Review of Thomas J Price’s Resilience of Scale

Review of Thomas J Price Resilience of Scale in June 2025 issue of Brooklyn Rail.

The twelve-foot bronze of a Black man in a hoodie and sweatpants commands attention; viewers can’t quite meet his steely gaze and his personhood feels accessible and opaque all at once. Thomas J Price’s Within the Folds (Dialogue 1) (2025) is not quite the first sculpture that greets viewers in the gallery, but it is the tallest. With Resilience of Scale, Price has assembled five of his immense bronzes—three women and two men, each a Black person, unconcerned in their own way with the world around them. These bronzes are immediately striking not only for their size, but also for their casual attire and relaxed postures. Composites of figures who one might glimpse on the street, they call to mind the quotidian textures of Blackness. Note, however, that I do not say represent. Though these might be said to be portraits, they are of fictional people alerting us to but one of the complications around representation that Price is enacting.