Chiffon Thomas 

Photo by Texas Isaiah @KingTexas. 

 
 

I introduce material to elaborate meaning; a solid material or dense material signifies something that cannot be penetrated and is indestructible. I might use bibles, or religious doctrines that are very rigid, to create a body and let that be a visual language.

— Chiffon Thomas

Selected Works

Exhibitions

Thomas Exhibition
Chiffon Thomas, Progeny
Chiffon Thomas, Progeny
Chiffon Thomas, Antithesis
Chiffon Thomas, Antithesis

Selected Press

Featured
Chiffon Thomas - ArtForum
Chiffon Thomas - ArtForum

“Progeny,” Chiffon Thomas’s exhibition here, presents three installations in which peculiar juxtapositions of body parts and architectural forms become points of departure for considering how individual and collective identities evolve.

Chiffon Thomas - Hyperallergic
Chiffon Thomas - Hyperallergic

Chiffon Thomas’s bronze, stained glass, and steel sculptures fuse the corporeal and the monumental, invoking forgotten legacies of labor, communal perseverance, and historical injustices.

Chiffon Thomas - The New York Times
Chiffon Thomas - The New York Times

Chiffon Thomas, 32, takes as his found objects the ornate wood columns retrieved from demolished Colonial and Victorian-style mansions on the East Coast — “the emblems of something oppressive, something that held my family back,” he said, describing the legacy of racial discrimination. “The architecture was a symbol of all this history, a ghost of the history still very present operating in this insidious way.”

Chiffon Thomas - Vacant Magazine
Chiffon Thomas - Vacant Magazine

“I am always thinking through social and political structures that can both disenfranchise or empower people, and seeing works by these artists help to remind me how we are all embedded in global networks of power, privilege, and oppression.”

Chiffon Thomas - Art Zealous
Chiffon Thomas - Art Zealous

What does it mean to live in a utopia of our own design? How can opposing ideas or bodies occupy the same space, where binary qualities are bound together to create a translation of form that is whole and yet wholly singular?

Books

Chiffon Thomas Chiffon Thomas
Chiffon Thomas
$39.99

86 pages
Hardcover

Published by Michael Kohn Gallery
1227 N Highland Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90038

All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this catalogue may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher.

Catalogue © 2024 Michael Kohn Gallery
All images © 2024 Chiffon Thomas
Progeny © 2024 Alyssa Collins
Photography and Design by Karl Puchlik
Portrait Photography by Texas Isaiah Horatio-Valenzuela and Ian Garcia

ISBN: 978-1-880086-32-2

Chiffon Thomas
Sold out
Chiffon Thomas
$39.99

Published on the occasion of Chiffon Thomas exhibition “Antithesis.”
Hardcover
108 pages
Published by Kohn Gallery

 

About the Artist

Born and raised in Chicago, IL, Chiffon Thomas received his MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2020 and his BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. Thomas is the recent recipient of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship and the Fountainhead Residency. Recent exhibitions include Antithesis, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Chiffon Thomas: The Cavernous, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2023); Progeny, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Ribbon Sharp; Perrotin, Paris, FR (2024); and Personal Stories/ Political Realities, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, FR (2025).  His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, FL; Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, KY; Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; and X Museum, Beijing, China; among others.

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