Hands holding up a sign that says “If you hear something free something,” outside a busy subway station.
About the artist
Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, conversation, situation, publication, and installation. Bass has been exhibited and published at major institutions around the world, including recent solo exhibits at Buffalo AKG Art Museum, California African American Museum at A+P, Skirball Cultural Center, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven. Recently, MTA Arts for Transit unveiled Chloë Bass’s permanent public artwork, Personal Choice #5, 2023, in the Lorimer-Metropolitan Avenue L train subway station. The work invites riders to reflect on shared lived experience, connection, and physical and emotional proximity in New York City.
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. She began her work with a focus on the individual, The Bureau of Self-Recognition (2011–2013), followed by an eight chapter work exploring one-on-one social interaction, The Book of Everyday Instruction (2015–2017). Bass recently concluded an investigation at the scale of the immediate family, Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place (2018–2024). She is currently expanding her study of groups with Since feeling is first (2024–ongoing), a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law. She will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis.
Chloë has held numerous fellowships and residencies: most recently, the 2022-2024 Kupferberg Arts Incubator residency; the 2022 Future Imagination Fund Fellowship at NYU Tisch College of the Arts; a 2020-2022 Faculty Fellowship for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center); and a 2020-2022 Lucas Art Fellowship at Montalvo Art Center. Previous honors include a grant from Art Matters, a residency at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including exhibits at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Ford Foundation Gallery, Skirball Cultural Center, California African American Museum at A+P, Henry Art Gallery, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, the Knockdown Center, The Kitchen, Brooklyn Museum, and elsewhere. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the L.A. Times, The Seattle Times, Artforum, Time magazine, Forbes, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, and ARTnews among publications. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates and serves as the co-director of Social Practice CUNY.
Photo Credit: Naima Green