Written for the 2025 edition of MCAD's CUT/PASTE
A celebrated member of the Pictures Generation, James Casebere ’76 is renowned for his pioneering work with constructed photography, using simple materials to craft increasingly complex, table-top architectural models that take on transcendent, otherworldly effects in two dimensions. It’s a style he first began exploring during his senior year at MCAD, in a flash of inspiration he still reflects on nearly fifty years later.
“I’d spent the day reading The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom on the beach at Lake Harriet, right before the semester started, when I conceived of that first one,” he says about Fan as Eudemonist: Relaxing After an Exhausting Day at the Beach, a black-and-white image of an electric fan resting on its side in the glow of a cardboard television. “A lot of different intellectual and psychological influences came together in a way that became very pivotal and important for me. It was playful and thoughtful and it reflected my whole process and the meaning I found in making art in a pretty profound way. I try to get back to that moment whenever I can.”
Casebere grew up outside of Detroit and came to MCAD expecting to study graphic arts before falling under the spell of sculpture faculty members Siah Armajani and Kinji Akagawa ’68, and a host of inspiring visiting artists including Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci. He went on to earn an MFA at CalArts, studying with conceptual artist John Baldessari and MCAD faculty member Mike Kelley, and diving into Los Angeles’s art scene—even renting an apartment from musician Laurie Anderson.
“I was lucky because I met people who were supportive,” he says about his early years as a working artist. “Success is social—you need to be part of a conversation and connect with your peers. It’s always been important to me to be part of a community of other artists, maybe to compete with one another, but also to balance and inspire one another. Without that, we’re kind of lost.”
In his work, Casebere has also been in an active dialogue about some of the greatest social challenges of our time: the rise of prison infrastructure, the subprime mortgage collapse, and the climate crisis. In Seeds of Time, his most recent one-artist show at New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery, flood water engulfs the schools, homes, and beach huts of the constructed architectural settings of Casebere’s haunting photographs, evoking the climate catastrophe to come. But with vivid colors, shimmering light, and ingenious structures inspired by architects he admires, like Balkrishna Doshi, Yasmeen Lari, and Francis Kéré, it’s also possible for a viewer to imagine the tide could still turn.
“With the houses on the water and at the water’s edge, part of the idea was designing structures for populations displaced by rising sea levels,” he says. “But I also wanted to create this atmosphere of courage. We’re facing a moment of great anxiety, but we have to be able to deal with a clear head, and act on it.”
With work in the collections of the Guggenheim, Whitney, Tate Gallery, and many others, Casebere was the subject of a 2016 retrospective at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, and won the prestigious Rome Prize in 2020. He’d intended the year-long fellowship in Italy as a chance to move away from the camera and toward sculpture and architecture, but when the pandemic cut his plans short, he returned to his studio in Canaan, New York, to pursue some of the same ideas.
“Over the years, I had built such a complicated process that I didn’t have a lot of time in the studio by myself. I missed being able to just sit with work, look at leisure, and create the atmosphere of a reverie—to visually really experience things in real space and spend time with it,” he says. “Right now I’m taking my time to draw and play around with images in the studio by myself, which is refreshing. I don’t know what it’ll do for my career, but I think it always helps to spend time looking, just really looking.”
