New Orleans native Zarouhie Abdalian, who recently returned to her hometown after stints in Philadelphia and Oakland, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work often interrogates site-specificity. Using sound, performance, and sculpture, she draws attention to the overlooked by framing a space and restoring forgotten aspects of its layered history.
Margaret Meehan
DALLAS, TEXAS Conduit Gallery
We like to imagine that the arc of history follows some kind of trajectory, like a book or a movie. Artists like Margaret Meehan, however, recognize that there is no clear chain of events, that history is illogical, directionless, and unpredictable.
Deeper Truths: A Conversation with Hank Willis Thomas
Hank Willis Thomas, who was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, has emerged as one of the most prolific artists of his generation. Formally trained as a photographer, over the last 15 years, he has considered the relationship we have to images and what they say about our priorities and privileges, focusing primarily on popular, found imagery from history, sport, and fashion.
Sydney Blum
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA Studio 21
After several decades in New York, including 17 years teaching at the Parsons School of Design, Sydney Blum moved to Nova Scotia. Her recent exhibition “Icarus–Colour–Space” (her first solo show in her adopted home) featured five sculptures that seem to float, rippling, in space—like sections of soap bubbles hovering just on this side of corporeality before winking out of existence.
Genesis Belanger: Seduction and Repulsion
Sometimes a hot dog is not just a hot dog. For sculptor Genesis Belanger, the humble frankfurter is a way to bitingly critique things that irk her—in this case, the patriarchy—while still maintaining a sly sense of humor.
Sarah Braman
NEW YORK Mitchell-Innes & Nash
While Braman is known for large-scale works, her smaller sculptures command equal recognition. Related to Minimalist traditions, these works use deceptively simple components to create a consortium of forms and effects, often highly colorful.
Yorkshire Sculpture International: Jimmie Durham, Tau Lewis, Wolfgang Laib, and Nairy Baghramian
WAKEFIELD, U.K. The Hepworth Wakefield
By lucky happenstance two of Britain’s foremost 20th-century sculptors, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, were born a mere six miles from each other, in West Yorkshire’s Castleford and Wakefield, and only five years apart, in 1898 and 1903 respectively.
Inmortalizar la Memoria: Una Conversación con Ezequiel Verona
El trabajo de Verona combina una fuerte presencia material con una búsqueda sistemática por dar a la imagen el rol patagónico de ser, simultáneamente, registro y preservación de la memoria.
Martin Puryear
VENICE U.S. Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale
“Liberty/Libertà,” Martin Puryear’s U.S. pavilion exhibition, uses subtle, disarming, and purposeful juxtapositions to create a mindful meditation on what it means to be an American artist and citizen today.
Rona Pondick: Civilizing the Self
When asked about her influences, Rona Pondick tends to reply succinctly. “Kafka and my mother,” she will often state, but when pressed further she has only been known to elaborate on the former. In looking at the hybrid metal creatures for which Pondick is perhaps best known, Kafka’s influence—from Metamorphosis to his letters to his
