Boz Deseo Garden

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

Boz Deseo Garden (b. 1997) is an artist and academic working between Los Angeles and Paris. Through sculpture, video, and critical writing, Garden employs narrative and mythology to confront the less apparent effects and implications of transatlantic slavery. Garden’s work argues that slavery extends beyond its historical container of the 15th to the 19th century and finds a unique afterlife in the way we produce judgments about art in the contemporary. While central to each work, slavery is never directly represented—placing the question of and difficulty with its representability at the forefront of Garden’s conceptual practice. Selected solo presentations include Bodenrader, Chicago (2025) (Forthcoming); Liste, Basel (2025), Timeshare, Los Angeles (2024); Petrine, Paris (2023); and Jargon Projects, Chicago (2022). Selected group exhibitions and workshops include Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2025) (Forthcoming); Soft Commodity and Emergent Magazine, London (2025) (Forthcoming); Petrine, Paris (2025); Project Space, London (2025); Final Hot Desert, London (2024); Heidi, Berlin (2024); Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); and Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2022). They received their BFA from California Institute of the Arts, their MFA from University of California, Los Angeles, and they are currently a Doctoral Student at the University of California, Irvine in the Culture & Theory Program. They are the Director at the Morning Star Research Center for the...

Artwork