Kevin Beasley (b. 1985 Lynchburg) is a New York-based artist whose work and performances have been shown internationally. His practice engages history and cultural nuance through diverse media, including sculpture, sound and performance. Since 2012, these works have been developed as process-lead explorations in which materials, audio and residue are altered, cast, distorted and rebuilt. Specifically, his approach to sound ruptures the auditory, implicating the body. As Thomas Lax writes in Artforum, “Beasley’s absenting presence—presence as voice, as indexical mark, presence that may be active and collective or haunted, spectral, and deferred—strategically negotiates the reality of being an embodied subject who cannot elide the dangers of subjection or its historical and political specificities.”
In recent years, Beasley has exhibited his work at institutions and site-specific venues such as Tate Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial (2018); Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, MA (solo) (2018); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, as part of Hammer Projects (solo) (2017); In 2017, CounterCurrent17 in conjunction with Project Row Houses and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, University of Houston, TX (2017); The Studio Museum in Harlem, Morningside Park, New York (solo) (2017); and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2016). Beasley has performed at venues such as Lincoln Center, New York (2016); The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2016); The High Line (2015); Casey Kaplan, New York (2015); The Dallas Museum of Art (2015); The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015); and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012). His work is held in the collections of TATE, London; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum Harlem, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. Beasley is slated to present a solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art in December 2018. The artist lives and works in New York.