Kim Dacres, a first-generation American sculptor of Jamaican descent, who lives in Harlem and practices her studio work in the Bronx. The artist’s representation follows the celebrated 2023 exhibition, Measure Me in Rotations, from which the gallery placed Dacres’s sculptures in the permanent collections of three museums across the country, including the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; the International African American Museum, Charleston, SC; and ICA Miami. Charles Moffett will next exhibit Dacres’s work in a two-person presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024 – the gallery’s debut year participating in the fair. Prior to pursuing a career as an artist, Dacres worked for nearly a decade as a teacher and principal in New York City public schools. In many ways she approaches her artistic practice as an evolution of teaching — often beginning her sculptures from a specific personal story or untold history, she translates overlooked and unusual materials into captivating new forms, infusing them with a wider, embracing narrative and assertive, worldly presence.

Dacres uses rubber from recycled tires to create sculptures celebrating the influential forces in her life. An act of sculptural translation, her work embodies the assertive energy and presence of the people, particularly the Black people, women, and queer people, that shape her communities across Harlem and the Bronx — individuals the artist may personally know or encounter, as well as fictional characters, performers, athletes, and musicians that have forged her experience. While drawn initially to the rubber tire material for its uniquely accessible, forgiving, and malleable nature, the artist further mines the material’s metaphorical resonances with her own personal experience and the broader cycle of injustice and oppression inflicted upon her communities in America and across the AfroCaribbean Diaspora. The parallels abound — where others see waste, lacking, and insufficiency Dacres sees boundless possibility; and with that vision comes a profound resiliency, solace, and joy.

In a process that the artist first began working with as an undergraduate student at Williams College, Dacres collects and disassembles tires of all kinds — car, motorcycle, bicycle, electric skateboard, etc. — from her neighborhood bicycle and auto shops, and then embarks on a complex path of shaping, layering, and connecting the loosened rubber elements to create the singular figurative forms of her work. In more recent years, the artist has integrated pressure treated wood as the internal core, the bones of the sculpture, empowering her to shape increasingly ambitious, individualized, and stylistically nuanced works. Through the alchemical transformation of object into art, Dacres infuses her material with a new, humanistic life force, one reaching far beyond its preordained purpose to tell a new story.

Kim Dacres (b. 1986, Bronx, New York; lives and works between Harlem and the Bronx, New York.; MS CUNY Lehman College, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, 2010; BA Williams College, Political Science, Art Studio, and Africana Studies 2008.) She reclaims rubber and discarded tires to construct figurative sculptures that embody cultural presence and expressive individuality. Through a meticulous process of layering these worn materials onto wooden frameworks, she transforms industrial refuse into viscerally evocative forms. Hairstyling and facial features are rendered with particular attention, elevating the dignity and specificity of her subjects.
Dacres’s work has been exhibited around the world, including recent solo and two-artist exhibitions at UTA Artist Space in Atlanta, GA (2024), Charles Moffett in New York, NY (2023), Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles, CA (2020) and Palm Beach, FL (2021); as well as group exhibitions internationally and within the U.S., including Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940 at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX (2024), Part 1 of Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial at The Bronx Museum, Bronx,NY (2024), Dueling Consciousness at Zidoun-Bossuyt in Luxembourg (2023), New Forms: that which constitutes (critical) matter at Artspeak, Vancouver, British Columbia (2023), Black American Portraits at Spelman College Museum ofFine Art, Atlanta, GA (2023) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2021), Sounds of Blackness at The Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines (2023), Godhead – Idols in Times of Crisis at Lustwarande 12th Edition, Tilburg, Netherlands (2022), Arrangements in Black at Phillips, New York, NY (2022), From a Place, Of a Place, presented by ArtNoir X regularnormal X Meatpacking District, New York, NY (2021), Through the Looking Glass, presented by UTA Artist Space, Beverly Hills, CA (2021). Dacres’ sculptures are in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Bunker Art Space in Palm Beach, FL; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; the International African American Museum in Charleston, SC; the North Dakota Museum of Art; the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York City, and Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami. In the Fall of 2025, she will unveil a new permanent installation of bronze sculptures in partnership with Artbridge and Settlement Housing Fund at the historic Harlem River Houses in New York City.