Kennedy Yanko

“Soul Talk is a monumental sculpture comprised of two materials: arching metal and tendriled paint skin. It is unclear what properties are vested in each element. The metal floats, while the paint is in the round, with shape, form, and rigidity—opposite qualities to what is normally ascribed to those materials.”

—Kennedy Yanko, November 2023

Salon 94, in collaboration with the Miami Design District and the architectural collective Flare, presents Soul Talk, Yanko’s new monumental sculpture displayed in a glass and steel pavilion designed by Alessandra Cianchetta and Veruska Vasconez. While opening hours are noted above, Stardust Pavilion is also viewable from the exterior at all hours.

The 10-foot-long sculpture is made up of the final piece of a shipping container Yanko broke apart and used in No More Drama, her installation spanning 70 feet at The Brooklyn Museum (on view until July 2024). Here, Soul Talk is a reclining sculpture in full view, day and night, in a room of her own.

The sculpture’s title credits author Akasha Gloria Hull, whose 2001 book, Soul Talk, explores the creative force among Black American women and a revival of spirituality and the divine. Soul Talk is both a memoir and conversation among creative powerful women—many of whom combine traditional Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, Native American teachings, meditation, the I Ching, and African-derived ancestral reverence—and explores their spiritual consciousness and how this knowledge is manifested, practiced, and passed forward. Scholar Camille Bacon, who gifted Yanko a copy of Soul Talk, was in conversation with the artist on Harvard’s Nexus Podcast, which releases this month.

Yanko’s creative process starts in scrap yards where she hunts for distinct colors amid heaps of junk. She treasures tarnished yellows and weathered reds. Back in her studio, she combines and rearranges metal pieces like elements in a collage, often employing crumpling, bending, welding, and surface treatments. She then pours customized latex paint onto plastic sheets, later peeling, sculpting, and placing the skins around the metal structures before the paint completely solidifies. The chartreuse color of Soul Talk was selected in response to the underlying colors nested within the metal’s patina and weathering. The yellow shade teases out its color wheel opposite: magenta with pink hues, furthering the relationship between the two materials. In Yanko’s hands, painting breaks free from the canvas and into our shared space.

Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988, St. Louis MO) is a sculptor and installation artist. In addition to numerous solo exhibitions, the artist’s work is currently included in Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls at the Brooklyn Museum (NY). Her work was also recently exhibited in Set It Off, curated by Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont, at the Parrish Museum, Water Mill (NY). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Albertina Museum, Vienna (AT); the Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach (FL); Rubell Museum, Miami (FL); Ståhl Collection, Norrköping (SE); and Stora Wäsby Sculpture Park, Stockholm (SE). In 2021, Yanko participated in the prestigious Rubell residency program, a pivotal moment that catalyzed the creation of her most monumental works to date. The work is currently on view at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami.

Soul Talk is the third collaborative project between Salon 94 and Kennedy Yanko.

A composition of perfect geometry transcending the traditional boundaries of architecture and art, the Stardust Pavilion is an inaugural work revealed in the Miami Design District in December 2023 as a collaborative and immersive art installation. Conceived by Flare, a newly launched design studio helmed by architects Alessandra Cianchetta and Veruska Vasconez, Stardust Pavilion is the first of several bespoke, collectible pavilions of shimmering glass and steel. Merging the boundaries between art, space, experience, and architecture, the Stardust Pavilion series is a set of intimate structures designed to allow a deeply personal experience with artworks exhibited within, and their surroundings.