Michael Heizer introduced substantial questions into the discourse of sculpture in the late 1960s and ’70s, offering new experiences with his bold choices of site, material, and scale. His use of rocks, stones, earth, and desert landscapes is integral to his core aesthetic and reflects his upbringing as the son of an eminent archaeologist: Heizer
Joan Truckenbrod: Exploring the In-Between
Video sculpture, at its best, represents a rich fusion of the materially embodied space of sculpture and the chronologically successive, fleeting moments of time. This synthesis lies at the heart of Joan Truckenbrod’s art. Her sculpture explores the density and mortality of the physical world by depicting that world as a continuous, unfolding, subatomic flow
Trusting Serendipity: A Conversation with John Phillips and Carolyn Healy
Carolyn Healy is an installation artist who began her career with an exhibition of small, abstract sculptures made of found objects at the Marian Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, in 1979. Since 1987 she has created numerous large site-specific installation pieces, some for performance events and many in collaboration with sound and video artist John Phillips.
Nevelson’s Dawn’s Wedding Feast: Re-Finding the Found Object
“The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend” (on view at The Jewish Museum in New York through September 16, 2007 and traveling to the de Young Museum in San Francisco, October 27, 2007–January 13, 2008) presents 66 works including sculpture, drawings, and two room-size masterworks by the towering 20th-century sculptor.
Art as Expedition: A Conversation with Lita Albuquerque
As a child, Lita Albuquerque was mesmerized by the vault of nighttime stars visible from the Catholic convent that was her home in Carthage. Occasionally she would visit her mother in a small seaside village, where the Mediterranean lapped the Tunisian shore.
Chicago’s Agora
The southwestern corner of Grant Park, often referred to as Chicago’s “front yard,” had been a conspicuous open space in a 320-acre park that dates to the 1830s and faces a more than mile-long skyscraper wall along Michigan Avenue.
The Perils of Public Art: Louise Nevelson Plaza
Even as a retrospective of Louise Nevelson’s work opens at The Jewish Museum in New York, one of her most important public artworks is being redesigned beyond recognition. Nevelson was the first woman to gain fame in the U.S.
Karlis Rekevics: Recent Sculpture
Karlis Rekevics’s generously scaled, weirdly architectural cast plaster constructions are some of the most robust, aggressive, materially expressive sculptures around. They are also among the most evocative and elusive. For all their size, their evident mass and weight, and their rough material palette, Rekevics’s haunting structures refuse to rely solely on the unignorable fact of
Shifting Paradigms: A Conversation with Conrad Shawcross
Addressing subjects on the border of science and philosophy, Conrad Shawcross’s structural and often mechanical sculptures question the empirical, ontological, and philosophical systems that define our lives. While at first appearing rational and functional, his complex systems ultimately deny all rational function and force the viewer down alternate philosophical and metaphysical avenues to deduce a
Thoughts on Resistance: A Conversation with Jeff and Alina Bliumis
While preparing to interview the Russian-born artists Alina and Jeff Bliumis, who live and work in New York, I involuntarily reflected on my own experience of living in exile. How did it happen that we, who are still young people, have already witnessed major historical shifts, including the rise and fall of regimes, ideologies, and
