Cavin-Morris Spotlight: Kevin Sampson
February 20 - March 21, 2020
Kevin Blythe Sampson was raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of a local civil rights activist. He initially trained as police sketch artist and joined the New Jersey police force, serving for twenty years as a detective, ten of them as the first African American police officer to have this responsibility.
A series of family tragedies eventually propelled him to heal himself by making art. He understood intrinsically that everyday objects, even when cast off, can retain the essences of those who touched them before, that they have stories to tell beyond their mundane surfaces. Kevin Sampson’s art is made of reworked and transformed found objects, including bones, tiles and fabric, to which he adds various painting mediums, including acrylics, oils, stains and an invented cement of which only he knows the ingredients. These objects-the bones, the fragments, the tiny specks and leftovers from day to day living- are poetic archaeological elements that he sees as part of a lifelong conceptual vocabulary of human impermanence and memory as well as a journal of African-American struggle.
In viewing his work, both in his drawings which are included in this spotlight and his sculpture, one gets the feeling of a vibrant, vigorous, sometimes dangerous, barely harnessed energy crackling with political, spiritual and racial apprehension and redemption. His subjects are people that he knows and has known, people who have been part of his world, and people who have lived lives that he feels need to be remembered. They are reliquaries of the souls he has encountered and imagined. By constructing sculptures of physical memories inspired by Caribbean and American Southern styles, by containing these voices of the urban North, he builds work that are about ancestors and family in all forms. They are urban yard shows, his own version of those sites all through the South that serve as allegorical and symbolic memories of an oppressed people. They are at once political, frightening and liberating.
We are pleased to present an intimate sampling of Kevin Sampson’s new sculptures as well as some drawings in this Cavin-Morris spotlight.
