Sanctuary by Paul Stephen Benjamin
Paul Stephen Benjamin
b. 1966, Chicago
Lives in Atlanta
Venue
New Orleans African American Museum
1418 Governor Nicholls Street, New Orleans, LA 70116
Monday–Wednesday, closed
Thursday–Sunday, 11 AM–4 PM
Neighborhood
Tremé
About The Project
Paul Stephen Benjamin’s subject is Blackness—as a color and a way of being. In his paintings, installations, and sculptures, he foregrounds the multivalent force of the color black to reveal new ways of seeing. Benjamin is as engaged by the formal possibilities of his investigations as he is by their conceptual rigor. With Sanctuary, Benjamin has constructed an edifice that is inspired by the vernacular architecture of New Orleans, namely the shotgun houses that line the city’s streets. The structure is made up of thousands of black bricks laid in an ascending configuration. The LED-lit letters that run down the tall central section read “Treme,” after the historic New Orleans neighborhood. While the work is invested in the rich history of Black architectural traditions, it is grounded in Benjamin’s personal history, too: his father was once a bricklayer in New Orleans. Thus, Sanctuary is at once a monument to collective and familial history.
About the Artist
Multimedia artist Paul Stephen Benjamin earned a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA from Georgia State University, Atlanta. The color black features prominently—nearly exclusively—in his work, particularly in his paintings and in his large installations of obsolete televisions, which play images of and audio from African American icons such as Beyoncé, Eldridge Cleaver, Aretha Franklin, Lil Wayne, Condoleezza Rice, and Nina Simone. Benjamin is focused on the pervasive connotations of the color black in society, culture, and language, and in concepts of identity, power, and authority. He is engaged in an ongoing investigation of the meaning and value of the color, but rather than conduct research alone, he takes viewers along on this inquiry. He asks: What came first, black as an agent or as a product? His work discusses the complex dynamics among culture, society, and what is, in fact, the absence of color. Recent exhibitions include State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum and The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas (2020); Great Force, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, (2019); Pure, Very, New, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (
Paul Stephen Benjamin, Sanctuary, 2021. Metallic black bricks and light, 160 x 200 x 32 inches. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. New Orleans African American Museum, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Jose Cotto.