Often referencing American history, his work explores culture and politics, engaging subjects such as the civil rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism.
Growing up near Boston, MA in the 1970’s he experienced the radical pedagogy of A. S. Neill, Maria Montessori, John Holt, anti-war demonstrations and the desegregation of the public school system.
After seeing the seminal exhibition Blueprints for Modern Living at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles[9] Durant began several years of work investigating the social dynamics and class politics of Modernist architecture and design.
Smithson's legendary work Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent State University in Ohio led Durant to his ongoing interest in Monuments and Memorials.
Working with curator Pedro Alonzo he produced Labyrinth (2015) in Philadelphia which addressed mass incarceration and The Meeting House (2016) in Concord, MA that took up the subject of race in colonial and contemporary New England.
[19] Because of the often controversial subject matter of his work the large scale interactive sculpture entitled Scaffold (2012) was protested when the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis attempted to install it in 2017.
Other notable works have encompassed Italian anarchism, cartographic histories of capitalism, gestures of everyday refusal and a decolonizing realignment of Surrealism through incorporating artists and writers from the former French colonial world, like Aimé Césaire and Joyce Mansour.