Description

Jack Pierson – Array (Miami Beach)
Publisher: Hassla Books, 2025
Softcover, 168 pages, English
Edition: 500 copies
Size: 30.5×22.9cm
New in seal

A photography book published in conjunction with the exhibition “Jack Pierson: The Miami Years” at the Bass Museum of Art.

Jack Pierson, born and raised in New England in the 1960s, is a distinctly American artist whose work explores universal themes such as desire, memory, loss, and the passage of time. His photographs, sculptures, drawings, paintings, films, books, and installations convey emotional narratives and ways of being in the world. Often associated with a generation of photographers who challenged the boundaries of the medium—including Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, and Mark Morrisroe —Pierson established himself in the early 1990s with his intimate portraits of everyday queer life and bohemian culture in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Provincetown, and Miami Beach.

Infused with punk and advertising aesthetics, and featuring an incredible variety of visual references, his work includes worn objects, salvaged furniture, and repurposed commercial signs. The projects Pierson creates on commission for fashion and style magazines are often indistinguishable from his works created for galleries and exhibitions; in fact, they significantly influence one another. Recurring themes such as isolation and waiting, the urge to travel, and escapism—the longing for another place or another time—permeate his entire body of work and career. Pierson came of age during the AIDS crisis, alongside contemporaries such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Tabboo!, Robert Gober, and Kiki Smith—artists who captured the sense of impermanence, fragility, and loneliness of the era—all themes that are also recognizable in Pierson’s work.