→Sam Durant

Biography

Sam Durant is a North American artist whose interdisciplinary work engages a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. Growing up near Boston, MA in the 1970’s he experienced the radical pedagogy of A.S. Neill, Maria Montessori, John Holt, anti-war demonstrations and the desegregation of the public school system. Exposure to an educational culture emphasising democratic ideals, racial equality and social justice created the foundation for Durant’s artistic perspective. Often taking up forgotten events from the past, his works make connections with present and ongoing social and cultural issues. Durant’s interest in monuments and memorials began with Proposal for Monument at Altamont Raceway (1999), continued notably with Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions (2005) that re-contextualises memorials to victims of the conquest of North America, and Proposal for Public Fountain (2015), a marble work depicting an anarchist statue being blasted by a police water canon. Earlier works have excavated subjects as diverse as modernism’s repressive energy, the death drive beneath 1960’s-70’s pop music and artist Robert Smithson’s theories of entropy. More recent work has encompassed Italian anarchism, cartographic histories of capitalism, gestures of everyday refusal and a decolonizing realignment of Surrealism through incorporating artists and writers from the former French colonial world, like Aimee Cesar and Joyce Mansour. Durant’s methodology is research based but with an emphasis on social engagement, often working with communities and groups in collaborative and performative formations. He has done major participatory public art projects, Labyrinth (2015) in Philadelphia which addressed mass incarceration and The Meeting House (2016) in Concord, MA that took up the subject of race in colonial and contemporary New England. His most recent public work Untitled (drone) was the second commission for the High Line Plinth in New York. It raised the issues of drone warfare and surveillance in American society. In recent years Durant has done several projects about the nonaligned movement - begun in 1961- an unfulfilled idea that holds potential for the polarised present and need for global cooperation to deal with challenges like climate change and migration. The work Proposal for Nonaligned Monuments, Free Movement (2020) has been shown in Denmark and Belgium and Proposals for Monuments to the Nonaligned Collection, Petrovic Park, Podgorica (2024) shown in Podgorica, Montenegro and Ljubjana, Slovenia and will include a curated selection from the collection of the Museum of Nonaligned Art. In 2007 Durant compiled and edited the monograph, Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (Rizzoli Intl.) and curated the exhibition of the same name at MOCA, Los Angeles and the New Museum, New York. Durant’s interviews and writing have been featured in publications like Mousse, Artforum and Flash Art, he has contributed catalog essays to Marcos Ramirez ERRE (Instituto Nacional de Belles Artes, Mexico D.F. 2011), Siah Armajani: Follow the Line (Walker Art Center, MN. 2018) and Hans Haacke: All Connected (New Museum, NY 2019). From 2005 to 2010 he was a member of the collective Transforma Projects, a grassroots cultural re-building initiative in New Orleans. In 2012/13 Durant was an artist in residence at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles where he collaborated with the education department to produce a discursive social media project called What #is a museum? . Durant’s work has been included in numerous international exhibitions including Documenta 13, the Yokohama Triennial, the Venice, Sydney, Busan, Liverpool, Panama, and the Whitney Biennials.  His work can be found in many public collections including Walker Art Center, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium, Tate Modern, London, England. Durant is based in Berlin and is a Professor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart.