All Roads Lead to Home

For some, home is the place they were born. For others, it is wherever they can rest their head. But for Clifford Prince King, home is not a place but a feeling—one that the photographer captures intimately. Starting this week, his first public art exhibition, titled “Let me know when you get home,” will be displayed on 330 bus shelters and newsstands across New York, Chicago, and Boston. In collaboration with the Public Art Fund—which has previously exhibited artists such as Fred Eversley, Martine Gutierrez, Nicholas Galanin, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in public, urban spaces—the autobiographical series depicts a nomadic period in the New York-based photographer’s life.

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The tender portraits capture the summer when King lived and worked on the road after he stored all of his belongings away in a storage unit in Los Angeles. The 13 photographs are a reflection of the people and places he encountered along the way. Each image reveals a heartfelt moment of everyday life. A pair of handcuffed lovers kiss off the side of a road; a capoeira dancer is caught mid-handstand on a rooftop in São Paolo. In dj and ryan, 2023, two young men huddle together in the rain as one reaches out to lightly touch the face of the other, framed by a misty waterfront. A light-filled scene of routine domesticity, the 8th house, 2023, depicts the posterior of a man holding a broom, framed by the wooden beams of an empty room. Behind him, yellow, green, and black paisley durags are carefully hung up like ribbons to dry. 

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King, whose work has been showcased in the Hammer Museum, Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, and ICA Miami, among others, is known for his evocative, and oftentimes unflinching, depictions of his lived experience as a queer Black man in Los Angeles. In Night Sweats, 2018, which was taken days after King’s HIV diagnosis and part of his 2020 debut solo show “While Night Comes On Gently,” he spotlights a physical symptom of the virus in an unadorned yet haunting snapshot. King’s themes of queerness and Blackness are further explored in his 2023 series “Hush-a-bye Dreams,” in which the title is derived from Nina Simone’s 1969 ballad “Music for Lovers.” “Let me know when you get home” is the latest extension of this thread. King (who was born in Arizona, moved to Portland, Oregon as a teenager, and spent time in LA before moving to New York) expands his field of vision to São Paulo, Vermont, the Cayman Islands, and Fire Island and Syracuse in New York. As a result, he reminds viewers that human connection is the key to finding refuge everywhere.

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“Let me know when you get home” is on view from February 21 to May 26, 2024, at JCDecaux bus shelters and newsstands throughout the cities of New York, Chicago, and Boston.