The Meeting House / Build Therefore Your Own World Durant, Sam

Sam Durant is a multimedia artist whose work engages social, political, and cultural issues. His work has been widely exhibited in the UK, Europe, Asia and the Americas. It has been included in the Panamá, Sydney, Venice, and Whitney Biennials and can be found in many public collections including MOMA, New York, Project Row Houses, Houston and Tate Modern, London. Based in Los Angeles, Durant teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.


Durant’s 'The Meeting House' (2016) was a public art project at The Old Manse, a National Historic Landmark built in 1770 and former home and gathering place for politicians, thinkers, and transcendentalists including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The sister exhibition at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles in 2017, 'Build Therefore Your Own World', introduced new works that expanded upon Durant’s premise of the interdependence between transcendentalists, abolitionists, and African American writers of pre- and post-revolutionary America in the creation of American culture and identity.


Featured in The Meeting House / Build Therefore Your Own World is a full-colour photo documentation of the project in Concord, MA and Los Angeles, CA as well as new essays by Pedro Alonzo, independent curator, and Tim Phillips, pioneer in the field of conflict resolution and reconciliation; and a new collection of poems by Tisa Bryant, Robin Coste Lewis, Danielle Legros Georges, and Kevin Young, who recently became Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

"Behavioral science overwhelmingly confirms that there is a biological basis for much of our behavior—particularly for our powerful need to be included, acknowledged, and seen as we see ourselves. Research on sacred values—those values we hold that are above compromise and that are key to our identity and sense of place in the world, such as the protection of our children, the principles of our religion, or family honor—are processed in different regions of the brain than more utilitarian or businesslike thoughts. The research shows that when we are asked to compromise our sacred values, we hold on to them more deeply and respond with anger and aggression. It is only when our sacred values are recognized by others that we begin to listen. [...] At this troubling and uncertain time, when social divides are deepening and trust is declining, we must find ways to connect. Artists must not only reflect painful and necessary truths, but they must strive to present them in contexts that allow us to see something about ourselves and to see our own lived experience in others. There is so much that divides us simply by being human."
From 'Making the Invisible Visible: Art and Context as an Instrument of Social Change' in The Meeting House