NEW YORK, NY.- A short play about watching shadows move across the room (2023) is a mural by Caroline Kent commissioned for the Queens Museum Large Wall. The mural consists of five layers of painted images and sculptures that begin with an all-black base. Painted over this foundation are figures that Kent calls “shadow shapes.” These large shapes vary across black tones lighter than the background yet retain the function of a shadow.

Interacting with these shadows, Kent layers colorful forms that overlap, intermingle, and butt up against each other. Hand-painted over these forms, the fourth layer incorporates “floor plans” — Kent’s own drawings that invent domestic spaces. The final layer consists of five 3D wooden sculptures in abstract shapes that hang from the wall. Together, the mural “moves through planes of space — from blackness, to shadow, to flat surface, to relief.” The Large Wall becomes a site for scenography where Kent renders the shapes as characters, props, and/or architectures themselves.

Caroline Kent is an abstract painter and text-based artist whose large-scale works blur notions of language, sculpture, and performance. Reminiscent of her connection to Eastern Europe, where she spent time in Romania as a Peace Corps volunteer, Kent’s pastel palette lends itself to improvisation and a reconsideration of the power and limits of language: what is told, heard, and what ultimately remains unspoken.

Kent’s work channels personal experience and her cultural background to widen a historically marginalizing discourse of abstraction, and she exploits emotional mark-making to manipulate the rhythms and tone of communication. Through an expanded form, Kent opens a realm of possibility for linguistic experimentation while leaving room for meaning that is silent, secret, and coded.

Caroline Kent: A short play about watching shadows move across the room is made possible in part by lead support from the Ford Foundation. Additional support is provided by JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey & Syzygy-nyc.org, Blanchard-Nesbitt Family, Hill Art Foundation, Orange Barrel Media and Queens Museum Exhibitions Circle.

Caroline Kent received a B.S. from Illinois State University (1998) and an M.F.A. from The University of Minnesota (2008). Kent’s work has been exhibited in institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Walker Art Center, MN; The DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; The California African American Museum, LA; The Flag Art Foundation, NY; The Suburban, Oak Park, IL; and the University Galleries of Illinois State University. Kent has received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, and The Jerome Foundation. Additionally, the artist is the 2021 recipient of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Prize, the 2020 Joan Mitchell Award for Painters and Sculptors, and was selected as an Artadia Foundation Chicago awardee in 2020. Kent’s work is a part of numerous public collections including the Hammer Museum, CA, the Guggenheim Museum, NY, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA, the Walker Art Center, MN, the Weisman Art Museum, MN, The Art Institute of Chicago, IL, the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA, the Dallas Museum of Art, TX, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN, among others. Kent is an Assistant Professor of Painting at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Queens Museum
Caroline Kent: A short play about watching shadows move across the room
December 2023 - December 2024