Christian Hincapié

Return Sale, three person exhibition with Emily Jacir and Rose Salane, curated by Camila Palomino
Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY, February- April 2022

Plans for Echos and Repetitions (The World Financial Center, NY as Seen in September 2001 and September 2021), 2022, 43” x 83”, Archival inkjet print on diazotype (blueprint)

Window Pull, Detail ft. One World Trade Center (Winter Garden Atrium at the World Financial Center, New York as Seen in Infrared Light), 2021, 40” x 50”, Digital C-print

Window Pull, Wide (Winter Garden Atrium at the World Financial Center, New York as Seen in Infrared Light), 2021, 40” x 50”, Digital C-print

La limpieza no es una disciplina. Es una expresión de amor y respeto por todas las vidas que nos rodean / Cleaning is not a type of discipline. It is an expression of love and respect for all the lives that surround us
2012-2021, 10” x 14”, Archival inkjet prints in welded aluminum frames

2021, Parallel Construction, group exhibition organized by Laura Poitras and Sean Vegezzi. Above my work pictured with Nan Goldin's
St. George’s Church, Little Syria, Manhattan

Bronze (above)
Below sculpture and assemblage work completed while on residency at 51Cth, Copenhagen, Denmark. January 2023

Shapes of Convergence
2021-2022
Ink on paper
All around 25" x 39"

Detail:

The Great Petrified Forest/ Skyline as Still Life (After Norman Bryson and Giorgio Morandi), NARS Foundation Satellite on Governors Island, New York, NY, October 2020

PDF Statement

Rutgers University MFA Thesis Show 2020, Decisions at a Desk

For the exhibition walkthrough PDF and full context click on the image below:

Decisions at a Desk. 2020 MFA thesis exhibition, Rutgers University

This exhibition included large scale rubbings, a sculpture made entirely of kneaded erasers, a wall text, and a set of blueprint diazotypes investigating a playground in NYC. The genesis of my project was a close reading of City Planner Robert Moses’ biography ‘The Power Broker,’ in which the author, Robert Caro, mentions the existence of four shackled monkey statues used to decorate the playhouse-bathroom at a Riverside Park Playground in Harlem. Caro hints at a symbolic attack that brings up Moses’ known biases against non- whites and the poor. Today, the statues remain installed, a prism in which to analyze racism in infrastructure and the imbalanced perspectives used in prescribing “improvement” to a city. A further look into the statues’ stylistic provenance as a colonial image and their physical attachment to Moses’ vast network of projects prompted the question: How do infrastructure, parks, and the decorative indoctrinate a notion of cruelty and apathy into social and public space?

Layout Diptych (Left: Page 560 of Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” Shown Over a Plan of the 148th Street Playground of Riverside Park. Right: Perspectival View of Comfort Station at the Playground with Detail of Monkey statues Installed as Decorative Motifs of Said Structure). 2020. Inkjet print on diazotype (blueprint). Diptych, each 24” x 36”

Upon encountering the statues after reading Caro’s passage, I questioned the origins of the monkeys. The only clue as to the person who sculpted them is the Art Deco style they are sculpted in, which was typical of the time. This distinctively modern style appears on much of NYC’s most prominent architecture and frequently uses symbolic imagery to promote a notion of greatness and wealth almost always on the backs of colonialism, imperialism, and racism. Here, a crucial detail of the monkey sculptures’ is that the monkeys are shackled to the trellises of the comfort station. This emphasizes roots in the colonial practices of exocitization, exhibition and display.

Decisions at a Desk. 2020. Mass of kneaded eraser. 16” x 56” x 24”

This sculpture is a mass of kneaded eraser which was pressed into one of the monkey statues at the 148th street playground, creating a 1:1 negative impression of the sculpture. In past works, when considering erasure in the urban landscape, I ask myself: what does and does not get erased in the world; what still stands; what is visible; and what and who is kept at the margins? Because this eraser sculpture occupies the physical space surrounding the monkey, as a negative mold, rather than as a positive cast, I hope to gather and address the surroundings or the air around it. While utilizing the significance of the material as a literal eraser and at the same time as a mold, I hope my eraser sculpture can hold the need for the object to disappear but also the impossibility of erasing its mark from memory, history, and the written record.

Decisions at a Desk (detail). 2020. Mass of kneaded eraser. 16” x 56” x 24”

In recent conversations concerning the removal of racist emblems and monuments in the public sphere, there have been people who believe in immediate removal in a guerilla style (something I am not opposed to), people who believe in a non-removal accompanied by “historical contextualization” around the monument, and people who believe in doing nothing at all. My encountering of the monkey motif with an eraser reflects on these various positions I see towards living amongst public monuments to dark histories. I mull over the need to erase the monkey sculptures, reinterpreting them as I seek to unravel the attitudes which are embodied in the object.

Robert Moses Rorschach Test . 2018. Frottage, oil on paper. 12 ft. x 133”

The mosaic from which this larger-than-life rubbing is made is the only literal monument to City Planner and longtime Parks Commissioner Robert Moses within city limits. The mosaic is strangely labeled “Robert Moses by Artist Andy Warhol 1964” alluding to Moses’ disapproval and censorship of Warhol’s submission to the 1964-65 World’s Fair. While Warhol had no role in the creation of the actual mosaic, which was installed in the 1990’s (the mosaic’s designer is unknown to the Parks Department) the image of Moses appears to be borrowed from an image Warhol created in response to the censorship of his work “Thirteen Most Wanted Men” (1964). This work depicted men from the FBI’s most wanted list, creating a homoerotic innuendo that Moses and then- New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller objected to and consequently removed from the fair. Warhol responded by creating a series of silkscreens using a particularly menacing image of a smiling Robert Moses.

Working on site at the Robert Moses Mosaic located at the entrance of Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, Queens, NY. Photo by Robert Mulero

Mosaic with Park-goers at the Entrance to Flushing Meadows– Corona Park in Queens, NY . 2020. Diazotype (blueprint). Diptych, each 24” x 36”

Shown here are two diazotypes made from photographs of the mosaic from which I took the large scale rubbing above. I first photographed the mosaic and took a rubbing of its surface in 2018. At that time the mosaic showed some signs of wear but was still fairly intact. I returned this past year, and the mosaic–and Moses’ face– appeared to have suffered significant damage. I had the thought that my rubbing had unwittingly become the only 1:1 representation of the mosaic prior to its degradation which was likely caused by extreme temperature shifts and the expansion of water as it had frozen in the small spaces between the tiles that make up the mosaic. I see some irony in climate change wrecking the image of an infamous public official and city planner and who thought car- centric cities were the way of the future. The planet bites back on the surface of the mosaic, making a ruin of his vision visible on the surface of his likeness.

Decisions at a Desk. 2020 MFA thesis exhibition, Rutgers University. Second exhibition view.

Four blueprinted and color works on paper tacked to the wall that expand on this exhibition as a nexus of research. I urge my viewers to click here to view the exhibition walkthrough and expanded context.

Similarly to the eraser sculpture, the blueprinted diazotypes seek to subvert the very tools used to build space around the public by recalling the tools of a draftsman or architect. When I couldn’t find the blueprints of the 148th Street Playground comfort station within any state or city managed archive, which I hoped would answer my question “How did these racist objects come into being?,” I realized I had to make my own blueprints for understanding the histories I was collaging together. Blueprints are specific tools in the design of spaces that, for the most part, the general public largely has no control over and is unable to give direct consent or approval to. Here, my blueprints are instead used as spaces in which information can help undo architecture; presenting a quasi-evidentiary argument to address the reasons why the statues should be addressed and ultimately taken down. The blueprints pull images from a variety of sources: my own photographs from site visits over the last two years; tweets about the monkey statues from a former Parks Commissioner, a screenshot of an interview with Robert Caro, photographs of Riverside Park from the time it was built; a handwritten letter to Robert Moses from a black resident named Victor E. Thomas who lived on 151st in Harlem in the 1930’s detailing the racial tensions in the playground at the time. The sources are all brought to the same surface for contemplation by the blueprinting process, collaged and composed so that we may consider history in a way that is non-linear, interweaving the subjective and the objective, the past and the present. The grid locked, multi-framing device I used in making the blueprint collages is able to equate seemingly unrelated things in a singular composition reminiscent of a broadside, newspaper or poster which is clearly intending to present information on one common ground, a blue ground.

Names Inscribed on October 2, 2000 at the East End of the Pedestrian Railroad Overpass Connecting Riverside Drive to the Playground at 148th Street and the Hudson River (Johann, Domica, D.B., et al.). 2019. Frottage, oil on paper. 9ft x 83”

In my site visits to the 148th Street Playground, I found this location, a landing on the stairs of a bridged access point to the playground. Here, people had inscribed their names into the once wet concrete. My rubbing of these names considers the contrast between unsanctioned and sanctioned marks left in the world. Individuals make marks on their environment as bureaucracies do. Here, spaces and materials can be reimagined, reinterpreted, to make visible the presence of the individuals who inhabit them. One has to always contend with the power structures one lives under. The preeminent author who defined these structures in Modern New York City was Robert Moses. His power is imbued into things, as all power is syphoned into everything, but there are always moments of reimagining and reinterpreting the materials of the built environment in order to begin to wrestle away from the world as it is designed around the public, but not for the public.

Grid Sheet 3 of 22 [Decomposed and Recomposed Spreadsheet titled ‘NYC Parks Monuments’ (Courtesy of NYC Parks Department Division of Arts and Antiques)]. 2020. Diazotype (blueprint). 42” x 9ft

In trying to trace the provenance of the monkeys, the Parks Department provided me a PDF from the Division of Arts and Antiques. This document lists all publicly recognized art works within the New York City Parks Department Jurisdiction. It includes everything from large monuments, to small plaques placed on trees that commemorate individuals. It does not however, include the monkey statues at the 148th street playground. This specific document is exactly where the City would acknowledge the existence of these statues. The document is difficult to read in the form in which it was given to me, in that it is a lengthy, horizontally oriented spreadsheet with many columns reformatted into a multi-page PDF that comprises close to 2200 entries. The structure and composition of the document, organized into a grid in a (perhaps futile) attempt to make legible its contents, mimics the experience of attempting to study history to make sense of the present.

Blueprint (Rubbing of a Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority Police Officer Challenge Coin). 2020. Rubbing, pencil on paper. 24” x 36”

Out of all the authorities that Robert Moses was in charge of, perhaps the most infamous besides the Parks Department (to which he served as Commissioner between 1934-1960) was the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA). The TBTA was in charge and collected tolls at all roads, bridges and tunnels that Moses built, and was famously autonomous from other parts of city and state government. The TBTA had so much power as an independent agency that it even established its own independent police force, which still exists today. This is a rubbing of an actual, modern day TBTA challenge coin (a medallion-like piece of law enforcement memorabilia), given to me by a TBTA officer that patrols the area under the Triborough Bridge in the Bronx where I have lived since 2014.

The following spreads are part of my contribution to 'Monuments Memorials (& Sometimes) Memory, Kara Walker presents: The Colossus of Rutgers exhibition publication. Book design in collaboration with Alex Turgeon.

Decisions at a Desk, 2019, Mass of kneaded erasers atop an early to mid-twentieth century bureaucrat's desk, 60" x 48" x 34," Part of group exhibition Kara Walker presents: The Colossus of Rutgers at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, New York, NY, May 2019

While on residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy, Summer 2019

Private Eye, two person exhibition with Iris Ward Loughran, curated by Anne Patsch, The Wild Project, New York, NY, April-May, 2019

7th Street Birthday (Happy Bday Pete, et al.), 2017, frottage, wax on paper, 44" x 72"

Incendio, 2019, Fire hydrant, rock, and burning incense sticks, 25" x 23 1/2" x 15"

Playing Puppeteer (Jane Jacobs pictured in the archives of the Library of Congress and hands of Neil Estern's statue of Fiorello La Guardia), 2019, Solvent transfer print, Framed: 16" x 24"

Backyard (Screenshot from a 2017 Daily News article by reporter Greg B. Smith), 2019, Solvent transfer print, Framed: 16" x 24"

Desgastar, two person exhibition with Angela Rosensweig, curated by Michelle Delgado, High Tide Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, February 2 - March 2, 2019

El Rodeo América de Cali NY (Julie Roma, Sara Zuñiga, et al.) in Scarlet and Black, 2017, frottage, wax on paper, 55 3/4" x 61"

Bird Abacus, 2019, Metal studs, copper nails, found soil barrier, bird cage, branch with leaves and bees’ nest, rubber balls, marbles, air conditioner sleeve with drawing found on index card, and hardware, 26" x 156" x 20"

Permanently Drawn, 2018, Stolen sheet of plywood found in the Upper East Side near Gracie Mansion, fiberglass insulation, found mannequin head, and hardware, 48" x 70" x 6"

Architectural Bodies, Group exhibition at Office Space 2 Gallery, New Brunswick, NJ, December 2018-January 2019

Air Compressor, 2018, Metal studs; found plywood; hardware; acquired flag; souvenir from the Middle of the World City at the equator in Quito, Ecuador; kneaded eraser; marbles atop borrowed, painted stump; air compressor wrapped in trash bag; found soccer ball inside Barneys New York shopping bag; found objects and laundry lint catchers attached to face of weathered blinds; small round mirror; various photo printouts and advertisements affixed to wall, 75" x 175" x 53"

Rainbow Moved Next Door, 2018, Found woven reed blind, invasive perennial plant (Phragmites), burning incense sticks (“Obama” scented), found flyers and signage, keychain, (with drawing by artist Maria Elvira Dieppa), 72" x 95" x 6," Part of group exhibition Luces desde la Isla organized by Alexis Pacheco and Maria Elvira Dieppa, The General Consulate of Colombia, New York, NY, April-May 2018

Rubbings of the facade of a manufacturing building on 133rd St. in the Bronx, NY.

2050 5th Ave., January-April 2016

Traces, Group exhibition organized by Omari Douglin, Vault Space, Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ, October-November 2017

Artist and friend Omari Douglin pictured here in front of Untitled (Child, Potato Man, Ninja, et al.), 2017, Frottage, wax on paper, 72" x 99.5"

The Baby and the Bathwater, 2017, Assorted poles and rods, stroller, pillow, chamomile flowers, tea bags, burning incense sticks (“Obama” scented), various objects, hardware, wire and rope, 19 feet tall, Part of group exhibition organized by Margaret Kross and John-Elio Reitman, Rzeplinski Garden Space, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY, February 2017

Weather Pains (Dolores del Tiempo), 2016-2100, Paper, tape, and lightfast acrylics on an irregular wood panel, 80.5” x 108.5” x 7”

Data maps showing the effects of rising sea levels in New York City by the year 2100. The maps were found in the vicinity of City Hall in downtown Manhattan.