LORENZO PACE:
SELECTED WORKS October 7- November 6, 2022

EUROPA is proud to present Lorenzo Pace: Selected Works; the first gallery exhibition in New York by the Brooklyn-based artist, performer, and educator, Lorenzo Pace.

Working in a variety of modes and media, Pace is best known for Triumph of the Human Spirit, a five-story 300 ton black granite sculpture sculpture permanently installed in New York's Foley Square. The piece was conceived in response to the rediscovery of a massive 18th century African Burial Ground in 1991 during the construction of a new federal building two blocks from City Hall. Human remains of 427 bodies were excavated from the site, nearly half of them children, debunking the dominate narrative that the Enslavement trade was limited to the American South. Pace's monument, located in what is now a National Historic Landmark and one of the most important sites of protest in the country, is an abstract representation of the female antelope based on the West African Bambara Chi Wara figure. It sits in a fountain atop a vessel meant to symbolize the canoes of the first Native Americans of the area and the ships that brought enslaved Africans to the United States. Embedded within the sculpture is a lock that shackled Pace's great great grandfather, Steven Pace, passed down after the death of his father, also in 1991. The story of the family lock also became the subject of Pace's award-winning children's book, Jalani and the Lock, published in 2000.

On view at EUROPA are a selection of Pace's rarely-seen assemblage sculptures created from 1984 - 2017, highlighting a more improvisational side of the artist's practice. The work was made primarily for residencies or commissions, using materials found on location, both readymade and sculpted. They pull from personal narrative and cultural iconography, with titles referencing Miss America, James Baldwin, John Chamberlain, and Pace's father, who was a Pentecostal preacher.

Central to the exhibition is a re-staging of a 2008 installation originally shown in Beijing soon after the first Forum on China-Africa summit, when over 40 African heads of state were invited to China to deepen trade and economic relations between the Asian superpower and the resource-rich continent. The official courtship, which took place during the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, was celebrated in Beijing with over-the-top gestures like giant billboards of elephants and giraffes and red banners on the streets that read, “Friendship, Peace, Cooperation and Development.” Pace's installation riffed on the spectacle of Chinese-African diplomacy by using traditional mutsvairos (twig brooms) typical of Zimbabwe and Chinese cloth mops he sourced from convenience stores in Beijing. The mops and brooms were painted red and black to represent China and Africa and installed bottom-up, like heads on sticks, in processional rows united by a central sun. While the materials remain consistent, the configuration and context of the installation are transformed at EUROPA, a gallery space in New York's Chinatown, less than a mile from the African Burial Ground.

-Text by Julia Trotta

Lorenzo Pace: Selected Works will coincide with the the 3rd Annual Human Spirit Day, a day of harmony and reflection to commemorate the 22nd anniversary of the unveiling of the Triumph of the Human Spirit. The celebration will take place at the monument in Foley Square on Sunday, October 23, 2022.