Nick Cave Opens at Smithsonian
Artist Nick Cave's "Mammoth" exhibition opened February 13 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, featuring mammoth-inspired installations that address "history being erased" and the importance of preserving cultural memory. The work features ancient mammoth figures to underscore urgency in preserving both natural and social histories.
- This exhibition is the Smithsonian American Art Museum's largest-ever commission by a single artist and is Nick Cave's first solo exhibition in Washington, D.C. - The installation is deeply personal, drawing on Cave's childhood on his grandparents' farm in Chariton County, Missouri, and incorporates family heirlooms like his grandmother's thimble collection and his late brother's wooden cane. - A central piece is a 700-square-foot glowing light table displaying thousands of found objects, including vintage tools and juggling balls, arranged like paleontological specimens. - The exhibition features a variety of media, including a 60-by-20-foot hand-beaded tapestry, towering lifeguard chairs topped with skeletal mammoth heads, and bronze sculptures from Cave's "Amalgams" series that fuse casts of his own body with natural forms. - A four-wall video projection titled “Roam” shows the mammoth figures wandering through present-day Chicago. - The exhibition will be activated by a live, site-specific performance in October 2026, where performers will operate 13 mammoths of varying sizes in a procession through the museum. - Cave is well-known for his "Soundsuits," elaborate, wearable sculptures often made from found objects, which he first created in response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King to conceal identity and challenge assumptions about race and gender. - The free exhibition will be on view from February 13, 2026, through January 3, 2027.
