Karyn Olivier’s Elusive Art Bears Witness to Hidden Histories

Karyn Olivier’s work can often read as elusive. An expansive artist whose practice floats across various mediums, her works take many forms: a white column that rests on a historical table, a set of 15 stacked orange construction barriers, heaps of found clothing or fishing nets, an aesthetically pleasing piece of driftwood resting atop sheets of steel, photographs that are partially obscured by asphalt. They typically come off as quiet or deceptively straightforward, slowly unfolding to reveal their nuances.

But, the idea of her work “bearing witness” appears repeatedly across these seemingly disconnected works, she said in a recent interview. There is something keenly observant in the way her work behaves, particularly in the way it reveals how everything and everyone—people, neighborhoods, infrastructure, structures of oppression, and even trash—are inextricably imbued with history. Whether we reciprocate that attention or not is part of what her work brings to the fore. There is a distinct corporeality to her oeuvre, one that elicits a powerful sense of empathy. Her work seems to ask, if we can listen to the things that are constantly whispering to us, what would we hear? And what does the way we choose to respond to this insight say about our empathy—or lack thereof?

A recent concern for the artist is monuments, having recently completed two public art commissions in Houston and Philadelphia, where she is based. “I think about monuments a lot because I think about how monuments can be a witness. A monument can be many things. Monuments in terms of the historical, weighty materiality, but also monuments are temporal,” Olivier, whose art has also appeared in four biennials in 2024 alone, told ARTnews.

This thinking informed Olivier’s current public art exhibition, “Off the Wall: Revelation,” at Rice University’s Brochstein Pavilion in Houston. The simple photograph on view there—of a neighborhood in North Philadelphia—initially reads as innocuous and documentary. The scale of “Revelation,” however, measuring10.5 feet by 55.75 feet, immerses the viewer in a painterly landscape that renders the pictured aged buildings nearly sentient. Vines in the upper left corner of the piece drape and conceal the building like hair, while a collapsed patch of vines heaves and sighs on the sidewalk, revealing a palimpsest of marks on the wall that could read as capillaries or stretch marks, or “the folds of a body,” as Olivier put it.

“What does it mean if plant life, which has its own temporal place and position in our world and our geography, is transformed into a body?” she asked. “The scale of that three-story vine being turned into the scale of our bodies was an interesting thing to think about.”

The personification of the pavilion adds “different layers, different histories that are part of a place,” like Rice University, according to Frauke Josenhans, the curator at the university’s Moody Center for the Arts who organized the exhibition. “It is hyperrealistic, but it almost has a painterly quality to it,” she added.

Unearthing the layers of history also appears in Olivier’s contributions to the recent Prospect.6 in New Orleans, which closed in February. Installed at the derelict Ford Motor Plant, amid belching and billowing factories in the neighboring town of Arabi, her works appeared as a gorgeous dystopian dreamscape. Most connected to that sense of dystopia was Drift (Tributary), a 2023 video work showing a sad processional of detritus riding a conveyer belt at Revolution Recovery, a construction waste and recycling center, which provides access and materials to the Recycled Artist in Residency (RAIR), in which Olivier participated in 2020. The context of New Orleans immediately called to mind the excesses and spirituality of the city’s various processionals that occur year-round.

Olivier, however, had a different form of excess in mind. “It’s a strange thing being aware of the excess—the horror of our human waste and extraction and excesses,” she said. “But then also these things that we are extracting to make things, they are things we surround ourselves with for comfort and love, and they have meaning.”

Nearby, at Prospect, was Winter hung to dry (2003), a sculptural installation consisting of a heap of found winter garments that drag down a clothesline. She was intrigued by the concept of putting clothes that you wouldn’t normally hang out to dry on a clothesline. “So the clothes are hanging like a surrogate for the bodies, there’s something like a weighty weightlessness to it,” she said. “There’s something about that mass—bodies on top of bodies.”

At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Olivier showed a similar sculpture, Stop Gap (2020), also consisting of second-hand clothing piled on top of each other.While Winter hung to dry points to ideas of concealment and revelation, Stop Gap, with its clothing trapped between branches of driftwood, feels vastly more personal and emotional. The work, in fact, memorialized a recently deceased friend of the artist.

“It’s a kind of memorial,” Chrissie Iles, cocurator of the 2024 Biennial, said of Stop Gap. “These works are very elegiac, and you have a responsibility when you’re showing them, to not dramatize it in the space but also not take away that sense of the elegiac by making it too neutral.”

While Stop Gap may be Olivier’s most personal commemoration to the dead, she has also invoked those who are longer with us on a grander scale for public projects in Philadelphia. Her emphasis on the simultaneity of revelation and concealment is evident in RIGHT HERE (2024), her memorial to Dinah, an enslaved woman who prevented the Stenton House from being burned by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War.

Olivier sees the public work, in which two engraved stone tablets face each other as less a memorial than a facilitator of thought and communication. One tablet poses questions of those who come to the memorial, like “Do you feel free?” or “What is your wildest dream?” The others are posed directly to Dinah, whose biography has been lost to the historical record, including “What was your full name?” and “How did freedom feel?” The most provocative: “Did you ever wish you had let it burn?”

“It’s a monument that you’re absolutely forced to engage with it,” Stenton House curator Laura Keim told ARTnews. Visitors who sit down and read out the questions are put “into conversation with Dinah—and then with ourselves.”

Her forthcoming public monument for Bethel Burying Ground, a historic African American cemetery in South Philadelphia, takes a different approach at thinking about what has been lost to history. Approved in 2021 with a planned completion date in 2026, Her Luxuriant Soil will place the names of the enslaved individuals buried there on pavers that will only reveal themselves when it rains or are washed anew.

These two memorials, like Olivier’s practice as a whole, become a place to reflect on history and all its complexities. “There’s always a balancing act,” Meg Onli, cocurator of the 2024 Whitney Biennial, said of Olivier’s approach. “She’s worked with things that are often perceived as heavy—history, enslavement, even migration. Yet she’s always able to approach them [with] a light, poetic touch without it ever being particularly heavy-handed.”

Olivier doesn’t shy away from posing difficult questions about painful aspects of our shared history—nor does she foist easy answers upon us. The ambiguity in her works should instead be seen as a generosity—a sentiment that her collaborators frequently shared. “What does it mean,” she said, “to give someone the space for them to grow into how they would answer those questions?”