Simone Leigh’s practice incorporates sculpture, video, and installation, all informed by her ongoing exploration of black female subjectivity and ethnography. Her objects often employ materials and forms traditionally associated with African art; her performance-influenced installations create spaces where historical precedent and self-determination comingle. Through her investigations of visual overlaps between cultures, time periods, and geographies, she confronts and examines ideas of the female body, race, beauty, and community.

Related Global Goals: 5, 10, and 16.

Tuazon identifies primarily as a sculptor, though his practice occupies a position between architecture and activism. One of Tuazon’s most ambitious projects is an architectural installation entitled Zome Alloy, a hollowed wooden structure consisting of eleven traversable polyhedral units, or zomes. The installation is modeled after the “Zome Home,” a solar powered house in Albuquerque, New Mexico designed by innovators Steve and Holly Baer. After its public presentation during Art Basel 2016 in the city’s Messeplatz, Tuazon’s Zome Alloy was broken up into clusters and installed at various locations in the United States. Three zomes have been erected outdoors in Los Angeles, where they function as the artist’s studio, and two zomes are currently being installed in Minnesota at an active protest site against a proposed oil pipeline.

Tuazon refers to each zome installation as a “water school,” as the structure becomes a hub for discussion and education about the environment in which it is located. His studio is the Los Angeles Water School, or LAWS; the Minnesota site is Winona’s Water School, in honor of activist Winona LaDuke. Tuazon is planning an additional permanent, public water school in Cedar Spring, Nevada to bring art and awareness to a remote and ecologically fraught region, where the water that has served the community and environment for thousands of years is at risk of being siphoned through a pipeline to serve more commercial areas. Tuazon is an unwavering advocate for the preservation of environmental resources, including clean and sustainable water sources, his interests internalized in his recent work both in subject matter, as well as in the fluid conception of forms and sites.

Related Global Goals: 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, and 15.

Throughout his career, Glenn Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across a body of work that builds critically on the legacies of modern painting and more recent conceptual art. He is best known for his landmark series of highly textured text-based paintings, which draw on the writings and speech of diverse figures such as Jean Genet, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman and Richard Pryor. In addition to paintings, Ligon’s practice also encompasses neon, photography, sculptures, print, installation, and video. Both politically provocative and formally rigorous, his work explores issues of history, language and identity.

Related Global Goals: 10 and 16.

Roger Hiorns’ sculptural work generates and inhabits interstices between dissentient ideas: construction and destruction; the theological and the technological; temporality and permanence; authoritarian control and organic spontaneity. His objects are threaded with an unease that ties them, and our experience of them, to the amorphous, unrelenting global anxiety which suffuses our everyday understanding and reality.

Related Global Goals: 9 and 12.

For the first edition of ART 2030 New York, the gallery unites with other leading Chelsea art galleries to welcome UN delegates, the art community, and the public to extended public hours during the week of the United Nations’ General Debate, to foster discussion, engagement and advocacy towards the Global Goals through art.

Related Global Goals: 17.

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