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Radcliffe Bailey

DEPICTING August Wilson

Lost and Found, 2013, is about Sun Ra, space travel, my experience as a boy in Virginia witnessing a locust storm. It was biblical to me, it was religion.

The jar is filled with locusts, land, my grandparents, family.

I was exposed to August Wilson’s work between classes at the Atlanta College of Art. From Fences to Jitney, I felt the black sensibility of his plays witnessing to me. I wanted my work to shadow those sensibilities.”

— Radcliffe Bailey

A collection of items in a glass box. An open book, the bottom half covered in dirt, a small black statue next to a glass jar of locusts, a sculpted black hand holding a flier of some kind.
Lost and Found [August Wilson], 2013. Radcliffe Bailey. © Radcliffe Bailey. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Artist

Radcliffe Bailey

(b. 1968)
Radcliffe Bailey is a contemporary American artist noted for mixed-media, paint, and sculpture works that explore African American history. Although trained as a sculptor, Bailey works within the convergence of painting and sculpting. Thematically, his artwork explores the intersection of ancestry, race, and cultural memory. In 2003, he adopted a style inspired by spiritual-invested Kongo minkisi. His “medicine cabinet sculptures” are three-dimensional and layered. Bailey is based in Atlanta.

A black & white photo of a man with a white beard and a black suit and hat standing in front of a wall covered with papers pinned to it.

August Wilson, 2004. Photo by David Cooper.

Man of Change

August Wilson


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