FOCUS: Jill Magid

Throughout Jill Magid’s career, she has carried out extraordinary tasks for her projects. The Brooklyn-based artist inserts herself into established systems of control to engage them from within. As part of her approach to artmaking, she has trained as a spy, police officer, and journalist to be embedded in Afghanistan. Magid creates space within institutions of power where individual agency can flourish, ultimately destabilizing set rules and regulations in favor of new, more equitable relationships.

For her exhibition at the Modern, Magid will show new works, including drawing, sculpture, and installation, alongside the film Tender Balance, 2021, and related works developed for the 2021 exhibition Tender: Balance at the Renaissance Society that expand upon her 2020 Creative Time public artwork, Tender. As the COVID-19 pandemic was unfolding, the artist noticed how public figureheads often downplayed the number of lives lost in contrast to the country’s perceived economic toll—demonstrating a stark difference in value between people’s lives and that of the nation’s economy. For Tender, Magid disseminated newly minted 2020 pennies engraved on the edge with the phrase “The BODY WAS ALREADY SO FRAGILE.” The coins entered the public’s hands via bodegas scattered throughout New York City. Passages of these exchanges in the film Tender Balance underscore the daily, close human connections that turned rife with anxiety and fear throughout the pandemic. The film implies the narrowing path the coins led from the mint to the individual—a course not unlike that of a pathogen—ruminating on systems of circulation on both intimate and grand scales.

Jill Magid (b. 1973) is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, and filmmaker. She has shown extensively both nationally and internationally at institutions including Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Creative Time, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dia Bridgehampton; Art in General, New York; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City; Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; and the New Museum, New York. She has participated in many important biennial exhibitions, including the Liverpool, Lyon, Bucharest, Singapore, Incheon, Gothenburg, and Performa Biennials, and Manifesta. Recent awards include the 2017 Calder Prize, a 2020 Creative Time Artist Commission, a 2021 VIA Art Fund Grant, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is in many public collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Fundación Jumex, Mexico City; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

The staff of the Modern gratefully acknowledges Jill Magid's studio and the staff of LABOR, Mexico City. We also extend thanks to Central Market for making this exhibition possible. Additional appreciation goes to Creative Time for commissioning the public iteration of Tender, 2020; the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago for the exhibition Tender: Balance (2021), curated by Karsten Lund; and Field of Vision.