Tanya Leighton is delighted to announce
‘May 25th, 2020
’, Esteban Jefferson’s first institutional solo exhibition in the United Kingdom at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London.
The exhibition will feature a new series of works revolving around the protests sparked across the United States after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota on 25 May 2020. After tracking the lifespan of these protests and studying detritus on the sites in which they took place, Jefferson's work is informed by small interventions left behind by protestors, from graffiti on a bus stop sign to large-scale vandalism of well-known colonialist monuments.
Jefferson's newest body of work pays special attention to the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial statue positioned outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York until 2022. The statue features Roosevelt on horseback, flanked on each side by a Native American and Black man at his feet. The statue had been the focus of a sustained campaign of criticism for years and was finally removed, but not destroyed, in January 2022. The sculpture has since been relocated to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota.
In previous exhibitions, Jefferson’s work has further examined the representation of marginalised figures in museum settings, through paintings and sculptural objects. The series
‘Petit Palais’ (2019-2021) revolved around two Venetian busts of Black subjects which sit behind the reception desk of the Petit Palais Fine Arts Museum in Paris. In the paintings, the museum itself is rendered as a ghostly sketched presence, while the two busts are intricately detailed, bringing them into the foreground of the picture plane while they remain backgrounded in reality through the curatorial choices of the museum. This choice in depiction creates a laser-like focus and elevation of the neglected works, which are not recorded in the museum’s wall texts or the catalogue as anything more than “Buste d’Africaine.”
