Glenn Kaino
Glenn Kaino, Sunday Bloody Sunday, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
“My practice has been about using art and the techniques associated with art to make connections – between seemingly disparate materials, ideas, people, and even histories.”
Portrait of Glenn Kaino. Courtesy of the artist.
Glenn Kaino’s studio practice includes sculpture, painting, filmmaking, performance, installation, and large-scale public work. He also operates outside the traditional purview of contemporary art, instigating collaborations with other modes of culture—ranging from tech to music to political organizing.
Kaino’s works, often functioning as poetic contradictions, aim to reconcile conflicting ideologies, opposing systems, and strict dichotomies in material and experiential ways. Conceiving his practice as conceptual kitbashing, akin to a model maker’s way of appropriating readymade kits to assemble unique models, Kaino reconfigures the conditions of distinct cultural spheres into ecologies of making in which seemingly disparate materials and ideas are brought into contact.
Major solo exhibitions of Kaino’s work have been presented at the High Museum of Art; the San Jose Museum of Art; Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Andy Warhol Museum; and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Kaino’s work has been featured in Desert X; the 13th International Cairo Biennale; the 12th Biennale de Lyon; and Performa (2009). Kaino is also an Emmy and Webby Award-winning producer and documentarian, whose films have been featured at the Tribeca Film Festival and SXSW.
Glenn Kaino, Invisible Man, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.
Glenn Kaino, The Burning Boards, 2007-ongoing. Chess game performance for 32 players with wood chessboards and wax chess pieces. Detail of Magnus Carlsen making a move during a performance at the World Chess Hall of Fame. Courtesy of the artist.
Glenn Kaino. Bridge, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
