White, Passing

On view at the Rubell Museum

Kennedy Yanko was the Rubell Museum’s 2021 Artist-in-Residence. During her residency, Yanko scoured scrapyards in south Florida in search of readymade forms ripe for intervention. The abstract sculptures created during the residency – I am flower, I am water, and I am that – express elements of her lived experience.

In Spring of 2021 I went to the Rubell Residency with the intention to make the biggest works I'd ever made. Don and Mera had asked me what I wanted to achieve during my time there, and all I could imagine were big shapes soaring up and over me like tornadoes. When I got to Miami, I immediately started looking for my metal—the spines and frames of my sculptures that are the first impulse of what's to come. I found a white and gray, crumpled and marked shipping container whose spots of blue and red and yellow caught my eye. Their colors were primary, and in that, urgent. I began making the paint skins, pouring over 100 gallons of paint in response to the metal that so demanded its other: this smooth, supple, full and writhing body. 

While making these pieces, I was simultaneously working on my graphic novel, Indelible Fluidity. It is autobiographical and it prompted me to look at myself, my story, my history and my physicality in a way that my other artmaking has never so bluntly required. I had to look at my blond hair, green eyes, white-passing skin and not necessarily reconcile any part of that, but to see it and feel it and sit with it. Working on this novel in tandem with the largest sculptures of my life was not only symbolic and intense, but revealing. I discovered a written language for my experience through developing this narrative while also realizing a visual language for the incommunicable parts of my existence in scale, form, and synchronicities within materials. The latter—the overlapping moments of the materials' experience, where metal and paint skin both bend and twist and sing—articulate dualities occurring within one moment, one person, one spirit. 

There is light, dark, shadow and reflection embedded in each of the three sculptures in White, Passing: I am Flower, I am Water, I am That. My black American mother, my white American father, my biracial brother are among the swell of tension and togetherness passing through the space, transforming this matter alongside me. 

Heavy as the work is, there’s a levity and even weightlessness to it—it’s bright, kinetic, and will move with the wind. Its fluidity is its solidity. It is a rejection of definition and welcoming of self.

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