Terry Adkins
86 x 86 in.
Bona Fide is among a number of works that came out of Adkins’s residency in 2000 at a disused uniform manufacturing factory, formerly known as Finesilver Manufacturing Company, in San Antonio, Texas. It was first exhibited as part of the recital Wild Ashes Mute at Finesilver Gallery, in San Antonio, Texas. The work is formed from stencil boards for trouser legs, which are fanned out in a circular arrangement in the order in which Adkins encountered them at the factory, employing chance as a compositional tool to determine the variations in form, shape and colour found in the sculpture. This work highlights Adkins’s belief in the evocative possibilities of ‘materials made by other hands, for other purposes’, in his words, in this case material connected to histories of labour and industry.
Installation view, Wild Ashes Mute, 2000, Finesilver Gallery, San Antonio. Courtesy Finesilver Gallery, San Antonio.
Provenance
Estate of Terry Adkins and Lévy Gorvy, New YorkExhibitions
Mettere al mondo il mondo, curated by Mark Godfrey, Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples, Italy, 4 October – 23 December 2022Terry Adkins: Resounding, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis MO, 13 March 2020 – 7 February 2021
Terry Adkins: The Smooth, The Cut, and The Assembled, Lévy Gorvy, New York NY, 10 January – 17 February 2018
Towering Steep, Jaffe-Friede & Strauss Galleries, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH, 24 June – 27 July 2003
Wild Ashes Mute, Finesilver Gallery, San Antonio TX, October – November 2000
Literature
Resounding, St Louis, MO: Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2020, pp. 24–25, 98–100 ill.
Terry Adkins: The Smooth, The Cut, and The Assembled, New York, NY: Lévy Gorvy, 2018, pp. 28–29, p. 45–47 ill.
Berry, Ian, ed, Recital, Saratoga Springs, NY: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum Art Gallery at Skidmore College; New York, NY: Prestel Publishing, 2017, p. 149 ill.