TUCSON, AZ.- MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) Tucson presents After Heaven, a solo exhibition by artist Clifford Prince King that features a new series of photographs, a photo-installation, and a video work. It is the artist’s first museum exhibition in the Southwest.
King’s approach to photography is intuitive and diaristic: for him, making a photograph is a way to understand himself, his subjects, and the world around him. He captures subtle, everyday moments that brim with connection, tenderness, and care, registering the expansiveness of Black queer personhood. His photographs often feature friends, lovers, and the artist himself; for After Heaven, King directs his focus to family, place, and landscape in Tucson, Arizona, where he grew up, and nearby Sahuarita on his family’s ranch.
Of the series the artist writes, “When the dust has settled / returning to origin / no longer familiar.” Through photographs of family members and self-portraits around the ranch and in the surrounding desert landscape, King traces his experience of return, made over the course of seven years during visits home. For King, “the desert is still dry, mysterious and quiet / spirit has become softer, body unforgiving,” and the photographs range from recognizable compositions to dream-like scenes: young cousins playfully showing off backbends and peeking over couches; his father holding a freshly shot hare, rifle casually slung over his shoulder; the artist communing bare-chested with a headless snake; his brother ascending a straight ladder that inexplicably rises up from the desert floor.
An accompanying video work and a photo-installation extends King’s meditation on memory and self-documenting familial life. The video collages footage from home videos recorded by the artist when he was ten years old, interspersed with audio of cicadas and clips of a conversation between King and his father, while the installation combines King’s recent photographs with those from his family archive. And indeed, the artist’s own photographs have the quality of a family photo album: a record of personal histories, intimate and complex relationships, and the textures of everyday home life. These media—photographs and home video—are ubiquitous formats through which individual memories become important documents of collective histories: highly personal modes of image-making that enrich the lexicon of shared visual culture.
In After Heaven, King attends to the connections that we hold, and the things we must keep at distance. In observing the cycles of family life and reflecting on his own transformations through the lens of the camera, King meditates on what remains after heaven: legacy, memory, and change.
This exhibition is organized by Alexis Wilkinson, Curator.
Clifford Prince King is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York. In 2023, King presented his first solo institutional exhibition at the Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach. He has had solo shows at Public Art Fund (2024) flatmarkus, Zurich, Switzerland (2024); Gordon Robichaux, New York (2023); STARS Gallery, Los Angeles (2022, 2020) and Light Work, Syracuse, New York (2021). Two-person and group exhibitions include Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Marc Selwyn Gallery, Gordon Robichaux, and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles; Higher Pictures and Leslie Lohman Museum, New York; MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; and Light Work, Syracuse, New York. King’s work is held in numerous institutional collections including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach, California; Los Angeles County Museum of Arts; ICA Miami; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
