Marcus Manganni is a New York City–based interdisciplinary artist whose practice examines how architecture, light, and systems of control shape the conditions through which we see and experience space. Working across sculpture, installation, public art, and architecture, Manganni considers the built environment not simply as a physical setting, but as a structure that can determine how we move, what we see, and what remains out of reach. His work moves between visibility and obscurity, access and restriction, attraction and threat. At the center of his practice is a simple but persistent question: under what conditions are we allowed to see?
Manganni approaches sculpture as an encounter between body, material, light, and space. Light can illuminate, but it can also expose, disorient, surveil, or deny. An opening can suggest access while functioning as a boundary. A reflective surface can make the viewer visible while obscuring what lies beyond it. An object can attract the body while making that body conscious of its own vulnerability. In this sense, perception is not neutral. The conditions through which we see are also conditions through which we move, understand, and experience access.
Manganni takes the central concern of Light and Space, the conditions through which perception occurs, and places it in contact with the lived realities of confinement, architecture, and institutional power. His practice emerged from an intensely restricted investigation of light and space and has developed into a broader inquiry into the structures that organize human experience. As curator and writer Stephanie Seungmin Kim, PhD, observes, “As with the Light and Space Movement, Manganni elicits visceral responses,” while noting that his works are “far from experimental musings” and carry “a more contemporary, experienced and pragmatic perspective.” Kim further writes that “the very instruments of possibility, light, objects, space, carry their own inherent meaning.”
This distinction is central to Manganni’s work. He is not interested in light solely as an optical phenomenon, or architecture simply as a container for objects. He examines how these systems organize behavior, attention, vulnerability, and access. The practice brings together the perceptual rigor associated with Light and Space, the material intelligence of contemporary sculpture, the spatial logic of architecture, and the psychological realities of confinement. What begins as an investigation of perception becomes an examination of the structures that produce its conditions.
Manganni’s work is held in public and private collections including the Ford Foundation, the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, The Foundry, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Nashville. His work has been presented at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Gund Museum, and the Young Collectors Contemporary Art Fair, as well as in a 2026 solo presentation at NADA with Trotter&Sholer.
His permanent and public installations extend across the United States, including New York, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Nashville, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. His practice has been supported by the Art for Justice Fund’s Art and Advocacy Collaborative Grant and Individual Artist Grant and Fellowship, the Right of Return Fellowship, and the Creatives Rebuild New York Artist Grant. He was a 2025 Artist-in-Residence with Silver Art Projects and a 2026 Senior Fellow in Residence. He is also a recipient of the Cleveland Public Library’s 2026 Public Art Initiative.
Through bodies of work including his Bluest and Gauze series, End to End Burners, and alongside an expanding program of public and architectural projects, Manganni continues to examine the relationship between perception and the structures that govern it. His work asks not only what we are able to see, but how the environments around us determine what can be seen, who is allowed access, and what remains beyond reach.