Raque Ford: A little space for you right under my shoe

About

Presented on the building facade on Horatio Street across from the Whitney and the High Line is a newly commissioned work by multimedia artist Raque Ford (b. 1986, Columbia, MD; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York). 

In Ford’s billboard project, the words “A little space for you / right under my shoe” waver across a collage of shoe prints and other graphic shapes. Excerpted from an original poem by the artist, the text invokes the conflicted feelings that can come with romantic longing and desire for connection with others, when holding someone close can teeter on crushing them. Ford plays with the scale and site-specificity of the billboard, as the imposing image of stomping shoes hovers over the pedestrian viewer below. True to much of Ford’s work, there is an edged sweetness here; something that may seem “cute” on the surface is belied by an apprehensiveness and ambivalence that registers on multiple levels.

Ford’s practice uses layers of text, image and media, often incorporating commercial materials like mylar, acrylic and steel. Working within the traditions of pop art and minimalism, she remixes contemporary symbols—here, diaristic writing, pop-punk aesthetics, clip art, and abstraction—to explore how private subjectivity is shaped by social codes and as a means to unsettle popular culture's insistent terms of address.

This project is organized by Roxanne Smith, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art.