Pace Welcomes Glenn Kaino

Marc Glimcher, CEO and President of Pace Gallery, is pleased to announce the gallery’s worldwide and exclusive representation of Glenn Kaino.

Kaino is known internationally for his expansive vision and activist-minded practice, which encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, performance, monumental public art, theatrical production, and feature film. Examining a wide range of political, social, and environmental issues in his work, Kaino takes a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to art making. His work brings together systems of knowledge, forms of production, and people that do not normally have a chance to connect, and often involves long-term partnerships with a diverse array of visionary collaborators. Kaino’s work in any media and within any system is distinguished by his obsessive investment in technical virtuosity, functionality, and legitimacy.

The artist’s practice, which has focused on equity, social justice, and climate change, among other urgent topics, traces through lines among various art historical movements, including Arte Povera, Conceptualism, and performance art. A relentless optimist, Kaino creates work that is imbued with hope, revealing structures of power and domination and creating opportunities for direct action and progress, all rooted in the belief that cultural production can affect real change. Kaino often highlights the illusionistic and mesmeric effects of scientific and natural phenomena in his large-scale installations to explore notions of empathy and subjectivity and to bring legibility to the often invisible forces that shape our world.

Kaino’s current solo exhibition at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, reflects the artist’s interest in how paradigmatic shifts might be rendered visually. Titled In the Light of a Shadow and running through September 2022, the presentation features a monumental, immersive installation considering the links between protests that have taken place across different time periods and locations around the world. The artist’s participatory installation Tidepools, which comprises cloud chambers that make cosmic particles visible and a bioluminescent wishing well, will debut at Compound, a new Long Beach, California–based center for contemporary art and wellness, in July. Works from his nearly ten-year collaboration with Tommie Smith, whose historic salute for human rights at the 1968 Olympic Games stands today as an iconic gesture of strength and activism, will be exhibited this fall at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

As part of the 2024 edition of the Getty Foundation’s initiative Pacific Standard Time, which includes programming from arts institutions across southern California, Kaino will co-curate the exhibition Breath(e): Towards Climate and Social Justice at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. The artist is also partnering with The Atlantic magazine and the arts platform Superblue for a forthcoming experiential project launching in March 2022, and he will open a solo exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, in fall 2022.

Among Kaino’s past projects are his 2016 series Tank, which situated cast resin fragments of a decommissioned military tank inside a grouping of aquariums growing multi-colored coral to explore the practice of sinking decommissioned tanks and other military apparatuses to construct artificial reefs and render tools of destruction into life-sustaining habitats; Arch, a 2008 monumental public work commissioned for the city of Pittsburgh on the occasion of its 250th anniversary; and the 2016 work Invisible Man, a monumental sculpture of a man standing atop a pedestal with his hands up in surrender that disappears or reflects the viewer as they move around the work.

Recent major projects in media include In & Of Itself, the critically acclaimed off-Broadway show that resulted from his decade-long performance art collaboration A.Bandit with celebrated writer and performer Derek DelGaudio, which culminated in a feature-length film on Hulu produced by Kaino, and the critically acclaimed feature-length documentary With Drawn Arms, a film co-directed by Kaino that traces the significance of Tommie Smith’s storied salute and its resonance for generations of activists and athletes.

Kaino has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, San José Museum of Art, California; the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and elsewhere. The artist’s works are part of the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and other institutions.

Learn more about Glenn Kaino.