The Henry will be closed March 3 - 4 for Collective Impulse: The 2022 Henry Gala ➞ preparations.

Chloë Bass

Chloë Bass, How Much of Love is Attention?, 2019. Mirrored stainless steel with frosted vinyl lettering. Image courtesy of the artist and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo: SaVonne Anderson.

Volunteer Park
Opens June 2022
Chloë Bass (b. 1984, New York) is a multiform conceptual artist based in New York and St. Louis. Her work in performance, installation, text, and social practice investigates the potential of daily life as a catalyst for intimacy, scaled from individuals to groups. Originally trained as a theatre director, Bass embraces Bertold Brecht’s idea of alienation: the discomfort that arises from calling attention to structure, and the things that we do without thinking, through naming or pointing. As Bass states, “my work evokes the particular state of attention produced by being alone in public: the sudden sense of everything as fascinating, the strange anxiety between feeling invisible and suddenly becoming aware that you are seen.”
For Bass’s project, commissioned and organized by the Henry, a series of stone benches will be arranged in familial groupings throughout Seattle’s Volunteer Park. Each bench will have its own engraved inscription, artist-written text that both stands alone and creates a larger meaning across the series of seating, alongside a silhouetted image applied in UV responsive pigment, which allows the image to change based on the level of available sunlight. The project examines themes of cultivation and wildness, the laws we impose to control human bodies, hierarchy and proximity, and stones as both memorials and boundary markers. 

Artist Bio

Chloë Bass (b. 1984, New York) is a multi-form conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice Queens with Gregory Sholette. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. 
Bass has held numerous fellowships and residencies: she is a 2020–2022 Faculty Fellow for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center), New York; a 2020–2022 Lucas Art Fellow at Montalvo Art Center, Saratoga, CA; and was a 2019 Art Matters Grantee. Recent honors include a residency at Denniston Hill, Glen Wild, New York and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship, Brooklyn. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, Germany; BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, the Netherlands; the Knockdown Center, Queens; the Kitchen, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; CUE Art Foundation, New York; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space New York; The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and elsewhere. 
CREDITS

Chloë Bass is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs.