Witness: The Distance Within | Studio Museum In Harlem
2 October, 2021 - 1 October, 2022
Marcus Garvey Park, NYC, USA

Thomas J Price: Witness marks the British sculptor’s first US solo institutional presentation. Price’s nine-foot bronze figure, The Distance Within (2021), is sited within Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park and depicts a young Black man looking down at his cell phone. The form of this piece pays homage to a work titled Network that the artist originally presented in the UK in 2013. Price’s large-scale figural sculptures are inspired by real people, often those who live and work in his hometown of South London, where the artist was born and raised

With Witness, the artist continues his exploration of blackness and Black masculinity at monumental scales. In The Distance Within, Price asks us to consider what is projected onto Black bodies as they move in the world and in what ways they are made monolithic via broader archetypes and stereotypes, as well as how Black bodies in the ordinary everyday are subject to extraordinary surveillance and spectatorship. The grand size of the sculpture celebrates a familiar everyday form rarely monumentalised within a public setting. Simultaneously, the scale works to take up space, to occupy, to hold presence, to bear witness.

Read more on the Studio Museum website here.

I want to interrogate [notions of] presence, movement, and freedom. Who do these spaces belong to? And what bodies are provided more or less autonomy to move with liberty through public [space]?

- Thomas J Price

inHarlem | Thomas J Price: Witness
Film and stills by RAVA films