Greg Carideo
June 3rd, 2025

“Won’t you let me see your naked body?” demands Leonard Cohen from Greg Carideo’s mixtape about looking and being seen. “They cannot see me naked,” replies Michael Stipe; Anohni and Yoko Ono weigh in. My delightful conversation with artist Greg Carideo traverses topics from Elliott Smith’s appearance on a demented FX morning show in 1995 to the close relationship between Lana Del Rey’s “Blue Bannisters” and Greg’s own work.

Carideo transforms steel, old t-shirts, bits of scrap metal, and other shopworn fragments into tabernacles of urban life. Each sculpture is a little world, a structure that carries narrative, materiality, and vernacular forms of architecture and adornment—ghostly bodegas, ramshackle duplexes, basilica-shaped cuchifritos.

For Carideo, collecting—impressions, images, writing—is a major part of his process. We talk about how his use of found objects, each one a little history of wear and tear, is a reflection of collected ideas and shapes that he transforms into palimpsests of time, material, and thought. We discuss all of this and more in this wide-ranging exploration of materiality, will, lyrics, and looking.

1. Dalhart, Texas, 1967, John Fahey, 1971
   
2. Clementine Live + Interview 1995 (Breakfast Time), Elliott Smith
   
3. Blue Banisters, Lana Del Rey, 2021
   
4. Memories, Leonard Cohen, 1977
   
5. Among the Leaves, Sun Kil Moon, 2012
   
6. Watch Me, ANOHNI, 2016
   
7. Panic, The Smiths, 1987
   
8. Solo, Frank Ocean, 2016
9. Blues Run the Game, Jackson C. Frank, 2001
10. Let X=X, Laurie Anderson, 1982
    
11. Nightswimming, R.E.M., 1992
    
12. Nobody Sees Me Like You Do, Yoko Ono, 2022
    
13. Losing My Taste For The Night Life, Arthur Russell, 1993
14. Regret, Fiona Apple, 2012
    
15. The Well, Smog, 2005
16. Tecumseh Valley, Townes Van Zandt, 1969
    
17. When I Get to Heaven, John Prine, 2018

Greg Carideo was born in. 1986, in Minneapolis, MN, and lives and works in New York. He received BFA from Minneapolis College of Art & Design, Minneapolis in 2008 and an MFA from New York University in 2015. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Public Gallery, London in 2025; In Lieu, Los Angeles in 2024; Foreign & Domestic, New York in 2023; FR MoCA, Fall River in 2022; an GRIMM, New York in 2021. His work has been featured in recent group exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York; Pangée Gallery, Montreal; 12.26 Gallery, Dallas; Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal; Margot Samel, New York; Public Gallery, London; ICA, Portland; and International Objects, New York. Several of Carideo’s exhibitions have garnered press, including a New York Times review for his solo exhibition, Dog Eared Reverie at Foreign & Domestic in 2023, a BOMB: Studio Visit for his solo exhibition ground work at Public Gallery in 2025, as well as group exhibitions featured in Cultured Magazine, Artforum, and the New York Times.