Dirty Words

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A GANG OF THREE
Dirty Words and Other Things
October 17 – November 7, 2026
Artist Reception: Saturday, October 17, 5–8 PM
One Mile Gallery | Kingston, New York

One Mile Gallery is pleased to present Dirty Words and Other Things, an exhibition by A
Gang of Three, the internationally award-winning multidisciplinary collaborative practice
of artists and designers William H. Dodge and Lincoln Hancock.

Working across public art, architecture, landscape, installation, urban planning, ecology,
and advocacy, A Gang of Three creates socially engaged work that examines some of
the most urgent issues of contemporary life, including human rights, climate change,
social justice, censorship, migration, data, and collective memory. At the heart of their
practice is a belief in art’s capacity to bring disparate people together while creating
space for difficult conversations.

Dirty Words and Other Things grew out of an unrealized project proposed for the Malta
Biennale. In the summer of 2025, A Gang of Three was selected by the Biennale to
develop a work addressing censorship efforts in the United States. Drawing upon
reporting in The New York Times, The Guardian, and other news organizations, as well
as government memos, directives, and executive orders, the project examined the
removal, restriction, and politicization of language within American public institutions.
Before the work could be fully developed and realized, however, the artists’ participation
in the Biennale was canceled without what they considered a clear explanation. The
experience transformed the project: a work conceived to examine censorship had itself,
in the artists’ view, become an example of the forces it sought to investigate.
Subsequent reports concerning Malta Prime Minister Robert Abela’s interest in joining
President Donald Trump’s proposed “Board of Peace” for Gaza added another layer to
the artists’ understanding of the circumstances surrounding the canceled exhibition.
The following spring, during a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in
California, Dodge and Hancock returned to the project. There, they began expanding
Dirty Words beyond the circumstances of the Malta Biennale, exploring censorship as
part of a broader landscape of political language, institutional power, public memory,
and social control.

The resulting installation at One Mile Gallery builds upon those experiments. Dirty
Words and Other Things asks what it means to make socially engaged art at a moment
when language itself has become contested territory—and what happens when artists,
institutions, and audiences are forced to negotiate the boundaries between expression,
power, and silence.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
A Gang of Three is an internationally award-winning multidisciplinary, socially focused
public art, arts planning, and urban design practice based in North Carolina.
Founded by William H. Dodge and Lincoln Hancock, the practice operates within an
ever-evolving gradient of public art, architecture, landscape architecture, installation,
urban planning, ecology, and advocacy. Its work regularly addresses critical issues
including human rights, climate change, resiliency, social justice, data, remembrance,
and migration.

At its core, A Gang of Three seeks to use art and design as tools for positive change
and for bringing disparate people together.

EXHIBITION INFORMATION
A Gang of Three: Dirty Words and Other Things
October 17 – November 7, 2026
Artist Reception: Saturday, October 17, 5–8 PM
One Mile Gallery
Kingston, New York
Open Saturdays and Sundays, 12–5 PM, and by appointment