February 23 – March 21, 2026
Yashua Klos: Proposal for a Monument
Sikkema Malloy Jenkins
In Person Viewing:
530 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
Opening reception with the artist on Thursday, February 12, from 6–8pm.
Online Viewing:
https://www.smjny.com/ex20260212yashuaklos
Sikkema Malloy Jenkins is pleased to present Proposal for a Monument, an exhibition of new work by Yashua Klos on view from February 12 through March 21, 2026. Proposal for a Monument marks Klos’s second solo exhibition with Sikkema Malloy Jenkins. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Thursday, February 12, from 6–8pm.
In his practice, Yashua Klos explores how identity—particularly Black identity—is constructed as a means of survival, adaptation, and empowerment. Proposal for a Monument features a selection of recent large-scale woodblock print collages. In this body of work, Klos revisits imagery he first began exploring in 2015, of dimensional portrait busts intersected by grids, planes, wood, and concrete blocks. The integration of building materials and architectural elements into the collages alludes to the built environment, and specifically to the urban area of Klos’s hometown, Chicago—a city indelibly shaped by its signature street grid as well as by legacies of segregation and housing discrimination. The anonymized subjects of Klos’s collages are placed in constant negotiation with the material symbols of these unjust systems, entangled within their wreckage yet at times breaking through or reclaiming it as scaffolding to support the construction of something anew.
Klos’s latest body of collages expands upon his earlier explorations of survival strategies to propose presence itself as a monument of resistance. History has shown that monuments, as both structures and symbols, are not infallible; what, Klos asks, might replace them? The exhibition’s title leaves the answer as an open-ended proposal, invoking a framework of monumentality that transcends fixed conditions or static forms. At a moment when Black and brown bodies are increasingly cast out from public space and Black figuration faces a downturn in the contemporary art landscape, Klos envisions a radical “hyper-visibility” of marginalized individuals constructing images in their own likeness.
