Cosmo Whyte: Ballad for Rodney

The Institute for the Humanities’ presentation of Cosmo Whyte’s Ballad for Rodney (2024) is organized as part of Whyte’s upcoming solo exhibition at the Stamps Gallery entitled Cosmo Whyte: Under the Quiet, Beyond the Eye.

This “Curtain Painting” operates simultaneously as painting and sculpture, inviting the viewer to physically engage with the surface, passing through to another layer underneath. Named in reference to Rodney King, the African American man who was a victim of police brutality in LA in 1991, the kinetic artwork intends to bring into question the relationship between the body and the artwork. Through direct engagement with image and materiality, it shifts one’s idea of an archive from a static memory to a lived embodied experience.

Cosmo Whyte (b. 1982, St. Andrew, Jamaica) is an interdisciplinary artist who employs drawing, installation, and sculpture to create conceptual work exploring interstitial subjectivity through an engagement with both intimate and public archives, as well as Black spatiality and forms of resistance. He received his MFA from the University of Michigan. In 2022, he joined the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture as an assistant professor.

Whyte’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at MOCA Georgia, Atlanta, GA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; and the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica, among others. His work is in public museum collections including the High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; International African American Museum, Charlotte, NC; MOCA Georgia, Atlanta, GA; National Gallery of Jamaica; Pérez Art Museum Miami, among others. Whyte lives and works between Montego Bay, Jamaica and Los Angeles, CA.