Nick Cave’s Mammoth Opens at the Smithsonian, Featured in The New York Times
Nick Cave at his Mammoth exhibition.
Photo by Donavon Smallwood for
The New York Times.
Nick Cave (MFA Fiber 1989) has unveiled a major new solo installation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Mammoth, on view February 13, 2026, through January 3, 2027, fills the museum’s galleries with a sweeping landscape of sculpture, memory, and spectacle. The exhibition is already drawing national attention, including a feature in The New York Times.
At the center of the exhibition is a 70-foot illuminated table crowded with hundreds of objects: brightly beaded trivets, sequined fruits and vegetables, canes, glass fish, slippers, and more. Suspended nearby, towering lifeguard chairs topped with tusked forms evoke the prehistoric animal of the exhibition’s title, while a large-scale mural created with designer and life-partner Bob Faust is partially obscured behind a dense scrim of beaded netting. In an adjacent space, video projections animate mammoth figures moving through contemporary landscapes, with live performances planned later in the run.
Cave told the Times that the project grew from a deep look into his own history and the generations of makers in his family, recalling in particular time spent on his grandparents’ farm in Missouri. SAAM curator of contemporary art Sarah Newman described the exhibition as a meditation on memory and creativity, while also suggesting that beneath its dazzling surfaces lies a more pervasive sense of unease connected to how we understand land, history, and shared futures.
Scholars contributing to the exhibition catalogue position the work within Cave’s long engagement with institutional critique and with the political dimensions that have animated his practice since the debut of his Soundsuits in response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King.
Now based in Chicago, Cave has for decades balanced an expansive studio practice with teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been the subject of major presentations at institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and the Denver Art Museum, and his Soundsuits remain among the most recognizable sculptural forms in contemporary art.
Exhibition view of Mammoth at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Photo by Donavon Smallwood for The New York Times.
Learn more:
The Artist Nick Cave Couches His Critique in Dazzle – The New York Times\
Nick Cave: Mammoth – Smithsonian American Art Museum
Nick Cave to Receive 2025 Smithsonian Visionary Award
Fiber at Cranbrook Academy of Art
