ARTNET NEWS: ‘The Dreams We Hold’: Jim Hodges on His Loving and Profound New Memorial in NYC, ‘Craig’s closet’

An open closet now stands in New York’s AIDS Memorial Park. In it are hangers and hoodies, stacked boxes and folded weekend bags. The structure looks, in other words, like a generic storage space. It is and it isn’t.  

The piece, called Craig’s closet (2023), was created by artist Jim Hodges for the New York City AIDS Memorial, which was erected in 2017 to honor the more than 100,000 New Yorkers who have died as part of the HIV/AIDS epidemic—some of whom the artist called friends and colleagues. It’s built to scale in granite and bronze, with the latter material painted an eerie, funereal black.  

You needn’t know the name of Hodges’s sculpture to understand that it was based on a particular person. The specificity of the artwork, right down to the wrinkles on the shirts, reveals that the piece was an act of recreation rather than strict imagination. But despite the attention to detail, we still don’t know who Craig is. We don’t know their surname or relationship to the artist; we don’t know if they died or how.