There is a new vogue in the traditional Garden City of Christchurch—art in public spaces. Public sculpture is all the rage, on the minds and agendas of artists, curators, gallery owners, urban designers, landscape architects, and the press and public alike.
Richard Serra’s Paris Promenade
Last spring, Monumenta transformed the historic Grand Palais in Paris for the second time, inviting Richard Serra to engage with the cavernous 145,000-square-foot volume that defines Henri Deglane’s 19th-century glass cathedral. By sponsoring these high-profile, site-specific interventions by contemporary artists (Anselm Kiefer was the first), the French government has restored the viability, public function, and
Sculpture Today: A Conversation with Alyson Shotz
For the past decade, Alyson Shotz has created sculptures and installations for public and private spaces in which light, texture, and material evoke sensations of movement and dynamism and create new and unexpected visual perceptions. Widely shown in the United States, she has exhibited at a number of major institutions, including the Aldrich Contemporary Art
Peripheral Visions: A Conversation with Linda Fleming
In the late afternoon light of the Western Nevada desert, the hard work of sand spiders becomes visible when the sun angle is just low enough to be caught by the glistening dew. This is the world that inspires Linda Fleming, a world apparent only out of the corner of one’s eye.
Jaume Plensa: The Shock of the Known
When Descartes deduced cogito ergo sum or when Einstein concluded that E=MC2, they formulated ideas of such incisive simplicity that we intuitively accept them as right. No matter that few of us are qualified to follow their precise reasoning, it is enough that such complex deductions have been so succinctly distilled and have thus entered
Dani Karavan: New Work in France, Germany, and Japan
Although the character of Dani Karavan’s site-specific outdoor interventions varies greatly, his basic vocabulary of geometric forms and innovative use of nature—light, wind, water, and sun—has remained unchanged since Negev Monument (1968), an early, seminal work in Israel.
2008 Outstanding Student Achievement In Contemporary Sculpture
Justin Colt BeckmanBernadette BirzerDaniel A. BruceSamantha DoanPeter GoffJorda GriskaDennis HarperBenjamin HuntMyeongbeom KimChika MatsudaKimberly WalkerShai Zurim The International Sculpture Center is proud to present the winners of the 2008 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.
Dennis Oppenheim: Public Action
Dennis Oppenheim’s iconoclastic inventions and interventions of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s would seem to be unlikely platforms for launching bureaucracy-laden public art commissions. By shaping remote landscapes, marking his own body, and making quasi-objects that galleries and museums found a challenge to exhibit, Oppenheim undermined every convention of the art world, let alone those
Follow Your Obsessions: A Conversation with Ron Pederson
“I’ve been making sculpture for 35 years and I still don’t know what I’m doing.” So confides Ron Pederson, who nevertheless has shaped a productive, influential career, working in a variety of materials while impacting hundreds, maybe thousands of students.
Searching for the Heavens When I Look Downward: A Conversation with Micha Ullman
In Germany, Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman achieved fame with his extraordinary memorial, the underground Bibliothek on Berlin’s Bebelplatz. The square room, its walls lined with empty shelves, is located exactly where the Nazis burned thousands of books on May 10, 1933.
