Over the past few decades, Los Angeles artist Kori Newkirk has elaborated a stylistic orientation that he calls “ghetto-fabulous conceptualism” to explore and comment on his own experience as a Black man living in pre- and post-millennial America as well as notions of race, gender, and place. From his formative years in Upstate New York to his role as an active creator working in a diverse yet hardly harmonious metropolis in the ostensible paradise that is Southern California, Newkirk is able to see the United States from many angles.
In 1997, Newkirk rendered a large-scale, circa 1980 Cadillac sedan directly onto a white wall at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles using a combination of hair pomade and black pigment, calling the result Modified Cadillac (Prototype #2). While this installation generated considerable buzz, Newkirk garnered even more attention with his 2001 life-size silhouette of a police surveillance helicopter, produced with the same materials, which he painted on a wall at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Between these two dramatic displays, Newkirk made the present lot, entitled Cadillac Fleet, 2000: a unique collection of works, also composed of hair pomade mixed with black pigment on 23 pieces of Dura-lene. Although Newkirk has expanded his practice in recent years with mixed-media sculpture and multimedia projects, his original Cadillac was featured in Don't Look Back: The 1990s at MOCA in 2016. As part of the exhibition, Newkirk gave a lecture at the Geffen Contemporary MOCA explaining both how his own identity as a Black man went into the making of the initial Cadillac as well as the symbolic import of the work's title and materials.
Auction Results Kori Newkirk
