The Armory Show: Allison Janae Hamilton | Love is like the sea...

For inquiries, please contact director Savannah Downs:

savannah@boeskygallery.com

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Allison Janae Hamilton’s monumental bronze sculpture, Love is like the sea… (2023), for the Platform section of The Armory Show 2025. Curated by Raina Lampkins-Fielder, Armory Platform will showcase a selection of large-scale artworks.

Throughout her practice, Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984; Lexington, KY) draws on her upbringing in the rural American South, weaving themes of environmental justice, folklore, and mythology into sculpture, photography, painting, and film. Layering plant matter, landscape and figurative imagery, complex sounds, and animal remains throughout her work, Hamilton creates immersive spaces that consider notions of “Americana” and our relationships to land in the face of a changing climate, particularly in the rural American South.

Love is like the sea... (2023) takes its title from Zora Neal Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, set against the backdrop of the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928, which devastated the state of Florida. The monumental sculpture—three columns of stacked tambourine forms—addresses the intersection of environmental crisis and cultural history. Employing the tambourine as both symbol and form, Hamilton evokes notions of celebration, war, and storytelling to link historically devastating Florida storms to present concerns around climate and natural disaster, particularly in southern Black communities. Constructed in bronze, Love is like the sea… continues Hamilton’s longstanding engagement with public sculpture.

Love is like the sea… (2023) was previously on view installed in the Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition presented by The Helis Foundation at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, LA. Earlier works from the same series were featured in Indicators: Artists on Climate Change at Storm King Art Center in 2018 and in there is this We at Sculpture Milwaukee in 2021. Another bronze work from the series is in the permanent collection of the Equal Justice Initiative Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, AL.

ABOUT ALLISON JANAE HAMILTON

Hamilton has exhibited widely across the United States and abroad. Her work has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at the Georgia Museum of Art, the Joslyn Art Museum, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), and Atlanta Contemporary, as well as a commissioned solo project with Creative Time. Her sculpture, Love is like the sea… (2023) was recently on view in the Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition, presented by The Helis Foundation in New Orleans, LA. Select recent group exhibitions include there is this We, Sculpture Milwaukee; The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (traveling); Shifting Horizons, Nevada Museum of Art; Enunciated Life, California African Art Museum; More, More, More, TANK Shanghai; and Indicators: Artists on Climate Change, Storm King Art Center. Work by the artist is held in public collections such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hood Museum of Art, The Menil Collection, Nasher Museum of Art, Nevada Museum of Art, and Speed Museum of Art, among others. Hamilton has participated in a range of fellowships and residencies, including at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and Fundación Botín, Santander, Spain. She is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. Hamilton holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She lives and works in New York.