NEW YORK, NY.- The New Orleans Museum of Art has installed a new outdoor sculpture by artist Thomas J Price in the museums Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden.
Prices sculpture, titled Time Unfolding, 2023, is a nine-foot-tall statue of a woman looking down at her cell phone, seemingly paused in contemplation. The work is part of a series depicting everyday fictional subjects at a monumental scalecombining traditional sculpting and digital technology to question how society projects ideas and expectations through public space.
Through his work, Price has ignited important public conversations about space, monuments, and personhood, said Susan M. Taylor, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of NOMA. Price asks viewers to reconsider what a monument isand what they can beand how monuments can reimagine and reflect everyday lives.
To create Time Unfolding and similar works, the artist combined observations from different subjects, incorporating 3D scanning imagery from an open call in Los Angeles. Since each work does not necessarily represent just one person, Prices works push back against histories of racial profiling and the modern use of biometric tools to monitor individuals actions.
Price often riffs on the tradition of canonical Western sculptureas seen in the subtle classical contrapposto pose of the figure in Time Unfolding and in the artists decision to never cast figures at a one-to-one scale, prompting viewers to think about who should exist in monumental form.
This installation in NOMAs Besthoff Sculpture Garden follows highly acclaimed public presentations of Prices works in Rotterdam Centraal Station in 2023; by the Studio Museum in Harlem in New Yorks Marcus Garvey Park in 2022, alongside a special commission by Hackney Town Council, London, to commemorate the Windrush Generation, also unveiled in 2022; and as part of the Lines public art initiative in London in 2020. A selection of sculptures by Price are currently on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (through May 27, 2024) in dialogue with the institutions historic collections. The artists touring European solo exhibition Matter of Place is on view at Kunsthalle Krems (through September 22, 2024). Price lives and works in London.
The addition of Prices Time Unfolding to NOMAs Besthoff Sculpture Garden, which is part of the museums permanent collection, is supported by Walda Besthoff. The sculpture is now on view in the gardens North Lawn near works by Ugo Rondinone, Sean Scully, Wangechi Mutu, and Ursula von Rydingsvard. NOMAs Besthoff Sculpture Garden is free and open to the public, seven days a week. Current spring and summer hours are 10 am6 pm.
The new installation is the first of three additions to the Besthoff Sculpture Garden in 2024. Later this year, the museum will unveil a commission by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, which takes the form of a 18-foot-tall diving board rising from the shore of the lagoon in the garden. NOMA will also install a new work by Sarah Sze, from the artists Fallen Sky series. Szes work was the subject of a major 2023 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
