Bend, Break, Mend is a solo exhibition of Trinidad-born, Brooklyn-raised artist Karyn Olivier at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). Known for installations and public artworks that confront historical erasure, collective memory, and social justice, Olivier creates sculptural and site-responsive interventions that give presence to people, places, and narratives that have long been overlooked or actively obscured. Working with found and transformed materials, objects that bear the marks of use, displacement, and time, she treats matter itself as a carrier of memory, holding layered histories of past, present, and future. Her practice interrogates how monuments function, challenges dominant forms of commemoration, and repositions Black life and cultural history at the center of public space.
Opening in Summer 2026, Bend, Break, Mend brings together recent works alongside a newly commissioned installation that engages the silences, omissions, and distortions embedded in historical narratives. Olivier’s work attends closely to what she has described as “amplified absences”, gaps that are never empty but filled with presence, residue, and possibility. Through shifts in scale, material transformation, and spatial intervention, she reveals how histories are constructed, fragmented, and continually reshaped. Her installations invite viewers to encounter the instability of what is seen and unseen, asking how memory persists, mutates, and resists disappearance.
As a former resident of Southeastern Michigan, Olivier brings a lived sensitivity to the region’s cultural and social landscapes, grounding the exhibition in the specific histories and conditions of Detroit. Attentive to the ways place holds both visible and buried narratives, her work considers the ground itself as witness, marked by geological, social, and political histories that remain in circulation. Conceived as both an artistic presentation and a platform for collective meaning-making, the exhibition invites reflection on memory, material, and the shifting terrain of public space.
Supported in part by the Ellsworth Kelly Award, this exhibition expands the scope of Olivier’s practice while deepening public engagement through educational programs and community partnerships.
Karyn Olivier
Karyn Olivier creates sculpture, installation, and public art. She is currently the Public Works Artist-in-Residence at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Forthcoming projects include a memorial to Vel R. Phillips. Recent presentations include the 2024 Whitney Biennial, La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio, the Malta Biennale, and Prospect.6 in New Orleans.
Olivier has exhibited widely at institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and MoMA PS1. She has received major honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and a USA Fellowship, and is a professor of sculpture at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Exhibition Credits
This exhibition is made possible with lead support from the Ellsworth Kelly Award, created to catalyze a solo exhibition for a contemporary visual artist. The Award is made possible by The Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.