The Artistic Explorations of Monique Péan
While the past year has presented numerous challenges, working on sculpture and painting has been a cathartic medium to further explore materiality, temporality, memory, and metaphysics.
I have found sculpture to be a vehicle for which to express myself and further investigate our relationship to nature, our origins, and identity, namely the impacts of racial and social constructs and opportunities to embrace our shared humanity. – Monique Péan
Monique Péan is a New York City-based artist, designer, and activist who explores deep time and the origins of humanity. Through sculpture and painting, she creates a dialogue on the intersection of materiality, temporality, metaphysics, nature, and culture.
Raised outside of Washington D.C., Péan grew up surrounded by the Smithsonian institutions and traveled the globe with her family. However, Péan did not turn to fine art until a trip to the Arctic Circle, where she became fascinated by the ways in which the Inupiaq and Yupik communities cared for their surrounding environment and utilized ancient fossils as tools, decoration, and adornment.
From then, Péan began creating sculptural work to highlight the implications of human interaction on the natural world. Her sculptures juxtapose rare sustainably-gathered elemental materials in recycled gold, platinum, and bronze with nature’s first photographs - dinosaur bones and extraterrestrial specimens.
The Sikhote Alin meteorite, sculpted by its entrance into the Earth’s atmosphere, is one of our few unaltered windows back to the beginning of our solar system. – Monique Péan
Péan’s Sikhote-Alin Vessel (2020), on view in Objects: USA 2020, investigates the relationship between the Earth and cosmos. Its bronze framework contains a rare 4.5 billion-year-old found specimen of Sikhote-Alin meteorite, which fell to Earth in 1947. The meteorite represents a geological stamp of our past, emphasized by the imprints made within the vessel, simultaneously recalling the meteorite’s collision upon the Earth. A charcoal sketch (on recycled cotton paper) also rests inside the vessel, introducing an element of manmade documentation.
Maquette for 1130G Sikhote-Alin Vessel.
Monique Péan has supported many philanthropic initiatives through her work over the past 15 years, and has built clean water wells and sanitation projects in Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Nepal, Malawi, and Mali that serve over 15,800 people.
Péan founded The Vanessa Péan Foundation, which raises funds to provide scholarships to students in Haiti. She is also a founder of Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT) and Yale School of Management’s Career Advancement Program, which has provided career advancement opportunities to over 700 Black, Latinx and Native American professionals in the United States.
Monique Péan received her B.A. in Philosophy, Political Science and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and has guest lectured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Museum, The Museum of Arts and Design, Parsons the New School for Design, Harvard Business School, and the University of Pennsylvania. Wearers of her jewelry include Beyoncé, Michelle Obama, and Dr. Jill Biden.