Smithsonian American Art Museum
Nick Cave: Mammoth
February 13, 2026 – January 3, 2027
Nick Cave (b. 1959) is renowned internationally for his work that surreally and seductively addresses issues of race, gender, and identity. Known for the exuberant Soundsuits that he originally created in response to racialized police violence, Cave has long been interested in the intersections of history and identity. With this new body of work, he broadens his view to encompass our connection with the natural world. He remakes the museum’s galleries into an immersive landscape marked by the crafted hides and bones of mammoths, a video projection of the long-dead animals come to life, and a large-scale beaded curtain depicting the Missouri family farm where he spent much of his childhood.
Cave’s exploration of his relationship to nature is at once grounded in history and deeply personal. Mammoth evokes the fraught past and precarious future of the American landscape, his own experience as a Black man within it, and the roots of his creative impulse, in which he learned to transform the raw materials of the world into something full of meaning. In this environment, the mammoths’ emergence conjures the many stories that have been buried and repressed and serves as evidence of their endurance.
Mammoth explores the fundamental entanglement of land and race in the American consciousness. Focused on the most urgent issues of our era, Cave proposes their deep connections, yoking social history in the United States to the primordial earth that sustains it. In Mammoth, he asks how we can begin to make sense of our evolving relationship with an ever more alien environment. How might we adapt, persevere, even thrive? As the contemporary world increasingly puts us face-to-face with forces which threaten our existence, Cave imagines a space of both anguish and possibility.
Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery. Photo by James Prinz.
