At
Cavin-Morris Gallery in Chelsea, two wooden ships can be found
stationed on a large white pedestal. “The Madjet,” with its curving
stern and sculptural ornaments raised high like royal standards, easily
conjures associations with ancient Egypt, with the sleek vessels
depicted ferrying deities up and down the Nile. Yet with its metal
fastenings, its projecting rudder, and its crisscrossing assemblage of
sticks, strings, screws, and woodchips, there is a machinelike quality
about the Madjet. Absent of human operators, the ship is animated
instead by a force unseen, an energy that gathers its parts and holds
them in a dynamic, buzzing tension. “I always try to make everything I
do move,” the sculptor Kevin Sampson told me later. “The Kron-Printzen,”
also on display at
Cavin-Morris,
offers another vibrant bricolage of wood and metal scraps, painted
rope, iridescent beads, and other vaguely discernible elements,
synthesized into a ghostly, two-masted ship. Named after an
eighteenth-century Dutch slaver that sank at sea, entombing hundreds of
Africans in an underwater grave, Sampson’s Kron-Printzen is layered with
histories as diverse as its materials.
“The Kron-Printzen,” Wood, Metal, String, and Found Materials, 26″ x 27″ x 12″, 2014. Image courtesy of Cavin-Morris Gallery.
These
were the first of Sampson’s sculptures I had encountered. At the time, I
had only corresponded over e-mail with the artist. Knowing little else
about Sampson aside from the fact that he was formerly a police officer
and, at any given time, a very busy man, I studied the two ships on
display and felt a swell of curiosity about the artist I had yet to
meet, about what fascinating combination of grand and personal
narratives threaded through these works.
When I asked the gallery
attendants at Cavin-Morris what they knew about Sampson, they
immediately lit up. They touched and handled Sampson’s sculptures as
they spoke about them, treating them not as precious artifacts but as
objects that incited direct engagement. One, whose name was Marissa,
remarked on how Sampson’s pieces are more robust than they might appear.
His strung-up, cement-filled, and screwed-together compositions always
made the journey from studio to exhibition space fully intact. As I drew
closer to the ships, Marissa explained how she could recognize a
system, a unique vocabulary and syntax, in each of Sampson’s sculptures.
However chaotic and freeform they may appear at a glance, their
interlocking wood pieces, well-placed screws, and assiduous dabs of
paint give the sculptures a sense of cohesion. Each individual artwork
manages to absorb the torrent of snapped twigs, fraying ropes, and
bleached chicken bones, the anomalous furniture knobs and jewelry pieces
that appear inexplicably fused into their new contexts. These
repurposed materials never completely lose their definition, revealing
their tangled past lives in vague but visceral flashes.
“St. John,” Mixed Media, 34″ x 18″ x 19″, Mixed Media, 2005. Image courtesy of Cavin-Morris Gallery.
It
was a chilly January afternoon when Sampson and I finally found time
for a studio visit. Sampson, 61, is a father of three. With the untimely
passing of his wife, he raised his children mostly on his own. To this
day Sampson, a recent grandfather and a teacher at schools and art
institutions, radiates parental love and attentiveness. Days, hours, and
minutes before our meeting, he sent instructions on how to get to his
Newark apartment from Manhattan, proposing at the last minute to meet me
at Newark Penn Station where my train would arrive. When I stepped out
of the exit he had specified, Sampson, dressed solemnly in a black
jacket and a charcoal gray fedora, met my eyes with his. His mouth,
tightly sealed and framed in thick, trimmed strokes of facial hair,
opened into a smile. He greeted me with a jovial handshake, and I could
recognize in an instant the charismatic warmth I had sensed in our
correspondence, as well as the melancholy of his art, the dreaminess
that seems inextricable from a familiarity with hardship and pain.
“I’ve
been here over 20 years, and I still don’t feel like I’m Newark,”
Sampson told me as we walked from the train station to his apartment and
studio a few blocks away. We were in the Ironbound neighborhood, a
community of mostly Portuguese and Brazilian immigrants that weathered
the boom and bust of industrial growth as well as the riots that swept
through Newark in 1967. As a widower, Sampson chose to relocate his
family to the Ironbound from Englishtown, New Jersey in the early 1990s,
leaving suburban living for a less conventional residence in an
artists’ colony that occupied an old factory space. Sampson had decided
to leave law enforcement to pursue art full-time. With a long career as a
composite sketch artist, he studied illustration at the Newark School
of Fine and Industrial Arts — soon teaching there — and took classes at
Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League in New York. The
pen and ink illustrations he showed me are arresting, many resembling
poster and mural designs, with their animated lines of text and
whimsical, often eerie, imagery of faces and machines. Sampson has in
fact worked on a number of publicly commissioned murals in the area.
“The Madjet,” Wood, Metal, String, and Found Materials, 27″ x 25″ x 8″, 2015. Image courtesy of Cavin-Morris Gallery.
But
Sampson prefers working with three-dimensional media. While
illustration, for him, requires prolonged contemplation, sculpture has a
spontaneity that currently holds greater appeal for Sampson. “I’m a
total process-oriented artist,” he told me. In this sense, art and life
seem inseparable for the sculptor, who considers his time spent watching
the news (“before CNN got so bad”), walking down the street, talking to
people, and collecting discarded objects, to be part of one continuous
artistic act. With his ships, Sampson will often build a basic framework
for each vessel with materials from a hardware store and then set off
on an Odyssean journey around the neighborhood to collect the
centerpieces and accessories for his vessels. Sampson has often felt
predestined to find the things he finds. When asked how his sculptures
are made, he responds by saying they were made “out there,” out in the
world beyond his studio, where he has often chanced upon exactly the
objects and conversations he had been searching for. “I remember
something Randall Morris said that really stuck with me,” Sampson
recalled of the cofounder of Cavin-Morris Gallery and an early supporter
of his work. “He said that artists like me live with their work.”
Sampson
currently lives in an open, second-story space above a large Brazilian
restaurant. He built the interior himself, starting with an empty,
stripped-down shell. Over the years, his residence has filled up with
created, inherited, acquired, and found objects. The first large room
hums with the rhythms and melodies of Sampson’s own sculptures. Other
seafaring vessels — including the satirical “U.S.S. Sarah Palin,”
bedizened with toy figurines like a nightmarish parade float — can be
seen alongside Sampson’s earlier works, his polychromatic, modified
musical instruments as well as the shrine-like memorials to friends,
family, and loved ones. Sampson had initially turned to sculpture as a
private activity, a means of dealing with personal tragedies as well as
the impact and aftermath of the AIDS and drug epidemics in the 80s and
early 90s. Now, when Sampson’s sculptures are not being displayed in
galleries and museums, many of them hang on the walls or sit on the
floors and tables of his apartment, where they commingle with a sundry
collection of busts, statuettes, icons, and dolls.
“Them Twins,” Mixed Media, 20″ x 29″ x 15″, 2002. Image courtesy of Cavin-Morris Gallery.
“Them Twins” (detail).
Sampson
apologized several times in advance for the “total mess” in his
apartment. His tone, however, was more playful than apologetic. Implicit
was a respect for his way of working, of finding meaning amid apparent
disorder. Indeed, his apartment reverberates with a contained chaos.
Nothing feels superfluous, nor essential or permanent. Objects glow with
the potential for use and change, from the wall of books slightly
obscured by larger artworks by Sampson’s friends, to the boxes of
cleaned chicken bones for his sculptures, to the jars of homemade
pickles on the kitchen counter, repeatedly replenished for friends,
family, and current and former students that regularly come through
Sampson’s home. Sampson is clearly a dedicated father, grandfather, and
community organizer, effortlessly adopting the traits of his own father,
who was a prominent civil rights leader. A photograph of Stephen
Sampson at a demonstration hangs by the door to his apartment.
“I
was the black sheep — or white sheep — of the family,” Sampson joked.
His father, a Sunday school teacher and independent scholar of black
history, wanted his children to be well-educated and empowered members
of their communities. Unable to identify a career path early on, the
young Sampson devoted himself to law enforcement because he had to “do
something.” Though he made bold decisions and concerted efforts to shift
his focus to art, Sampson expressed that his recognition as an
exhibited artist seems to him almost incidental. He still thinks little
of his success as an artist, despite having often found himself in the
company of elite politicians, artists, actors, and other members of what
seemed a distant world. “I came into the art world after
Basquiat,
Keith Haring, all the drug addicts. I think the galleries and the
museums were just happy to have a functional person,” Sampson said,
chuckling at himself. “I still feel more policeman than artist.”
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