Nora Lawrence, Executive Director, and Eric Booker, Associate Curator, with Adela Goldsmith, Assistant Curator.
This exhibition is made possible with major support by Roberta and Steven Denning, the Hazen Polsky Foundation, and the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, with lead support by Janet Benton and David Schunter, Jennifer Brorsen and Richard DeMartini, Agnes Gund, Lipman Family Foundation, and Samuel Freeman Charitable Trust, with support also provided by Regen Projects and supported in part by Candace Carmel Barasch, Allison and Larry Berg, and Girlfriend Fund.
This project is supported through a Market New York grant awarded by Empire State Development, and I LOVE NY, New York State’s Division of Tourism.
®I LOVE NEW YORK is a registered trademark and service mark of the New York State Department of Economic Development; used with permission.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
For this site-specific installation, four triptychs, each formed from three cast-resin slabs, represent the four seasons. Beasley renders each scene with gestural marks in resin, Sharpie, and various casting techniques. Densely layered clothing, plants, farm tools, and seeds form the earth and sky, which meet along a shifting horizon line. On the reverse, a varied topography reveals the artist’s unique method of layering resin and an assortment of collected materials inside the frame to create a three-dimensional composition. The resulting work contains layers of material memory, evoking strata of land. The installation’s curved form recalls that of a proscenium, the space in front of a theater curtain where performance and audience meet. Throughout his practice, Beasley engages sound and performance as a means of channeling the histories and lived experiences embedded in the American landscape. Set within Tippet’s Field, his multisensory work frames and reflects the surrounding landscape, engaging the viewer in a fully embodied experience of place.
For more than a century, Beasley’s family has owned land in Valentines, Virginia—a remarkable inheritance for a Black family and a lens through which the artist reflects on land stewardship, farming, and the legacies of colonialism. At Storm King, his engagement with the local landscape converses with and complicates the work of the Hudson River School, a group of artists who produced idealized landscape paintings in the nineteenth century. “Landscape is a word to ask questions around,” says Beasley. “For some folks it means freedom, and for others it means something you can’t access . . . [it] tells a deep story and speaks in ways that encourage us to absorb experiences.”
Kevin Beasley will activate the exhibition with a collaborative performance, Growth: The Watch, on Saturday, July 19, and Sunday, July 20. Please visit stormking.org for more information.
This exhibition is organized by Nora Lawrence, Executive Director, and Eric Booker, Associate Curator, with Adela Goldsmith, Assistant Curator.
This exhibition is made possible with major support by Roberta and Steven Denning, the Hazen Polsky Foundation, and the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, with lead support by Janet Benton and David Schunter, Jennifer Brorsen and Richard DeMartini, Agnes Gund, Lipman Family Foundation, and Samuel Freeman Charitable Trust, with support also provided by Regen Projects and supported in part by Candace Carmel Barasch, Allison and Larry Berg, and Girlfriend Fund.
This project is supported through a Market New York grant awarded by Empire State Development, and I LOVE NY, New York State’s Division of Tourism.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.