The Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in Paris is a museum almost entirely dedicated to plaster casts and crowded with replicas of classical and religious architecture. There are medieval screens, Romanesque tympanums, and even a copy of the portal of Chartres Cathedral. This month, amid these overwhelmingly white, almost ghostly relics, you will find the sculptures of Kennedy Yanko: skeins of paint and salvaged metal twisted into beautifully balanced and weighted sculptures that look like three-dimensional Abstract Expressionist paintings.

Yanko is also an actor, notable for playing Reed Smith-Clarke in Spike Lee’s hit Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It (2017–2019), and her art has a sure feel for dramatic tension. She took inspiration for her exhibition ‘Ce qui nous rassemble’ (‘What brings us together’) from an apocryphal story about Mary Magdalene traveling across the Mediterranean to settle in the south of France. Art Basel caught up with Yanko via video link from her Miami studio to discuss Christianity, French New Wave, and why Jacques-Louis David is her guy.

Art Basel: What was your first impression of the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine?

Kennedy Yanko: The location is phenomenal. It frames the Eiffel Tower, so historically it feels like it’s at the center of the world. The room where my work is being shown is lined with moldings from churches, so there are these beautiful architectural framings around the sculptures that carry so much history and so many ideas.

How does your work sit within the museum collection’s religious dimension?

I was raised Seventh-day Adventist, so Christianity was a very big part of my home. It left me with a lot of questions about what spirituality and religion are, and how those two things play out in our everyday lives. I’ve done quite extensive research on Theosophy [and its proponents] like Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, and Wassily Kandinsky. I’m very interested in the occult and the spiritual world, as well as ideas explored by the Surrealists.

Mary Magdalene is an important figure in the new work. What about her captured your imagination?

I did a residency in the south of France, and before I went, I felt that I was being called by a female deity or energy. Then while I was responding to the site of the Cité de l’architecture, I found this interesting book, The Magdalen Manuscript: The Alchemies of Horus & the Sex Magic of Isis (2002). [It] speaks about sexual energy being at the forefront of our creative energy. I’m reimagining Mary’s story, thinking about what was taken from her, and how she was turned into this repentant sexual woman. She became all these different things – virgin, whore, mother, lover – all in one figure.

Paris is a city full of monuments, but we live in an increasingly unmonumental age. What does it mean to produce large-scale sculpture today?

Sculpture is a form of devotion – trying to see something and then creating these beautiful relics that represent a moment in time. For me to work at this scale, as a woman, is a blessing.

That’s a very romantic idea. Have you looked to the French Romantics? Is there a particular artist from that period you connect to?

When I was at the Living Theatre and working with Judith Malina, the company’s brilliant director, we did the play The History of the World. I played the French proto-Romantic, neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David. At the very end, I transformed into Venus, the goddess of love. His generation were able to translate passion, pain, war, and drama. They could clearly see what kings were doing to their people and then ask: How do you translate that into paint? So yeah, Jacques-Louis David, that’s my guy.

You grew up in St. Louis, which was once a French colony. Did you have a sense of France growing up?

I did. Architecturally, St. Louis definitely has a relationship to France. As a young girl, I always loved French New Wave: Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. I thought their storytelling was incredible. The Surrealists were the first artists I ever looked at. I was amazed by Man Ray and the way he played with perception and investigated invisible worlds.

What does the perfect day in Paris look like?

What I actually love about Paris is the quiet at night. I’m kind of a granny back in the States – I go to bed at about 9:30pm. But when I’m in Paris, I’m up all night. I’ll read and I love to ride my bike everywhere. In the United States, leisure isn’t part of our culture. Miami is where I work and focus. Paris is where I research. I think that’s why so many artists, for so many centuries, have been drawn to Paris. Look at Josephine Baker and James Baldwin and all of these Black artists who found reprieve there.