Shandaken Projects is pleased to announce the inauguration of a new public art initiative, Shandaken: 14x48. This program debuts with a commission from Josh Kline in partnership with billboard company Lamar. Kline’s new work poses a question to the public that the artist—who is of mixed-race and whose mother was an immigrant from the Philippines—has encountered throughout his life: “But where are you really from?” The work contrasts late-18th Century American costume and architecture with anachronistic artifacts from the 21st Century like SUVs and rolling hand luggage. Historical reenactors photographed on the streets of Philadelphia’s historic, colonial center call attention to the irony of adopting anti-immigration stances in a country whose current population is only 2.09 percent indigenous.
Subsequent artists for this program will be selected from an open-call application, available this season July 2 through August 18.
Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia, USA) lives and works in New York. His art has been exhibited internationally, including in solo exhibitions at Astrup Fearnley Musset, Oslo; Modern Art Oxford; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Portland Art Museum; Modern Art, London; and 47 Canal, New York. Before the Pandemic, Kline’s work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century at MoMA, New York. In Fall 2021, he will have a solo exhibition at LAXArt, Los Angeles.
Josh Kline, Illegal Aliens 1776, 2021, 258 x 219 inches, 7th Avenue and 40th Street. Commission by Shandaken Projects, billboard by Lamar.