If birthplace is a determinant of fate, then Maria Lai (1919–2013), who was born in Ulassai on the island of Sardinia, embraced hers willingly, mining a profound cultural heritage made personal. For her, geography truly was destiny, and her work is defined by what was native to her experience.
My Mother’s House, My Father’s House: A Conversation with Jeanne Silverthorne
For more than 30 years, Jeanne Silverthorne has investigated the psychological and physical space of the studio, as well as its successes and failures. For her, the studio is reality and more than reality. She identifies with its beat-up chairs, wiring, floorboards spent light bulbs—even its flies.
Object Lessons: Lauren Fensterstock
For a long time, I have been looking at how we shape landscapes and project meaning through them, but now I’m thinking less about a site and more about an event. With this piece, you’re experiencing a vignette of something happening in time.
Offending Statues and the Dilemma of Commemoration
Until the mid-20th century, governments (especially in America and Europe) erected propagandistic statues and memorials at will, works that quickly melted into the realm of invisible street furniture alongside lamp posts and traffic lights. Over the last 50 years, however, public sculpture has become properly public.
Academicismo Remasterizado: Una Conversación con Marcela González
La artista plástica Marcela González trabaja las esculturas ejerciendo sobre ellas una mirada académica atravesada por los ecos contemporáneos. Sus conocimientos de las formas, técnicas y materiales hace que, si bien la Antigüedad, el Renacimiento, el Barroco sean una fuente de consulta y referencia permanente, la artista ponga especial atención en el diálogo con las estéticas actuales.
A Conversation with Nick Hornby
“My practice over the last decade has been a very slow and systematic inquiry into authorship—the critique of authorship, methods of eliminating the personal subjective, and questions of digital reproduction. It led me to cool, calculated Boolean operations and slick, high-production sculptures.”
Davina Semo: Call and Response
Davina Semo is folded over her laptop, head in her hands, elbows on the table. She makes eye contact with the camera, with me, and we both laugh. There’s really nothing else we can do. We both have the lights on—she in her studio in San Francisco, me in my home a few miles away.
Engaging the Informal City: A Conversation with Martand Khosla
Martand Khosla’s sculptures capture the evolutionary forces at work in the modern city, with its constant churning, its shifting appearance and demographics, and the dynamics of the divide between rich and poor.
Things in the Margins: A Conversation with Chung Hyun
Chung Hyun, a professor at Hongik University in Seoul, is known for his flat, anonymous, mostly wooden, and slightly larger-than-life figures arranged in long processions, indoors and out. His work, which plays with existential questions, conveys a personalized vision that partakes of Modernism and installation art while remaining figurative in nature.
Unbreakable Spirit: Berengo Glass Studio
A set of deep blue glass sculptures sits in a window of Peggy Guggenheim’s unfinished palazzo, overlooking Venice’s Grand Canal. Made from sketches by Picasso, they are a rare relic of Guggenheim’s collaboration with Egidio Costantini, Murano’s “master of masters.”
