New Museum

I’m happy to have been invited to give an Out of Bounds lecture on soils at the New Museum in response to Wangechi Mutu’s exhibition, INTERTWINED.

Soils, in particular, Kenya’s red soils, are a living material that Wangechi uses often in her remarkable artworks — 25 years of which are on display through June, 2023.

In keeping with the Out of Bounds curators’ charge, I chose exhibit themes of corporality and transmutation as points of entry into soils which contain predators, prey, producers, consumers and parasites. I see echoes of that collection of earthy characters in Wangechi’s works like DANCER and THIS, YOU CALL CIVILIZATION? and took it from there.

I introduced the full-house to our region’s red soil bodies formed in Triassic-aged red shale found in NJ, PA, MD & VA and offered opportunities for folks to look at iron precipitating through glauconite green soils formed just south of the museum in Cretaceous-age marine deposits. Participants also met MOSHOLU — an extraordinary soil body formed in human-transported and human-altered material, specifically coal ash deposited in Van Cortlandt Park. As of 2014, Mosholu is an official US soil series, which is a radical reckoning x radical acceptance.

Big thanks to Richard Shaw, USDA-NRCS soil scientist, colleague, mentor and friend of several years who brought the soils and the legacy of fieldwork.