Untitled, 2025
Moko Fukuyama & James Beckett
sculpture, installation
During Uncommissioned, Brooklyn and Amsterdam-based South African artist James Beckett and Brooklyn-based Japanese artist Moko Fukuyama will create site-specific works at a neighborhood landmark in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The vacant store front at 539 Driggs Avenue remains untouched, though few understand why. How has such a valuable piece of real estate stayed unsold for so long in one of New York’s most aggressively gentrified neighborhoods?
As residents of the neighborhood, both artists share a deep interest in the site. Honoring the building owner’s quiet resistance to change, and his commitment to preserving memory, Beckett and Fukuyama will develop subtle interventions to the unused storefront. Drawing from their individual practices, each artist will pursue a personal line of inquiry through their work.
From James Beckett:
539 Driggs Avenue is a former barber shop that closed its doors several decades ago. Its owner, Jimmy, was born in the rear building on the same property and still lives there today. He speaks lyrically of the many stories bound to the site, and refuses to sell to developers, choosing instead to remain in the place he calls home.
Though now in a state of near-ruin, the shopfront bears the marks of vandalism: its windows are acid-tagged, the glass barber pole shattered, and pieces of the wooden façade stolen—an image of a neighborhood cannibalising its own body.
There is a princess-like figurine, resting on the inner ledge of the store-front. She has clearly been sitting there for some time, gathering dust. She is calm and unsettling, her face a smudge of turquoise enamel which has been applied by some child in a haste of expression, then baked by a parent to permanence. She is actually a piggy bank, a little reservoir for loose coins. I will make an enlarged version of this princess, and transpose her from the inside, to the vacant barber’s pole outside. If all goes well, she will rotate – she will be animated; alive.
From Moko Fukuyama:
For Uncommissioned, I will create a video installation in the display window of the storefront, using archival footage of Hawaii-born, Brooklyn based ballerina Elizabeth Mertz’s performances. Please refer to the following document for additional context.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cIvHi4NH5VzIDGPRXfP03kCx8tx6S2M3PZYL7MeY-FM/edit?usp=sharing
Gallery
About the Artist
Moko Fukuyama:
Moko Fukuyama is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from Japan, she immigrated to the United States in her early twenties and has since pursued her own vision of the American Dream. Her diverse practice spans large-scale sculptural installations, experimental film, and collaborative projects. Fukuyama’s work has been supported by leading nonprofit institutions, including Recess, The Shed, Socrates Sculpture Park, Smack Mellon, and The Kitchen. She has received grants from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Jerome Foundation, and held residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Art Omi, and Stoneleaf. From 2020 to 2022, she was in residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), where she was named studio honoree. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, she completed major public commissions for Lighthouse Works and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. In 2026, she will debut a new public artwork commissioned by Public Art Fund.
James Beckett:
James Beckett’s work explores the often overlooked histories of industry and the built environment. Through installations and public projects, he focuses on how physical objects carry traces of the past and shape our present. Craft-like assembly places the work uneasily between bourgeois decorative art and blunt social reality. These constructions present history as perpetually reinterpreted, portraying a world in which anomaly and change are ultimately constitutive. Beckett’s work is in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. He is the recipient of the Netherlands Prix de Rome for art and public space and represented Belgium in the 56th Venice Biennale. His work has additionally been shown in The Kitchen, NYC; MCAD, Manila; MAAT, Lisbon; Der Steirische Herbst, Graz; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; GAM, Turin and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. He is an alumni of the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, and the ISCP, NYC.
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