The artist’s latest exhibition probes – and recreates – the materials, histories and attitudes that undergird American consumer culture
Kevin Beasley’s latest exhibition seems, at first glance, closer to the mainstream than the fringe aesthetic its title suggests. Beasley’s signature mixed-media artworks and wall-based reliefs are installed like a typical show of paintings and sculptures, replicating how his pieces might be staged in a collector’s home. The works on view are a far cry from the artist’s DJ set at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2014, which featured descriptions, spoken over a dance track, of Black teenager Michael Brown’s wrongful shooting by police – and further still from Beasley’s 2018 Whitney solo debut, which used a cotton gin motor to generate discordant audio. Now, though, Beasley plays with collector and institutional demands, probing – and recreating – the problematic materials, histories and attitudes that undergird American consumption in art galleries and beyond.
Colourful wall-hanging ‘paintings’ crafted from resin, dye transfer and found objects line the perimeter of the large main gallery. Their titles all employ variations on the word ‘synthesizer’, suggesting the transformation of Beasley’s musical interests into visual media. The comparison isn’t unwarranted: in Synthesizer III (all works 2025), crumpled orange, pink and blue fabrics, cotton housedresses, small ‘confetti’ strips of torn clothing – gain a painterly, poetic gloss, their folds and crinkles taking on the feel of brushstrokes or record scratches. Pinned into place with glossy resin, the artwork’s bright, intimate surface includes, according to the exhibition checklist, ‘raw Virginia cotton’, a choice that draws a parallel between Beasley’s contemporary textiles and legacies of enslaved labour in the US. Other inclusions, though, can be confusingly vague in their referents: in Synth XI, a gingham swatch appears alongside graphic T-shirts, tank tops and knit sweater.
In this show, accumulation becomes Beasley’s medium, camouflaged in the trappings of conventional display. Large floor-mounted ‘sculptures’ segment the space: four hinged screens loom over the main gallery, like room dividers hastily strewn with wet laundry. In They know me better than anyone else, a barred plywood frame resembling one side of a large cage abuts three panels hung with clothing and carbon fibres shellacked into place with resin. The mass accretion of materials in these artworks is successfully overwhelming, transforming Beasley’s art, a luxury commodity, from decorative to dominating. But by privileging an additive logic – one shared, perhaps, by his collectors and curators – Beasley dulls his critique. In The beginning of you and the end of me., for example, a resin-drenched clothes rack supports a wide array of army uniforms that lack distinguishing markers of era or origin, turning what may have been commentary – on the commodification of war, or the artworld’s complicity (or worse) in armed conflict – into an illegible gesture.
Consumption may be the most American art, but it is not always the best form of self-expression – or social criticism. Like many producers these days, Beasley occasionally loses track of his supply chain; sometimes, a bedsheet really is just a bedsheet. At their best, though, Beasley’s works show how what is owned will haunt its owners – leaving them unable to distinguish one product from another.
What delineates the edge at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, through 16 August
