gary lapointe jr

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My practice spans sculpture, installation, mixed media, and works on paper, examining the intersections of built environments, natural systems, and queer identity construction. Raised in rural New England and based in Chicago, IL, I draw from both urban and rural landscapes as shifting geographies in which questions of navigation, desire, and belonging emerge amid ecological and social precarity. I work through collecting, altering, and assembling found objects, industrial remnants, and foraged organic materials. These materials are selected not only for their physical properties and modes of construction, but also for the social, political, and personal histories they carry. Often sourced from my immediate surroundings, they are embedded within systems of production, extraction, and waste. Their reuse resists forms of disposability while addressing frameworks of environmental degradation, labor, and material excess. My process is iterative and often non-linear, shaped by acts of addition, subtraction, and spatial reconfiguration that offsets and unsettles function and meaning. Through this approach, objects and forms are transformed, and new relationships and meanings emerge. Underlying my work are intersecting concerns with ecological instability, the politics of material systems, and questions of queer representation and the social codings of desire. Through these frameworks, I explore the malleability of materials and forms as a way to think through how identities, environments, and cultural codes are constructed, disrupted, and reimagined.

Gary LaPointe Jr. ( 1991, USA ) graduated in 2016 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA in Sculpture and was also awarded the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award ( 2016 ) from the International Sculpture Center. He received his BFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design and was also a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. LaPointe has exhibited nationally and internationally with select solo and group exhibitions at Roman Susan ( Chicago ) Randy Alexander Gallery ( Chicago ) Galerie B-312 ( Montréal ) LVL3 ( Chicago ) Heaven Gallery ( Chicago ) the Lunder Arts Center ( Cambridge ) Kunsthal Charlottenborg ( Copenhagen ) and at the Royal Academy of Arts ( London ). LaPointe also received a Purchase Award from the Working Artist Organization ( 2020 ) and was featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow ( 2019 ) published by Thames and Hudson and BEERS Gallery ( London ). He received a Fellowship residency from the Vermont Studio Center ( 2025 ) and also attended the Wassaic Projects Residency ( 2019 ). LaPointe currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.