Peter Kelly on Eric N. Mack, whose stitched-together installations and paintings weave pop culture, fashion, and found materials into immersive, kinetic environments.
In 2020, painter Eric N. Mack curated Pedestrian Profanities at Simon Lee Gallery. The press release included the artist’s reflection on storefront mannequins: “This show is about the event of walking down the avenue. The role of a mannequin in a storefront is to elicit a direct relationship between the consumer, their body and the garment; to engender a sense of its structure. In a similar way, the role of the viewer in the act of observing, or consuming, an artwork bestows value and radiant spirit: the art object, at its most sacred, should reflect altered systems of value, especially in observation of our world’s brutalities.”
In 1967, art-critic Michael Fried wrote his treatise on minimalism, Art and Objecthood–Fried decries the minimalists as “theatrical” in their creation of objects that implicitly needed to be activated by an audience. Conversely Fried praised the modernists for creating objects that were immediate and self-contained. Mack’s installations are simultaneously theatrical and self-contained objects–a contradiction to Fried’s main conceit echoing pre-1967 installations like Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau or Allan Kaprow’s Happenings.
Mack’s most recent exhibition, Fishers of Men at The American Academy of Arts and Letters was consistent with the artist’s installation-based practice as seen at Desert X, The Brooklyn Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and more. Emphasising the viewer’s dialogue with structure and form, these installations are paradoxically activated by viewer engagement and their own immediate, self-contained environments. While he identifies primarily as a painter, he alchemizes painting, installation, set design, textile arts, assemblage, and sculpture.
The artist’s influences are expansive. Mack’s oeuvre speaks to a reverence for culture (namely pop culture, music, and fashion) and an observational eye for minutiae. The exhibition at The American Academy of Arts and Letters is officially referencing a now closed fish restaurant in Harlem on 125th Street. The press release for the exhibition contains hyperlinks to an array of touchstones: Ha Ya by the Clark Sisters, Suzanne by Nina Simone, Isaac Mizrahi’s 1995 documentary Unzipped, the IMDb page for Ryan Coogler’s 2025 film Sinners. The seafood restaurant’s name references Matthew 4:19 and Mark 1:17: And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” Layered, associative, and eclectic the artist’s cultural touchstones are embedded into patchwork textiles alongside moving blankets and found fabrics, stitched and draped together like quilts.
Often these references are literal, as editorial spreads and magazine covers appear as assemblage elements. But other times the associations are more poetic–with titles adding new dimension to the work. Mack’s 2018 exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery was titled Misa Hylton-Brim, paying homage to one of the most influential 1990s stylists in hip-hop and R&B, dressing Lil’ Kim and Mary J. Blige. The stylist, now Misa Hylton, undeniably shaped the mainstream aesthetics of the decade which are still venerated and revisited today.
In his 2025 NewCrits discussion Mack describes Hylton as a “fashion architect,” echoing the stylist’s past self-identification, a burgeoning parlance (the association between fashion and architecture is not made by Hynton and Mack alone, the turn-of-phrase “Image Architect” was trademarked by celebrity stylist Law Roach in January 2020), and an acknowledgment of creative vocation’s innate expansive nature. Stylist as architect, public persona as physical structure, textile as painting, painting as environment.
