Shinique Smith has often related how reading a 2002 article in The New York Times Magazine prompted a new sculptural language in her work. “How Susie Bayer’s T-Shirt Ended Up on Yusuf Mama’s Back” traces the journey of a used T-shirt from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Jinja, Uganda—part of a global trek of donated clothing from rich to poor countries.
Between Playful and Disturbing: A Conversation with Permindar Kaur
Approaching the familiar as though it were a fairy tale, Permindar Kaur uses the uncanny as camouflage in order to re-explain ordinary things. In “Home,” her current exhibition at Howick Place in central London, she continues her exploration of “private” and “public” by uprooting basic domestic objects and reintroducing them as freakishly distorted furnishings that enjoy the safety of the exhibition space while wanting to be free of it.
Spectral Memory: A Conversation with Liana Strasberg
What to remember and how to remember: these are the key concerns in Liana Strasberg’s work, which unearths and reworks images and symbols from the past in order to create what the Argentinian artist calls a “new memory file.”
Fragments of Interest: A Conversation with Marion Verboom
Complexly layered in thought and process, Marion Verboom’s works inhale cultural histories in order to exhale new-era imagery. By turns minimal, architectural, organic, and ornamental, her forms shape contemporary time into a fresh visual alphabet and run it A to Z through mythic narratives—from Aztec gods to the progeny of Zeus.
Buscando la Geometría Universal: Una Conversación con Hernán Salvo
Egresado del IUNA con profesorado de escultura y un postgrado en dibujo realizado en la Universidad Torcuato Di Tella guiado por el reconocido artista Eduardo Stupia, Hernán Salvo desarrolla su obra siempre nutriéndose de los conocimientos que le aportan los grupos de análisis dirigidos por artistas y teóricos y las residencias internacionales.
A Conversation with Kenseth Armstead
Kenseth Armstead’s videos, drawings, and sculptures draw upon and re-envision the legacy of Africans and their diaspora in the United States. In his decade-long “Spook” project, Armstead explored the life and legacy of James Armistead Lafayette, a double-agent spy for George Washington during the American Revolution.
Poetry in Motion: A Conversation with Mildred Howard and Johanna Poethig
Cultural Corridor/Urban Flow is a nine-and-a-half-mile-long public artwork on the first Bus Rapid Transit Line in Oakland, California. Designed by Johanna Poethig and Mildred Howard, with Peter Richards and Joyce Hsu, the line’s 34 stations are visually connected with a “ribbon” of words and images rendered in laser-cut aluminum on handrail panels and decorative windscreens.
Edoardo Tresoldi: Framing Emptiness
A former scenographer who helped to design backdrops for other people’s cinema productions, Italian sculptor Edoardo Tresoldi has since found success by putting his own work center stage. His large-scale, seemingly fragile sculptures are predominantly constructed from wire mesh, a medium that reinforces their ephemeral, mirage-like quality.
Dubious Origins: A Conversation with Sanford Biggers
By remixing references and aesthetic values from multiple cultures and time periods, Biggers reconsiders questions of authenticity, art historical authority, and provenance, infusing his hybridized forms—which he calls “objects for a future ethnography”—with overlapping and sometimes diametrically opposed meanings that demand to be grasped simultaneously.
A Conversation with Natalie Frank
Natalie Frank is a multidimensional artist who plays in the arena of the figure. After first garnering attention with ribald oil paintings, she expanded into drawing, illustrating such books as the unexpurgated Tales of the Brothers Grimm.
