Nick Cave

When Nick Cave opened Amalgams and Graphts, his exhibition that opened at Jack Shainman Gallery's Tribeca space in the spring of 2025, the viewer knew straight away that something had changed. After three years of deliberate silence in the wake of major retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Guggenheim, the Chicago-based Cave returned with work that was practically unrecognizable from his signature "Soundsuits," or the textile sculptures that first brought him recognition over two decades ago.

Growing up as one of seven brothers, the trained fiber artist and dancer learned early in life the need to be adaptable in order to survive. His childhood lessons in code-switching would later become central to his identity and art. At Cranbrook Academy, as the only minority student at the time, Cave started to examine how protective armor, both literal and metaphorical, can help a person move through hostile environments.

The "Soundsuits" themselves were born from trauma, or the artist's visceral response to the Rodney King beating in 1992. Sitting alone in a park, Cave began collecting twigs---initially because he'd stepped on one and dismissed it, not unlike how society had dismissed King. What took root as a sculpture eventually became wearable armor, and when the artist moved in it, it made sound. That sound became a protest, or a means of consideration, demanding to be heard in a world set on silencing Black voices.

Today, Cave refuses to be trapped by his own success. The bronze sculptures and mixed-media works in Amalgams and Graphts are a move into new territory; they feature the same energy that animated his earlier work but appear through radically different materials and forms. Using cutting-edge 3D technology and collaborating with foundries across continents, Cave has created monumental pieces that speak to permanence and accessibility in ways his previous work did not. It's worth noting that unlike museum-bound art, these works are designed to live in public spaces where anyone can encounter them---yet not all is unfamiliar. In Amalgams and Graphts, just like in his "Soundsuits" series, the artist takes something discarded or overlooked and reconfigures it into a mesmerizing experience.