"I got the sense that it was finding new content for me," the artist recalls. And it was that algorithm providing the hypermasculine, potentially paranoid but also fantastical subculture content that inspired his "Dream Police" paintings. (The title also references the Cheap Trick song of the same name.)
In 2023, he showed the series at Miami Beach gallery Central Fine, his third solo show at the space. Last weekend, he released an artist edition of a book box that includes a hoodie, Dream Police_Champion_render.1. It will be available for purchase for the next two weeks at the gallery as part of a short-term exhibition. The whole project is a web of collaborations, connecting different artists and thinkers to his original concept, examining violence, fear, and identity.
Thurman grew up outside Philadelphia, mostly unaware of contemporary art. Before studying at Columbia University, he learned about the arts through music, magazines, comic books, and Catholic school. "Moving to New York City and quickly learning about contemporary art and ravenously consuming as much as I could — seeing the breadth of career that was happening, I was exposed to the many potentials of an artistic practice," he says. His work has since appeared in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and is in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
"Dream Police" asks questions about young men and women who create protective gear. "There's clearly some need to armor oneself. Or, some desired comfort by armoring oneself. And on the flip side, there's the Marvel cinematic universe and the wild financial success of that in popular culture," he says, "and what that might be indicative of."
The hoodie in Kyle Thurman's art book was created by Jeff Kaplan of General Working Group.
Kyle Thurman photo
"A lot of my work has cultural and art historical tropes of masculinity and questions of identity that follow that," Thurman says. He sees the entirety of it as almost a documentary that uses a variety of formats to showcase a certain kind of experience of life in the U.S. "Particularly what I might call an inevitability of violence that we're living within. Whether that's physical or psychological violence or ecological violence."
The art book includes an excerpt from a novel by New York City-based poet and critic Shiv Kotecha and a discussion between Thurman and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster about the work of Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Jeff Kaplan of General Working Group created the hoodie and cloth-bound box. He has produced projects for the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Harvard, and MIT presses. He worked with Thurman's material to inspire a silkscreen image of body armor on a sweatshirt. "I wanted to reinsert some of this stuff into a more popular language or visual place," Thurman says. "It has a streetwear vibe that is relevant to a lot of these conversations."
When the hoodie idea was formulated, he decided he wanted a shoot featuring the garment. So Thurman asked two Central Fine employees, Miami artists Betty McGhee and Hunter Osking, to create a short with the prompt: Make it something you'd show if Marvel asked you to direct the next Iron Man. "In some crazy world, I could imagine where Marvel Cinemas would make this kind of version of Iron Man that they're proposing," the artist says.
You can pick up one of the limited-edition book boxes with a hoodie at the gallery for $200 until August 8 or at the ICA Miami gift shop starting in September.
Kyle Thurman's "Dream Police_Champion_render.1." On view through Thursday, August 8, at Central Fine, 1224-1226 Normandy Dr., Miami Beach; 786-899-0977; centralfine.com.
