T MAGAZINE T List: A Bronze Closet as a Memorial in New York City’s West Village

The New York City AIDS Memorial is within St. Vincent’s Triangle, a traffic island in the West Village that was named after the former hospital in whose shadow it sits — the first hospital to establish a dedicated ward for the treatment of AIDS in 1984, soon after the disease’s identification. This year, a sculptural installation by the artist Jim Hodges has been added to the triangle’s small lawn. Titled “Craig’s Closet,” the work honors the musician Craig Ducote, with whom Hodges lived at the time of his death in 2016. To make the piece, which is a faithful re-creation of the contents of Ducote’s closet, Hodges started by taking photographs and 3-D scans of the real-life version to ensure all details were accurate and, as he puts it, “to preserve the specificity of his essence as it was revealed in the precise placement of his things.” The bulk of the sculpture was carved from granite in Garfagnana, Italy, with additional fragile pieces cast in bronze at Washington’s Walla Walla Foundry. The result is a monochromatic black wall whose inverse reveals the cross-section of a crowded closet full of T-shirts, books and boxes, the end of its rack displaying a jumble of unused hangers. Its installation here feels universal; a remembrance of lives lived through objects gathered on the way.