One of the Rubell Museum’s 2021 artists in residence, Kennedy Yanko scours scrap yards for salvaged metal to craft abstract sculptures that challenge our perceptions through sensation and contrast. She often creates thick, velvety skins of paint and weaves them through looming heaps of metal—a poetic meditation on material, form, and her lived experiences. Four such sculptures debut during Miami Art Week, each among her largest yet physically and spiritually, and which were made while Yanko was writing an autobiographical graphic novel that beckoned further self-reflection.   

“It prompted me to look at myself, my story, my history, and my physicality in a way that my other art making has never so bluntly required,” Yanko says. “[It] was not only symbolic and intense, but revealing. I discovered a written language for my experience through developing this narrative while also realizing a visual language for the incommunicable parts of my existence in scale, form, and synchronicities within materials. The latter—the overlapping moments of the materials’ experience, where metal and paint skin both bend and twist and sing—articulate dualities occurring within one moment, one person, one spirit.” 

Pictured: Kennedy Yanko with I Am Water (2021)