Community Forms

Matt Barton: Community Forms

Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum—TAXI Campus

3455 Ringsby Court, Denver, CO 80216

Ongoing/Permanent

Curated by Cortney Lane Stell

Admission: Free

Review by Livy Onalee Snyder

Community Forms is an outdoor installation on the TAXI Campus in Denver by the artist Matt Barton (b. 1975), created for the nonprofit, nomadic art museum Black Cube. In 2021, Barton received an 18-month artist fellowship with Black Cube to produce a site-specific work that expands audience engagement with contemporary art. [1] To that end, Barton designed Community Forms as Black Cube’s first permanent site-specific artwork.

Matt Barton, Community Forms, 2021, concrete, formed earth, recycled materials, and landscaping. This site-specific installation is located at the TAXI Campus at 3455 Ringsby Court in Denver, Colorado. Image by Third Dune Productions, courtesy of the artist and Black Cube.

Made of concrete and recycled materials, Community Forms’ abstract sculptural shapes rise and fall in response to the surrounding urban landscape. Reminiscent of a topographic map or the mesas of a western canyon landscape, the smooth gray space begs for interaction from any passerby who can walk, roll, skate, or sit in the shade under the trees.

Barton designed Community Forms as a piece that allows viewers to reframe their perception about the engagement of space. He is able to accomplish this by reimagining the location of the TAXI Campus—a large, mixed-use community campus with offices, businesses, and residential spaces— into an artwork that is multidisciplinary and made for multiple uses. Not only is it a sculptural site that invites recreational play, but it is also a response to the water mitigation issue at TAXI prompted by FEMA Region 8. [2]

One can easily get lost in the references and intentions of this work, particularly in its combination of public art, recreation, and water mitigation system, but this is an important aspect of the piece. As Black Cube’s website clarifies, Community Forms is a “non-prescriptive, freeform, exploratory interaction through dynamic visitor-centric installation,” meaning that the artwork has multiple points of entry. [3] Community Forms purposefully rejects a singular notion or reading of how to engage with the site, which is probably its most playful quality. Ultimately, the work brings attention to spatial power politics.

Matt Barton, Community Forms, 2021, concrete, formed earth, recycled materials, and landscaping. This site-specific installation is located at the TAXI Campus in Denver. Image by Third Dune Productions, courtesy of the artist and Black Cube.

Barton notes in an interview with Black Cube’s chief curator, Cortney Stell, that he was inspired to create this installation based on a childhood experience of skating in public spaces. He says, “I grew up skateboarding and so often public space became confrontational. It wasn’t really meant to be used by the entirety of the public and as a kid, you are chased by security guards, harassed, and arrested daily” and he asserts this experience shaped his perspective about the “limitations for how we physically engage public space.” [4]

Barton’s work acknowledges space and architecture as political. Just as we shape land into homes, buildings, and businesses, so too are spaces designed for particular and appropriate forms of social interaction. Community Forms recognizes space and architecture as active participants that structure our daily lives and relations, and acknowledges how they are shaped by political and economic institutions. The piece makes room for multiple interpretations and functions, challenging the way power is produced and embodied in the physical environment by physical structures. 

An aerial view of Matt Barton’s Community Forms, 2021, concrete, formed earth, recycled materials, and landscaping. This site-specific installation is located at the TAXI Campus in Denver. Image by Third Dune Productions, courtesy of the artist and Black Cube.

A defining author for site-specific scholarship, Miwon Kwon, writes that contemporary site-specific artworks are “structured (inter)textually rather than spatially, and its model is not a map but an itinerary, a fragmentary sequence of actions and events through spaces, that is, a nomadic narrative whose path is articulated by the passage of the artist.” [5] In other words, for the past few decades, site-specific artwork has not only responded to location/site but has combined ideas and discourses about urban design and architecture with spatial cultural dialogues about the city, social/public space, and the Other. [6] Barton places the viewer and community at the forefront of Community Forms, taking care in the relationship between the aesthetic quality of the built environment and the social conditions it supports.

Livy Onalee Snyder is a curator and writer based in Denver. She graduated with a BA in Art History and BFA in Painting and Drawing from CU Denver's College of Arts & Media and a Masters in Humanities from the University of Chicago. Her passion for contemporary art has translated into successful internships with the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy, the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Black Cube Nomadic Museum. Currently, she contributes curatorial projects to the Supernova Digital Animation Festival and works for punctum books.

[1] “Supporting artists + Access to Contemporary Art,” Black Cube Nomadic Museum, https://blackcube.art/programs.

[2] The Denver Area is prone to flooding and Barton’s artwork helps to channel the stormwater to soak the soil and drain into the river rather than flood the Taxi Campus. This project was supported by FEMA Region 8. More information about FEMA Region 8’s support of the project can be found in Black Cube’s press release about the work: https://mailchi.mp/472539e3be0e/matt-barton-pr.

[3] “Community Forms,” Black Cube Nomadic Museum, https://blackcube.art/exhibition/community-forms.

[4] Cortney Stell, “Community Forms Interview with Matt Barton,” Black Cube Nomadic Museum Blog, May 17, 2021, https://blackcube.art/blog/community-forms.

[5] Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 29.

[6] “The Other” refers to the social and psychological ways in which one group excludes or marginalizes another group by forming an "us" and "them" relationship based on racial, geographic, ethnic, economic, or ideological differences.