Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999–2016

Tom Sachs pays tribute to a defining icon of street culture—the boom box—by transforming our glass entryway, the Rubin Pavilion, into a living sound system that hovers between art and science, the functional and the mythological.

Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999–2016 features eighteen works that highlight the artist’s ability to inventively transform ordinary, everyday materials into art. With wit and ingenuity, he creates boom box sculptures that play music and activate the space, turning it into an immersive sound environment. The work is programmed with playlists that go on sequentially throughout our public hours.

The installation includes Toyan’s (2002), a group of speakers eight feet tall by twelve feet across inspired by Jamaican sound systems, and Presidential Vampire Booth (2002), complete with a stocked bar and Presidential seal. Sachs’s work is crafted from a wide range of materials such as plywood, foamcore, batteries, duct tape, wires, hot glue, and solder.

Exhibition overview from museum website