Chicago’s Nick Cave is digging up America’s bones at a fraught moment for the Smithsonian

On a cerulean blue Tuesday in early January, artist Nick Cave directs an uncanny scene unfolding along the Chicago lakefront. Three enormous mammoths lumber south toward the city’s silhouetted skyline.

It’s around 11 a.m., but the scene feels out of time, hovering between past and present.

Built from open metal frames wrapped in long, wispy hair, each creature is animated by four people walking in unison. But their bodies are not the kind of Woolly mammoth reconstructions typically found in museum dioramas. Moving across the horizon, the mammoths appear partially decomposed, as if recently unearthed from an ancient, Arctic permafrost.

“Stop!” Cave calls out, his voice carried by the blustering winter wind. “Let’s do that again.”

Art in a moment of ‘incredible upheaval’

The mammalian puppets are in fact the stars of Cave’s new film installation, “Roam,” one of several works the artist has created for his eponymous exhibition “Mammoth” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

The exhibition, which opens on Friday and remains on view through January of next year, is the museum’s largest ever single-artist commission. The decision to showcase a queer Black artist is not lost on Cave, who lives and works in Chicago. And the eerie sense of resurrection, he says, is intentional.

“I was reflecting on what’s going on at the Smithsonian in terms of erasing history and shifting the narrative,” he reflects. “This whole notion of disappearing, dissolving.” And yet, he adds, history has a way of resurfacing. “That’s our mammoth. We’re still digging up bones.”

Last March, the Trump administration issued the executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which criticizes the Smithsonian for promoting what it calls “divisive race-centered ideology.” The order puts the museum campus under federal scrutiny by authorizing reviews of exhibitions and programming. The goal, it reads, is to emphasize "American exceptionalism" and remove what the Trump administration calls "partisan narratives."

Officials have warned federal funding could be withheld if the museums don't comply. But the directive has prompted resignations and high-profile artist cancellations, such as by painter Amy Sherald.

In a moment of “incredible upheaval,” says Sarah Newman, the James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art and acting head curator at SAAM, “Nick is proposing a way to navigate through that change, a way to look at our environment and our heritage, take solace in it, honor and learn from it, and look toward creativity as a way to locate your place in the world.”

At 67, Cave is best known for his Soundsuits, folkloric, futuristic sculptural forms that blur the line between costume and armor. Sometimes glittering, other times spectral, the suits evoke both Maurice Sendak’s “wild things” and the heightened drama of Schiaparelli couture.

Cave began making the Soundsuits in 1991 in response to the brutal Los Angeles Police Department beating of Rodney King, a Black man whose assault ignited the 1992 L.A. riots, and national outrage, over police brutality. Since then, Cave estimates he has made nearly 500 suits, each an expression of his expansive, inimitable imagination.

A former dancer who trained at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Cave has long straddled the worlds of fashion, performance and art. He is a professor of fashion studies at the School of the Art Institute and has exhibited widely across the United States, including major solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim, MASS MoCA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

In Chicago, one of Cave’s Soundsuits is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago as part of the show, “City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago.” Two additional pieces hang in the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition “On Loss and Absence.” On the South Side, Cave designed the floral-inspired mosaic ceiling at the Washington Park Green Line stop and will unveil a new commission for the Obama Presidential Center later this spring.

Cave and his partner in life and art, Bob Faust, also run a gallery from their expansive live-work space, Facility, in Old Irving Park.

While Cave’s work seems to dance, often literally. around overt political declarations, the artist doesn't shy from pointed critique. “Is the work somewhat political?” Cave asks, rhetorically. “Oh yeah, it’s in there.”

All of Cave’s creations hold grief and celebration, agony and ecstasy, in equal measure.

A legacy of craftmaking and meticulous handiwork

For Cave, the Smithsonian show began with a personal excavation. “I started thinking, how was I made?” says Cave. “How did I become who I am?”

Cave grew up one of seven brothers in Missouri. Many of his favorite memories were shaped on his grandparents’ farm where he was surrounded by aunts and uncles who made things with their hands. “They were all just making stuff anyway, but didn’t call it art,” recalls Cave. “It was really just hobbies, craftsmanship. Things they did on Saturdays and Sundays.”

As a boy, Cave especially loved watching his grandmother work. “At seven o’clock, she would say, ‘Knick Knack, go pull my quilt out of the chest,’” he recalls, “and she would sit down and just start to quilt.” He also remembers how his grandmother would cut clothing patterns from brown paper bags, pin them directly onto one of her many grandchildren, and assemble garments in a matter of hours.

But the making was only part of it. Pageantry mattered, too. When a quilt or painting was finished, “there would be this big reveal,” says Cave. “Something about it was magical.”

Cave’s memories weave through exhibition, which includes “Roam;” a series of five towering lifeguard chairs; figurative bronze sculptures molded from Cave’s own body; and a 60-foot beaded curtain that hangs over a mural designed by Cave’s partner, Faust, inspired by the Missouri farm. Cave’s mammoths also appear throughout the gallery spaces, some in full form, others reduced to skulls or tusks.

The show’s most intimate work, however, sprawls across a 70-foot light table. Titled “A Lit History,” the massive assemblage is created from thousands of objects — pie pans, nails, trivets, bingo ball cages, thimbles, crocheted doilies, metal coils — that Cave has collected over the last three decades, many of them from his grandparents’ house. Those unadorned, everyday items sit alongside elaborate pieces of Cave’s own invention: veils fashioned from plastic ties and price tags, hats assembled from knobbed keychain rings, and garments stitched from tens of thousands of buttons.

It registers in two ways at once. From a distance, “A Lit History” provokes sheer bewilderment and wonder; up close, the display reveals intricate and meticulous craftsmanship.

“Nick has this unique ability to see beauty and art in things that people would otherwise be so quick to discard or not value,” says Michelle Boone, the president of the Poetry Foundation and former cultural commissioner, who has known Cave for years.

Boone recalls a visit to the Randolph Street Market that revealed Cave’s way of seeing. She remembers passing a long wooden slab — “I think it was an African bed,” she says — and wondering aloud what anyone would ever do with it. An hour later, she saw Cave walking through the antique market with the piece tucked under his arm. When she later visited his home, the bed had become the centerpiece of his dining table. “It never would have occurred to me to see that as an art piece. The way Nick views the world is very, very different from most people.”

Cave is perhaps more like a bowerbird, collecting artifacts of daily life and assembling them into a world of his own making.

And like the forest bird’s elaborate nests, no object in Cave’s “Mammoth” is incidental. One, though, stands apart as a particular talisman: a walking cane that belonged to Cave’s youngest brother, Stacy, who died at 20. In the museum gallery, “it’s the first object you encounter,” explains Cave, who placed the cane in the show without altering it. “It was his cane. I didn’t need to do anything. It was everything it needed to be.”

The fact that his family’s relics are now on display at the Smithsonian simply amazes Cave. “My grandmother’s thimbles are in the Smithsonian,” he smiles. “That is American history.”

An artist seizes the moment

A week before “Mammoth” is set to open, Cave has just returned from Washington, D.C., where he finished installing the exhibition. A handful of studio assistants work studiously at their stations nearby. Cave employs ten full-time assistants, several of whom wore the mammoths for “Roam,” but that number can climb as high as 30 at the height of a project.

Today, the space is quieter than it has been in months. Not only does “Mammoth” open as the Smithsonian sits at the center of the Trump administration’s anti-diversity campaign, but it also appears in a moment when stories of state violence dominate the headlines. That includes the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, news that carries a grim echo of the early days of Cave’s career when he created his first Soundsuit.

Walking the studio floor, Cave pauses at a few mammoth heads that rest in a corner. He will eventually make a total of 13 mammoths — enough to form a herd — for a performance at the museum later this year. Looking at the pieces, Cave recalls the moment when the animal’s final form first came into focus.

Cave, who made the mammoths with the Chicago metal fabrication studio, Manifold, originally imagined the creatures fully skinned. But once he saw people standing beneath an early prototype, visible through the ribs, Cave changed his mind. “Something about that just revealed the state of the world today,” he says.

Bringing this work to Washington now, adds Cave, only sharpens the stakes. The Smithsonian, Newman asserts, stands behind him. “The show is Nick’s vision,” she says. “We are presenting it. We will not change the show.”

The exhibition may have been nearly a decade in the making, but Cave believes the work is arriving in the world exactly when it’s meant to. “I believe I’m not ever given anything that I’m not supposed to have at any given moment,” reflects Cave. “So,” he adds, “I have a job to do.”

Elly Fishman’s reporting on news and culture has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, GQ, Fast Company, Chicago, and WBEZ, among others. She is currently working on her second book, forthcoming from HarperCollins.