Born in London in 1961, Lawson Oyekan grew up in his parents’ native Nigeria. In 1983, he returned to England to study at the Central School of Art and Design (1985–88) and the Royal College of Art (1988–90).
In Art, Anything is Possible: A Conversation with Yinka Shonibare
Visually arresting, Yinka Shonibare’s art plays imaginatively with stereotypes about race, class, culture, gender, and sexuality in order to deconstruct these concepts and show that they are “manufactured.” His re-creations include Diary of a Victorian Dandy, a suite of large photographs based on Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, in which he portrays the Victorian dandy; a
Out of Africa: A Conversation with El Anatsui
A “cloth” made by sewing thousands of recycled, crushed, and flattened liquor bottle tops. A 10-foot-tall installation of redundant newspaper printing plates used for obituary pages and re-used as sculptural material to comment on temporary— and disposable— human lives.
Donna Dennis: Home Away from Home
When Donna Dennis created her earnest, plain-spoken “Tourist Cabins” at the outset of her career, they had the impact of cultural icons. She was one of a number of sculptors fresh on the ’70s scene—including Alice Aycock and Jackie Ferrara—who pushed sculpture toward the domain of architecture.
Knowledge Through Stories: A Conversation with Eva Marisaldi
Eva Marisaldi shows us the extraordinary in the ordinary: the mold that grows on things, stories of parties and unusual situations, drawings that rub themselves out, or the discovery of a new place. There is also the matter of communication as a relationship between things: her installations often become the backdrop for interpersonal exchange mechanisms.
Reading in Public: A Conversation with Shane Cullen
Shane Cullen is an artist from the Republic of Ireland currently living and working in Dublin. He was born in 1957 and has been exhibiting internationally since 1979. He represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1995.
Yumi Kori: Keeping Space Alive with Light
In recent years, the relationship between sculpture and architecture has become so close as to effect a merger, a situation more complex than it would initially appear. Richard Serra moves more and more inevitably into the realm of architectural space, giving his sculpture a massiveness of size that translates into work expressing the duration of
Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler: America Starts Here
Impalpable forces must have been in the aesthetic air in the 1970s and ’80s. During this period, widely scattered conceptual artists began to see the same future—making public art that grows out of its locale and its community of viewers.
Not Specifically Political: A Conversation with Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell
As the sculpture of Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell leads us to understand, we do not merely occupy the spaces in which we live and work, we actively interrelate with them. Architecture influences us while we inhabit it, and the artistic team known as Langlands & Bell critically engages this reciprocal relationship by creating striking
Getting Things Straight: Jackie Winsor Moves Ahead
Many artists of importance associated with postminimal/maximal aesthetics emerged during the late ’60s and early ’70s in New York. Artists such as Jackie Winsor, Keith Sonnier, Alan Saret, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Joel Shapiro, Bruce Nauman, Lynda Benglis, and John Duff were not only dedicated to extending the principles of literalness into
