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James Perkins for Stetson
Celebrated artist @jamesperkinsstudio uses the sand, sun, surf and salt of Fire Island, a beach community about 60 miles east of New York City, as his paintbrush to create his signature sculptures. Crafted from two-by-fours wrapped in colored silk, his artworks are left to age for up to years, half-submerged in the sand and exposed to sun, salt, wind and freezing rain—making their mark on the landscape as they weather the storm, slowly becoming monuments of nature’s power.
“It’s my version of trying to find a totem for all mankind,” he says. “Standing on the shore, I’m reminded of how small I am. We realize how much of the planet we have to share when we’re at the beach.” His passion for land art and beach life is balanced with an equal zeal for the pace of New York City and the energy of the international art scene—and dressing up for the occasion.
“I’m interested in getting in the dirt, I’m interested in being at the beach and being outside and being challenged physically as much as I am mentally,” he says, “But for style, it’s important to me to be a gentleman. I get dressed up as a sign of respect to my fellow human, but more importantly as a sign of respect to myself and to the day. The Open Road is a great hat for me because a lot of my personal work is this juxtaposition between being in the city and being out in nature.”
#OpenRoadCharacterDriven
#ItsAStetson
The 10 Best Booths at Frieze Los Angeles 2024
Artsy
Located at the corner at one of the fair’s busiest intersections in the Focus section, James Perkins’s solo exhibition with New York gallery Hannah Traore Gallery is a rejuvenating stop for guests. Here, the artist presents 14 wall and floor sculptures made from several types of wood and stone, drawing inspiration from the works of land artists like Michael Heizer and Robert Irwin. Perkins developed his distinctive technique by wrapping silk around two-by-four wood planks and burying them in the sand for up to two years, allowing nature to act as his paintbrush. The intricate patterns and textures viewers see on the silk are entirely the work of natural elements, not crafted by hand.
“What I think is so amazing about James is he really is continuing the tradition of land art, but he’s adding his own flair,” founder Hannah Traore told Artsy. “Land art has a little bit of a problematic history, and it’s really interesting to have a Black man inserting himself, but also really adding to the conversation and adding a whole new perspective—a whole new process.”
Perkins intends this body of work to act as a unifying entry point for people to engage with each other and the environment. These works, such as the triangular A Forest of Love (2021), covered with bright green silk, mean to offer a symbol of the most unifying force: the Earth.
The Best Booths at Frieze Los Angeles 2024
ARTnews
James Perkins’s stunning wall-hung works, included in the fair’s Focus section, are each made from a dyed piece of silk fabric that is wrapped around a 2-by-4. Perkins then buries the works on the beach of Fire Island, just outside New York, for up to two years. During that time, the minerals from the sand and the salt from the waves that lap onto the shore transform the fabric into ethereal gradients; they now act as permanent records of the elements. Accompanying this installation are several floor pieces: three-dimensional right triangles, made in either wood or stone. That series is titled “Grounded in Love,” an acknowledgement of Perkins’s belief in all that coexistence with nature can provide.
- Maximilíano Durón
Laura Hyatt’s Top 5 Picks from Frieze Los Angeles Viewing Room 2024
Frieze
“‘Sun, sand, salt, wind, wood, water.’ I love how these works hold the residue of a place, and I think they succeed. They are like anti- ‘land art’ land art. I love anything that intervenes in land art’s problematic histories. These capture the elements of a place, a moment, with such poetic softness, an intimacy that contrasts the masculine monumentality and extractive properties of traditional land art.”
Galleries You Don't Want to Miss at Frieze LA 2024
HYPEBEAST
Hannah Traore is exhibiting recent paintings and sculptures by renowned NY-based artist James Perkins. Continuing from his initial solo display titled Burying Painting at Hannah Traore Gallery in 2022, Perkins introduces a contemporary dialogue surrounding the concept of the nonsite—a term originally coined by Robert Smithson in 1968 to denote an indoor earthwork or a natural site imbued with symbolic meaning when removed from its original context.
Instead of presenting untouched earth as the focal point, Perkins reimagines nature as an artistic entity within his living and working space on Fire Island, New York. He describes his creations as “post-totem” forms, encompassing paintings and sculptures that evoke the ancestral essence of his great grandmother’s Chickasaw heritage while also alluding to totemic symbols of authority—those ingrained patterns of behavior we adopt to navigate various aspects of American identity, society, and economics.
James Perkins Selected to the ArtDest 100
ArtDesk ispleased to announce the ArtDesk 100. These early to mid-career voices in contemporary art, performance, theater, animal wellbeing, and social innovation are recognized for pushing new frontiers in creative work. In honor of ArtDesk’s tenth anniversary in 2023, we have chosen our favorite creators, thinkers, and voices leading new frontiers in art, performance, and thought. These creative discoverers are all early- to mid-career at 45 years old and younger. Each is exciting to watch and learn from, and every one has the demonstrated bona fides to merit inclusion on the inaugural ArtDesk 100.
Domino magazine
Check out The Perkins’ Fire Island home and studio in Domino magazine this Winter. On newsstands December 22nd, they talk about some of the work they’ve done to restore the property, renovation updates and how they continue the spirit of sustainability implemented by the architect Horace Gifford.
Thom Browne Artist Talk event with James Perkins
Cocktails and a conversations between James Perkins and curator Lauren R. O'Connell from Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.
James Perkins and curator Lauren R. O'Connell from Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art at the Thom Browne Artist Talk event.
Wallpaper Magazine
Artist James Perkins: ‘land art was ripe for me to make a contribution’
Fire Island-based artist James Perkins transforms silk sculptures into forces of nature. Here, he discusses the future of land art, belonging, and living in a Horace Gifford-designed modern masterwork
At a time when things feel so unstable, artist James Perkins’ silk totemic sculptures ground us to the earth and celebrate the beauty of time and space. In a meditative process that can take up to two years, Perkins uses nature as his paintbrush. He allows the sea salt, ocean spray, sun, rain, and hurricane-force winds to weather his silk sculptures – even burying some in the sand – unveiling dynamic, layered, and utterly transformed totems.
Following in the footsteps of the great land artists, like Michael Heizer, James Turrell, and Walter De Maria, Perkins’ silk totems possess power far beyond their individual components. Despite deceptive simplicity, land artists create complex, soul-searching natural art to ask viewers to contemplate what they see and who they are.
Perkins’ work stands apart from the greats as his time-based land art installations, which he calls post-totem structures, question the lines between sculpture and painting, monumental land art and temporary works, and human intervention and nature.
By Michelle S Coleman
read here
Artsy
James Perkins Buries Silk Canvases at the Beach to Make Vivid Abstractions
Across his work, Perkins resurrects the genre of 20th-century action painting, making time-based labor central to the process of creation. For his latest body of work—on view in his solo show “Burying Painting” at Hannah Traore Gallery through July 30th—the New York–based artist created his structures on Fire Island, New York. Left there for varying periods of time, the structures intermingled with the wind, water, snow, sand, and animals to reveal their final form.
By Ayanna Dozier
Review: James Perkins' Black minimalism and Chris Fallon's time-skipping depictions of women's forms stand out at "Janus II."
“Meeting viewers as soon as they ascend the stairs into the gallery, Perkins’ “The Weight of My Appearance (Black),” (2016) is the most subtle, yet poignant piece in the exhibition. Two marble blocks—like feet—support a vertical black rectangle, which based upon the work’s title, mirrors the artist’s body. In addition to creating a figurative reference, Perkins cunningly inverts minimalism’s dependence upon viewers, which typically employs simple forms as foils to activate onlookers’ presence in the shapes’ reflective surfaces, rigid geometry, and seriality. However, Perkins’ matte black fabric denies non-Black viewers the satisfaction of seeing ourselves reflected, as if to say, “it’s not about you” and “your gaze does not activate me.” Moreover, for Black viewers, the work holds space within the historically rather white art world that may mirror their own presence. While the work formally explores Blackness as abstract color, it actually engages in a much larger and more complicated discussion about race in an art historical context and currently in the art world and society at large.”
By Genevieve Quick
LUXE Interiors + Design
En Plein Air
ON THE SHORES OF FIRE ISLAND, NEW YORK, AN ARTIST CRAFTS TEXTILE MONUMENTS TO THE UNBRIDLED WILD.
Stand still long enough on Fire Island’s churning beaches, and you will witness a procession of nature’s mercurial wonders: the electric neons of sunsets, the blue-grays of pending storms, the fathoms-deep darkness of midnight. James Perkins has seen them all, distilling these moments of awe into three-dimensional paintings that undulate with currents of color and form. The artist’s slices of sea and sky, however, are not made with paint, but by exposing textiles to wind, water, heat and cold. “My goal is to infuse the material with this sensation of standing at the shoreline’s edge and feeling like the smallest thing on the planet,” he explains. Perkins’ work evolved from his explorations of the Light and Space and Land art movements, both of which conceptualize earthly landscapes. Fire Island, where he splits the year with his wife and son, became a natural muse, with its sunken pine forests, windswept coastline and radiant eastern sunrises.
Written by Monique Mcintish
Photography by Bryan Derballa
Kering Foundation and Balenciaga for Caring for Women
James Perkins attends the Kering Foundation Second Annual Caring For Women Dinner at The Pool on September 12, 2023 in New York City.
HUCKBERRY
Building a Family Philosophy Around Slow Design
Artist James Perkins on the beauty of well-aged things, romance, and passing ideas down to the next generation. James is the perfect person to talk to about patina; not only does he have a highly refined sense of style, but his work as an artist is all about the passing of time. He often creates pieces of sculpture that he then exposes to the elements on Fire Island, exploring questions of transience and beauty. So during a recent shoot for Wills, we decided to go deep.
An Artist and Sailor Teamed Up to Transform a Raceboat Into a Floating Work of Art
Robb Report
James Perkins' beautiful silk panels were in tatters by the time Conrad Colman's "Imagine" sailed into Guadeloupe from France. But that was the point.
Artsy
Works available on Artsy from the Burying Painting: Event Horizons series.
Office Magazine
James Perkins and All The Elements
Upon the sand are the forces of nature to remind us to never get too caught up in all of this technological chaos. Forests, and beaches are where beauty resorts so effortlessly, we can all sit for hours, mesmerized by its inability to be anything less than perfect.
Text by JoliAmour DuBose-Morris
Balenciaga New York Runway show at NYSE
James Perkins attends the Balenciaga runway show where the fashion house took over the New York Stock Exchange For a Star-Studded Show
White Columns
James Perkins is a sculpturist and painter originally from the South. Currently based in NYC and Fire Island, the Yale graduate who studied Chemistry came to his practice by way of wanting to create work that makes people feel good and optimistic about the future. He uses the outdoors to inform and react to his works, leaving many of his paintings outside with the elements to create the cohesion with nature that humans often seek.
Initiated in 2016 on the beach in Fire Island, NY, the “Burying Painting” series employs a system in nature to explore the experience of weathering the vicissitudes of life and the existential questions that we all face. The work consists of time-based land art installations. Using wood and silk, the objects start outdoors in the language of sculpture and come indoors as paintings with marks made in collaboration with nature.
WEST ELM
Inside the Fire Island home where artist James Perkins and his family escape the city
Lulu and Georgia Collaboration
Artist James Perkins’ work spans land art installations, sculpture, painting, photography, and film. In his collection of wallpaper and textiles, James takes inspiration from the Earth’s color palette. The launch will include wallpapers, silk pillows, and cashmere throws.
Sleepy Jones
Check out @sleepyjones IG stories for a fun studio visit with James at his Fire Island studio shot by @christopherstarbody
Vela Creative Artist Profile
As an alumnus of both Yale and the School of Visual Arts, James Perkins is a proud New Yorker who seeks inspiration in the contrast between the manmade city he calls home and the sweeping and unpredictable paths of the natural world just beyond. He counts the ocean and sunsets as his muses and the uninhibited elements of the outdoors are his materials; thus, through paint and sculpture, he experiments in entirely unique ways to tell the story of our planet’s history with stunning visual splendor. While many artists create only within the confines of their studios, Perkins finds that constraining, preferring instead to create using elements of nature. He defies the expected by using techniques like burying paintings in the sand to see what surprising patterns or color infusions await once they emerge.
Perkins’s work elicits the slow and steady pulse of life that lies beneath our surface-level hustle and bustle. While the world struggles en masse to disconnect from devices and the general hectic feelings of day-to-day life, his art seeks to find moments of peace and to remind viewers that simplicity and reflection are essential to achieving a life filled with true contentment.
Though he undoubtedly has the soul of an artist, an academic foundation of chemistry and experience in the business world lend his work a touch of logic and simplicity, too. The results mimic the beautiful stillness you can expect from a perfectly-formed mathematics solution: thrilling and boundary-pushing, yet simultaneously logical and scientific as straight and calculated lines collide with a shifting color palette and the grit of sand particles still clinging to the canvas.
As fans of James Perkins, he has been on our list of artists to feature for quite some time now, and we are thrilled to feature his work.
Like James Perkins, we believe in a shared humanity, and his devotion to leading a life that uses the “ugliness in the word as motivation to seek beauty” is an inspiring ethos that deeply resonates with our hope for the future.
By Megan Johansson
James Perkins for Huckberry
We worked with artist James Perkins during a recent photo shoot for Wills, spending hours at his home and studio on Fire Island. James is among the most stylish men we’ve ever worked with, displaying impeccable taste in clothes, architecture, watches, and much more.
So we decided to ask James how he did it. The conversation took us from growing up in Arkansas in the 80’s, to his undergraduate career at Yale where he was a chemistry major, to his time on Wall Street working in finance and starting a hedge fund, and finally to his current life as an artist.
Our photographer called this one of his favorite assignments ever, simply because James had so much wisdom to pass on. It was difficult to edit him down, but read on for some style inspiration from a master of the craft.
Tappan Collective
The ocean is something I have spent a lot of time thinking about. I was a Chemistry major as an undergraduate and I think about things in terms of materials and elements. Our ocean is this immense resource and has this incredible presence and power. It conveys your smallness in a way I have only ever experienced in the mountains. It gives you the sense of standing at the edge of the world as we know it. I am fascinated by that feeling and I find it unifying. I am also inspired by our shared experience to paint our identity, and how we all navigate the history of totems to do so.
smARTpills
3 FUN FACTS: My first jobs out of college were at Investment Banks. I had just graduated from Yale as a chemistry major and was performing Breast Cancer research. Next, I did equity research on retail and industrial stocks. My best friend recently said, “ You’re still doing research reports, they’re just paintings now.”
HODINKEE
In his solo exhibition with famed Ace Gallery, artist James Perkins eloquently confronted money and its societal impact as an universal and unifying human experience of perception. Using materials from his time spent on Wall Street, many of the artworks are facially accessible to viewers; however, this is devised to draw the viewer into a more intimate exchange that challenges their own value judgments as the artist was forced to do in the making of the works. This is perhaps most exemplified in “One Percent”, an artwork comprised of 99 counterfeit watches, and one genuine Rolex Submariner anonymously interspersed within the milieu.
NYU IFA
James Perkins explicitly plays with our perception of universal truths and values, as perceived through conceptual signifiers. In One Percent, Perkins places a single Submariner Rolex watch within a pile of 99 counterfeit Submariner Rolex watches purchased on the black market. Poignant and optimistic, this installation explores our sense of discovery and fascination with the idea of luxury, symbols of success, and signs of difference. Perkins dazzles us with the sheer numbers of the timepieces, and the near impossibility of finding the real within the pile of imitations. The physical characteristics of luxury like shiny rare metals, exquisite workmanship, and thick polished glass, compete with the recognizable form of the watches. Real luxurious watches and cheap fake copies blend as their sheer numbers overwhelm viewers. All are working timepieces. Only one is the truth the viewer seeks. Perkins plays with our understanding of value, of reality, and of time, challenging our ability to decipher the real from fake, and the valuable from the dispensable. As the viewer tries to identify the one real Rolex watch in a pile of fakes, times escapes. Time well spent searching for the truth? Or time wasted attempting to decide whether real and fake can be separated and understood at a glance? James Perkins studied at Yale University before going to Wall Street, later completing his Masters at the School of Visual Arts.
Curated by Lisa Banner
Faust Wines
#InTheHaus playlist series for the Faust Haus in Napa Valley. His playlist is an exploration of genres, featuring the likes of Luciano Pavarotti and Miles Davis, to Solange and Kanye West.
BFROW In Conversation
I learned modes and models for thinking from Donald Judd, Richard Serra, John Cage, Miles Davis, Robert Irwin, and Michael Heizer. Artists have replicated the strategies of painting or bronze sculpture so much that I think I am attracted to these newer modes that are less studied and more difficult to execute. You don’t just get a painting at the end of a month or two. It's almost a complete commitment to your life being the work, with a few objects and remnants left along the way.
Intersect Aspen
Cult Aimee Friberg Exhibitions is Thrilled to Present James Perkins’ ‘Totemic Abstractions’
Made on the beach in Fire Island, NY, the time-based land art installations composed of wood and silk employ a system in nature to explore the beauty and experience of weathering the vicissitudes of life. The “post-totem structures” start outdoors in the language of sculpture and culminate as “nonsite” wall reliefs with marks made in collaboration with nature. The results blur the lines of sculpture and painting, figuration and minimalism, monumental land art and temporary works, masculine and feminine, human intervention and nature. The works initially appear as painted steel, solid wood, or even fiberglass, but upon closer inspection, one sees they are much more delicate. The hollow frames are draped and wrapped in silk, semi buried or stacked to create ephemeral monumental works.