NEW YORK, NY.- It was a Friday night in central New Jersey, and artist EJ Hill had me doing high-speed upside-down corkscrews as we rode the Green Lantern, a somewhat demonic roller coaster at Six Flags Great Adventure that seems designed to reshuffle your organs.
For me, in deep middle age, this was my first roller coaster. For Hill, 37, his umpteenth. He’s a coaster aficionado. Coaster toys littered his childhood bedroom in South Central Los Angeles. He knows an in-line twist from a heartline roll. He loves wooden coasters of yore and high-tech insanities like the X2, with seats out on wings that flip you over and over as you go.
“For your first coaster, that was a bold start,” Hill said as we devoured fried food once our stomachs resumed normal service. We had come for the 45-story-high Kingda Ka, billed as the world’s tallest, but it was down for maintenance. But the front-row ride on the Green Lantern, where you stand rather than sit, heightening the sense of danger, did the job. “I was thinking, if this thing goes off the rails, it’s us first,” he said.
The excursion’s real point: “There are things that I believe you have to feel to understand,” Hill said. “Certain ideas can be communicated via language and land really well; other things, you have to feel in your gut.”
Coasters aren’t just a hobby for Hill. They’re a recurring motif in his performance art, photography, painting and sculpture. “Brake Run Helix,” his exhibition opening Oct. 30 at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art for an 18-month run, has a coaster theme and a spectacular centerpiece: a working coaster inside the museum for visitors to ride.
As a form, coasters give Hill visual pleasure. “Look, they’re like line drawings,” he said when we arrived at the park, pointing to one ride’s frame and curve in the twilight.
But the inspiration is also conceptual. He is drawn to coasters for their contradictions: the way the ride merges terror with delight; how the experience is highly personal, but shared with strangers; how amusement parks are in some ways a leveler, mixing people of many backgrounds — yet in the past were often segregated, and today, despite their populist atmosphere, typically charge high gate fees.
For Hill, who is Black, queer and from the ’hood — intersecting outsider identities — inviting people onto coasters might just convey something about his life experience that a biographical litany cannot. And in the process, it might reveal something about yourself.
“I feel like I understand bodily threat in a very real way,” he said. “Every day when I leave my place, the threat to my bodily existence is palpable.” To share the coaster experience, he added, was “in a sleight-of-hand way, to bring people as much as I can to understanding what that feels like, but in a space of joy, of being a human in the world.”
A few weeks after our New Jersey ride, I joined Hill at Mass MoCA, in North Adams, Massachusetts, where he was installing his show. In addition to the working coaster, it includes photographs, paintings, works on paper and several new coaster-inspired wood sculptures, which he was finishing up with Martín Gonzales, the exhibition’s lead fabricator.
One sculpture included a track arcing up a tower. Another had an undulating form inspired, Hill explained, by a semifamous hand-built coaster called the Oklahoma Land Run. They were intentionally rough, repurposing planks gathered around the museum.
By evoking hobbyist constructions you encounter on coaster YouTube channels, the sculptures celebrate folk architecture. “The whole point is, you could make this in your backyard,” he said. The exhibition’s sleek pink fiberboard platforms would make the pieces “capital-A art.”
The coaster, which was designed by Hill with his friend Christopher Torres, a landscape architect, and Skyline Attractions, a Florida-based builder, had not yet arrived, but numbers on the floor indicated its path. A velvet stage curtain cloaked the mezzanine where visitors will board a single-rider cart, then whiz out on the track — also pink — for the brief but curvy 260-foot ride, powered by gravity alone. (The work is technically designated a “ridable sculptural installation” for regulatory reasons, but comes with trained operators and full safety protocols.)
The area beneath the mezzanine will show Hill’s paintings that mix coaster imagery — the crosshatching of their frames, the line of their crest — with flowers and foliage, in a kind of pink-hued pastoral. Some are augmented by neon tube lights. Hill told me that the show was his tribute to Robert Cartmell, author of a history of coasters beloved among enthusiasts, who was also a painter.
On site, Hill huddled with Alexandra Foradas, the exhibition curator, brainstorming layout details. He suggested setting up a few benches where people could watch the riders.
“That sounds fun,” Foradas said. She thought of the layout of theme parks, where you watch people stepping into rides or flying overhead. “It gives space to that interest in observing, but also asks us why we’re so interested in watching other people have these extreme experiences.”
For a long time, Hill was the one being watched, in performances that tested his endurance and emotions. The most recent was in the 2018 “Made in L.A.” biennial at the Hammer Museum. For the show’s duration — six days a week for three months — he stood motionless and silent all day on a wood podium.
The installation included a turf field and photographs by Texas Isaiah, showing Hill running laps around every institution he had attended in the city, from primary school to Catholic school to UCLA, where he earned his Master of Fine Arts. The work expressed the toll of hypervisibility as a minority “other” in elite settings — in the schools, but also in museums.
Faced with Hill on his podium, some visitors squirmed and left, while others got close and gawked, Erin Christovale, an associate curator at the Hammer and co-organizer of “Made in L.A.,” recalled. “The spectrum of responses spoke to what his work does so well, which is to really make you deal with yourself and embody a human experience.”
A son of immigrants from Belize, Hill grew up near the epicenter of the 1992 LA riots, then found his way to the East Coast. When mentors suggested art school, he enrolled at Columbia College Chicago, where he studied performance, after learning about its pioneers, including Chris Burden. At UCLA, he studied with Andrea Fraser, the performance artist whose work is identified with feminism and institutional critique.
In 2016, as artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, he lay prone, eyes open, on a platform for hours — alluding to police and vigilante violence against Black men, but also to watchfulness, perhaps even rest. The platform was built into a neon-lit wood sculpture of a roller-coaster track.
“Watching him build the roller coaster and the platform where he would lay during opening hours was one of the most difficult and beautiful experiences of my life,” said painter Jordan Casteel, in residence the same year. Hill, she added, “pushes us all to feel more deeply.”
In retrospect, that piece and one in 2017, where he built a coaster-track sculpture in the courtyard of a Venice, Italy, palazzo and stood atop it for periods of time, signal an inflection point. As coasters grow prominent in his work, his body is receding from view.
“I’m no longer interested in being the one to perform for a ravenous audience who wants to either celebrate me or consume me,” he said. With “Brake Run Helix,” he added, “I’m making this elaborate stage for other people to perform while I collect myself and recharge.”
“He’s moving from his body to a general body,” said writer and curator Makayla Bailey, the exhibition’s co-editor and interpretation consultant. When visitors ride, they become performers, and everyone else, the audience. “It’s almost like a ready-made for the idea of performance itself.”
The show has already drawn notice from coaster nerds online who have called it a “rare credit” — one to seek out for its odd setting and limited run. Hill likes the idea of museums having to welcome the coaster crowd that he relates to. “Even installing my own show, I feel insecure in here,” he said. “At a place like the amusement park, there’s an audience that feels closer to home. I can see myself reflected in so many others.”
His art resume is lengthening, but his instincts are pulling him back to South Central (now officially South LA) — where his mother and grandmother live and where he plans to start youth art education projects — and to other Black neighborhoods. For the Prospect New Orleans triennial, he built a sculpture of a section of a Ferris wheel in the New Orleans East community, incorporating a gondola salvaged from a Six Flags park abandoned after Hurricane Katrina. It was welcomed.
In the Whitney Biennial this year, he showed nothing except a blank sheet of pink paper in the catalog, a presence so spectral that few even noticed. Those who did could only guess at its meaning.
In fact, the page is a marker for “pedagogical work” that Hill said he is shielding from the spotlight for now. As the Biennial’s curators, Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin, said in a joint message, the page “withholds, but also holds space” for work that “should take as long as it takes” and not conform to a museum calendar.
“It absolutely is an abstraction,” Hill told me. But how specialists interpret his art doesn’t matter so much, he said. “I’m more interested in fitting in a legacy of people who, in art or any other field, are working to expand what it means to be human.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
