Yashua Klos: Cornerstones

Curated by Dexter Wimberly

Cornerstones features a selection of Yashua Klos's recent large-scale woodblock print collages, in which the artist revisits imagery first explored in 2015: dimensional portrait busts intersected by grids, planes, and blocks of wood and concrete. These building materials and architectural elements allude to the built environment, particularly Klos's hometown of Chicago, a city defined by its iconic street grid and by enduring legacies of segregation and housing discrimination.

The exhibition's title carries a double meaning. A cornerstone is the first stone set in a foundation, establishing a structure's orientation and stability. It also refers to the people who anchor families and communities, whose presence provides strength and holds others steady. Klos brings these meanings together, proposing presence itself as a foundation: a monument of resilience built not from above but from the ground up.

Klos's figures often stand firmly on the picture plane or hover in indeterminate space. Composed of fragments of friends, family members, and imagined faces, they are individuals who have both always existed and never existed. Part human, part architecture, and part detritus, these composite forms embody a monumentality that is not imposed on them but assembled and asserted by the subjects themselves.

Throughout the exhibition, Klos's anonymized figures are in constant negotiation with the material remnants of systemic injustice. Entangled in fractured grids, concrete, and salvaged wood, they confront the physical and symbolic structures that have shaped Black life in America. Yet these same materials are transformed into sites of possibility, reclaimed as the foundation for new futures.

Yashua Klos (b. 1977, Chicago, Illinois) received his BFA from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb and his MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. Recent exhibitions featuring Klos’s work include Ancestral: Afro-Americas at the Museum of Brazilian Art FAAP (2024); the traveling survey Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary Collage, organized by and presented at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2023), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2024), and the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2024); and Elegies: Still Lifes in Contemporary Art at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2022). The artist’s first major institutional exhibition, Yashua Klos: OUR LABOUR, curated by Tracy Adler, was presented at the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, in 2022.

Klos's work is held in the public collections of the Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY. He has received residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans (2022); the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT (2014); and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE (2012). Klos is the recipient of a 2015 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and a 2014 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. He lives in Queens and works in Brooklyn.

Photographed by Daniel Greer

Dexter Wimberly is an American curator based in Japan who has organized exhibitions at galleries and institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; ICA/Boston; the Harvey B. Gantt Center in Charlotte, NC; STANDING PINE in Tokyo; BODE in Berlin; Lehmann Maupin in London; SECCI in Milan; and Efie Gallery in Dubai.

Wimberly is an alumnus of Hauser & Wirth's International Curatorial Residency Symposium in Somerset, England. His exhibitions have been reviewed and featured in The New York Times and Artforum and have received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He has been featured in Elle Decor, Beyond The Studio, and Artnet News. Wimberly is the founder and director of the Hayama Artist Residency and The Kyoto Retreat in Japan.