“Won’t you join us in this great new national crusade?” Nancy Reagan’s cold, scripted words echoed across the gallery and between dozens of Quaker church pews that, for Onyedika Chuke’s exhibition here, had been arranged into an enormous maze titled The Forever Museum Archive/The Untitled/Labyrinth, 2020–21. The sound bite was cut from President Reagan’s 1986 national address on the perils of drug use among America’s youth. Ron and Nancy appealed to the public on live TV in the guise of two concerned grandparents, welcoming the country into the Oval Office for a fireside chat. Yet, as history would reveal, this moment ushered in a bloody “war on drugs” that disproportionately targeted communities of color, contributing to a lasting legacy of mass incarceration in the United States.

For a decade now, Chuke’s ongoing “Forever Museum Archive,” 2011–, has served as a kind of transient repository for ideas and artifacts culled from the artist’s personal and cultural experiences. The work is organized around themes as intimate as the death of a beloved parent and as onerous as the corrupt power structures that govern “democratic” societies. This latest iteration plumbed the historical depths by crafting a narrative that took in Greek mythology, early Christianity, white supremacy, and the modern prison-industrial complex.

This complicated reckoning was perhaps most evident in the exhibition’s centerpiece, The Forever Museum Archive/The Untitled/Hermes＿and＿Reflection Pool＿Blue＿Circa 2020, 2021—a circular sapphire fountain tucked into a cove at the heart of Labyrinth, like a hero’s prize at the end of a grueling odyssey. But this font is poisonous: Human bones on a Jurassic scale, painstakingly crafted by Chuke, form a tidy wreath around the pool. At its center is an outsize sculptural rendering of the winged feet of Hermes, gruesome and dismembered, the right one ready to crush the skull of a faceless bust in a white ski mask. Nearby was The Forever Museum Archive/The Untitled/ The Death of Saint Anne＿Fabrizio Chiari, Circa 1615–1695, 2019, Chuke’s blasphemous detourning of an Italian Renaissance painting, which was hung on its side. The work was originally created for a Roman chapel, but the church was torn down in 1880, and in its place, through a cruel twist of fate, a prison was erected.

Drifting across the aforementioned circular pool, unscathed by all this horror, were clouds of silky bubbles created by a liquid soap pumped in from another work, The Forever Museum Archive/The Untitled/Corcraft, 2021—basically, an enormous plastic bladder that sat in an adjacent room. The cleanser that fills this sac is manufactured by Corcraft, a business operated by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision that “employs” the state’s inmates at the appalling rate of 16 cents an hour. Chuke worked with these men in 2018–19, after being awarded the first artist residency on Rikers Island. This 413-acre jail is often regarded as symbolic of the failures of America’s penal system, and it was there that Chuke developed an arts curriculum focused on establishing new channels of communication between both the prisoners and the facility’s correctional officers.

The dynamics between the oppressed and the oppressor are explored in The Forever Museum Archive/The Untitled/Severed Head of Hercules, 2019–21, a translucent bust of the titular warrior, which appeared as though it had simply been tossed into the middle of the gallery. Chuke’s sculpture is modeled after Marble statue of a bearded Hercules, 68–98 ce, which is in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Yet, in a panel discussion hosted by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the artist described how, for his version, he meticulously studied photographs of decapitated men—many of which were taken by religious militants in conflict zones—in order to create the facial expressions of someone recently beheaded.) Embedded in the surface of the work are bits of shattered glass that Chuke collected from storefront windows broken during the riots in Manhattan’s SoHo after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The work is a powerful and disturbing capstone to an extraordinary, haunting show.

— Gabriel H. Sanchez