Witness: The Distance Within
New York NY, 2021
Solo Show
Studio Museum Harlem, Marcus Garvey Park
Thomas J Price: Witness marks the British sculptor’s first US solo institutional presentation. Price’s nine-foot bronze figure, The Distance Within (2021), is sited within Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park and depicts a young Black man looking down at his cell phone.
Price’s relationship to Harlem comes via his lived experience as a Black man looking “across the pond” from his neighbourhood of Brixton to where he describes as his home’s “counterpoint.” Both historically Black neighbourhoods with rich social and cultural legacies, the respective landscapes of Harlem and Brixton remain in dialogue. Thus, for Price, Harlem holds a special significance as a place the artist considers a home away from home.
With Witness, the artist continues his exploration of blackness and Black masculinity at monumental scales. In The Distance Within, Price asks us to consider what is projected onto Black bodies as they move in the world and in what ways they are made monolithic via broader archetypes and stereotypes, as well as how Black bodies in the ordinary everyday are subject to extraordinary surveillance and spectatorship.
The grand size of the sculpture celebrates a familiar everyday form rarely monumentalized within a public setting. Simultaneously, the scale works to take up space, to occupy, to hold presence, to bear witness.
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