Eric Nathaniel Mack was born in Columbia, Maryland, in 1987. As a child, he often visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where his father was a plexiglass specialist and his mother an archivist. In his teenage years, he worked at his father’s brick-and-mortar-turned-mobile pop-up shop, Mack’s Discount Clothing, where he discovered an interest in fashion and textiles. His earliest works of sculpture and collage incorporated J.Crew catalogs, threadbare hoodies, and sketchbook paper dyed with soy sauce. Mack’s mixed-media installations have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The “sketches” in this portfolio include drawings and photographs of mock-ups and details from his finished larger compositions. Others capture works in progress or everyday encounters with what he calls outside affirmations— a sweatshirt tangled in a barbed-wire fence, a stack of clothes piled on a bed.

photograph by Eric Nathaniel Mack. © Eric Nathaniel Mack and courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.