The North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) has been given a new work by Cuban artist Yoan Capote to be installed in its 164-acre Museum Park. The sculpture, titled Open Mind (Barricades), is made from metal crowd-control barricades and is designed to resemble a brain if viewed from above. A gift by an anonymous donor, it is the first installation funded by the NCMA’s new Art in the Environment Fund, which was established to support permanent, loaned, and temporary installations of public art in the Museum Park and community. Open Mind is the second work by Capote in the Museum’s permanent collection and will be installed over the course of three days, June 7−9.
Appropriating utilitarian metal barricades used for crowd control, Capote created the intricate labyrinth, Open Mind, modeled after a diagram of the human brain. He imagines visitors walking through the maze “like neurons interacting” inside the brain. In Capote’s words, “When I saw the piece from above, it made me think of each barricade as all the rules, dogmas, and taboos that are intended to control our behavior.” By elevating the barricades, he subverts their original use and intention: visitors are not kept out, but rather invited in to freely wander through the work.
Employing a variety of media—painting, photography, video, sculpture, and installation—Yoan Capote, who lives and works in Havana, Cuba, makes works of art that poetically capture both highly personal experiences and universal issues of power, difference, alienation, isolation, dislocation, censorship, and restriction.
The Art in the Environment Fund was established to support works of permanent or temporary art in the Museum Park as well as temporary installations of public art in the Raleigh community and beyond. It is dedicated to investment in significant and engaging public art and to providing accessible and meaningful experiences with art and nature for the people of North Carolina. Capote’s Open Mind is the first installation funded by the Art in the Environment Fund. Additional works of public art will be installed throughout the summer and fall in celebration of the NCMA’s Park expansion.