NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery will display Sam Durant’s lightbox End White Supremacy (2008) on the façade of 534 West 21st Street to coincide with the 2008 Presidential Election.

Engaging history and politics, Sam Durant‘s work addresses utopias and their failures, investigating the fabric of popular culture, and weaving relationships between defining art-historical, pop-cultural and political events. His past work has focused on the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panthers; the student massacre at Kent State, Ohio; and the centuries-long struggle between Native Americans and white settlers. Durant has also created work about artists Robert Smithson, Joseph Beuys and Isamu Noguchi and musicians Neil Young and the Rolling Stones.

Sam Durant was born in Seattle in 1961, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Durant has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Kunstverein Düsseldorf; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, and other institutions. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Out of Place: Contemporary Art and the Architectural Uncanny at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2002); the 2002 Venice Biennale, Italy; the 2004 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennal, New York; and Unmonumental at the New Museum in New York (2007). This past summer, Durant’s work was featured in Freedom at the Hague Sculpture Center in the Netherlands, and he is currently included in OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding at the Kellen Gallery at Parsons The New School in New York.

Sam Durant is a finalist for the 2008 Hugo Boss Prize, awarded in conjunction with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York for significant achievement in contemporary art.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com