Early in 2002, a photo was published in the Guardian of a nude figure lying among the debris of the World Trade Center in the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The ambiguities in this image are manifold.
Arnaldo Pomodoro: Within/Without
Arnaldo Pomodoro was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2008. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. For more than half a century, Arnaldo Pomodoro has been making prescient, penetrating observations about modern life with his sculpture, expressing the inherent intimations, tensions, and tenuous, fleeting joys of the postwar era
Marisol: Stories of the Self
A lot has been written about Marisol Escobar, often focusing as much on her legendary eccentricities as on her art. In his recent memoir, Irving Sandler recalls her participating in a panel at The Club in the early 1960s, wearing a white mask; she was infamously known for “her silences and one-word responses to any
Sculpting Consciousness in Time and Space: A Conversation with Ned Kahn
MacArthur Fellow Ned Kahn is one of the most undefined artists working today. And that is just the way he likes it. His refusal to be pigeonholed grants him the freedom to embark on projects of his own choosing, whether they be wind curtains to cover the urban blight of a concrete parking garage or
Fletcher Benton: Indifference to the Absolute
Fletcher Benton was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2008. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. For more than three decades, Fletcher Benton has been refining and redefining geometric sculpture.
Kim Simonsson: Alien Innocence
Finnish artist Kim Simonsson speaks of finding his calling when he discovered ceramic. He describes its extreme variability and diversity of forms as a sort of paradise that allows him to exploit his artistic potential. The first work he created in this material was in the style of a common ceramic living room ornament—a dog.
Under the Dome of Time: Two Iranian Sculptors
Through a series of coincidences, I was invited by the municipality of Tehran to serve as a juror for its First International Sculpture Symposium in March 2007. Although hesitant at the outset, I accepted out of a sincere curiosity to see what kind of sculpture was being produced in that part of the world.
Feeding the Spirit of Adventure: A Conversation with Nicholas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley
No research on installation art is complete without a conversation with Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley. As founding directors of London’s Museum of Installation (MoI, 1990–2005), an influential nonprofit exhibition space, and authors of the equally influential books, Installation Art (1994) and Installation Art in the New Millennium (2003), their impact is well known.
Quarryography: New Life in an Old Quarry
Three hundred and sixty million years ago when the granite coast of Maine was forming, the fairies and wood nymphs were planning their debut. A massive rock formation consisting of microcline, plagioclase, and quartz seemed perched at the end of the world—too perfect a place to remain inert.
Poetics and Utopia in Cuban Contemporary Sculpture
Recent exhibitions of Latin American and Caribbean contemporary art have fostered new interest in Cuban art. While the island nation may be isolated politically and economically, its art scene has kept the door open to international influences and exchange.
