ARTFORUM: Top Ten
Chris Bogia shares his Top Ten
3: JIM HODGES, CRAIG’S CLOSET, 2023
After decades of colorful, frequently dazzling works, Hodges’s Craig’s Closet interrupts the artist’s kaleidoscopic parade with a dark intermission. A doorless full-scale closet—made of charcoal-hued granite and bronze—was commissioned for the New York City AIDS Memorial Park. Every fiber of each exposed garment is meticulously rendered, the work a hyperreal shadow of an extremely private domain. When we lose someone close, their closet can become a site of surprising intimacy, a moving portrait of the dead. Positioned intentionally across from the former site of Saint Vincent’s Hospital, Craig’s Closet is a meaningful marker of deaths from AIDS during the worst years of the crisis.
Chris Bogia is a Queens, New York–based artist as well as the cofounder and former executive director of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR).