High Point

Terry Adkins’ genre-blurring practice, combining sculpture, live music, spoken word, and video, drew on the traditions of modernist abstraction as well as vernacular artforms of the American South. His highly distinctive sculptural objects frequently incorporate found materials, many scavenged from historical and industrial sites. Adkins, a musician himself who staged multimedia performances with his group the Lone Wolf Recital Corps, regarded his sculptures as tangible interpretations of sound. "My quest," he said, "has been to find a way to make music as physical as sculpture might be and sculpture as ethereal as music is."

Over the course of four days In March 1993, Adkins fabricated eight sculptures, including this one, using materials sourced in Greensboro, North Carolina. High Point is a floor-based work composed of jettisoned equipment from the Norfolk Southern Railroad, namely rusted steel tie plates punctured with railroad spikes. Its material composition and curious form evokes the coal train that winds its way through Greensboro and the nearby town of High Point, while its title is a coded nod to jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, who grew up in the neighborhood. Though powerfully physical in its sculptural construction, High Point recalls the ephemerality of improvisatory music through its reference to the vanished history of Greensboro.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Adkins created his cerebral and idiosyncratic work in dialogue with trends in Post-Minimalism, an approach to contemporary sculptural practice that moved away from the geometry of Minimal art in favor of open forms and work invested with personal and psychical significance. In this way, High Point might be seen as a challenge to Carl Andre’s floor-based sculptures, among the most recognizable works of Minimalism, which were informed by Andre’s work on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Whereas Andre arranged standard industrial materials such as bricks and steel plates in flat and rigorously ordered grids, Adkins opted here for an energetic and asymmetrical form that forcefully evokes the history of its source site: a Southern railroad constructed through Black enslaved labor.