Kevin Beasley: What Delineates the Edge

Installation view, Kevin Beasley, Regen Projects 2025, Los Angeles California

By PETER FRANK August 28, 2025

In the fraught, now-crisis-level tenor of our time, the issues that have dominated recent artistic discourse seem small and dilatory. They may in fact be, but identity-sensitive issues and matters having to do with personal and political expression are at the heart of the now-overt struggle for the soul of America. The war on DEI, after all, is a war on all those who had been claiming, or re-claiming, a voice through their art, and not incidentally for their audience. Black Lives matter more than ever, and those artists who best articulate such ramifications keep a progressive stance viable amidst a full-on assault on their, and our, values.

Kevin Beasley is one such artist, a figure-less teller of family histories, mostly his own. What has set Beasley’s work aside from – above – that of most of his peers is his ability to rely not on imagery but on object and even (more or less) raw material to convey with intense lyricism the complexities and intimacies of his family’s deep-Virginia roots and military identification. 

Beasley is a passionate assembleur, building – indeed, erecting -- free-standing compilation-arrangements that bristle with that heady mixture of urgency and nostalgia that has been driving the work of post-Boomer African American artists. This year’s steep spike in urgency has actually brought out, or perhaps reframed, that nostalgic streak, amplifying the narrative quality of Beasley’s structures.  

Even so, Beasley does not spin tales out of incriminating visual testimony, as does, say, Betye Saar. For the most part he builds stage sets of a sort out of boards, doors, semi-fences, rags, more intact clothing, bedsheets, and all manner of detritus, not-quite-detritus, and not-at-all-detritus. A too quick reading of these trestles and coverlets can leave one with a soupçon of Robert Rauschenberg’s delirious de-hoardings. Beasley’s approach to recycling/re-building does have something of Rauschenberg’s choreographic poise, but whereas the Texan proto-Pop artist was responding to the sensual, even kinetic power of stuff, Beasley exploits his own dumpster-diving instinct to much more measured ends. You might say that his free-standing tableaux unction as scenes in a play (or cycle of plays).

The free-standing pieces are supplemented by wallworks – the Synthesizer or Synth series –fabricated from a vast assortment of consumer flotsam and jetsam. In fact, what Beasley does is embed all sorts of things – shoes, pool cues, T-shirts, etc. – in large rectangular tranches of polyurethane resin, each slab injected with a dominant color or colors that give it a painterly countenance. Like the assemblages, these highly synthetic, and synthesized, not-paintings account for a moment or moments in time demarcated by the concoction of each serving of this urban head cheese. It’s the opposite of nostalgia – a moment frozen in space as well as time. But for Beasley, the Synths, too, are part of the story, whether or not there is a story – or if there’s going to be.  WM