Sarah Meyers Brent’s friends tend to donate their used clothes to her, as if she were a branch of Goodwill. Not that she needs these garments to wear; instead, she uses them to construct complex sculptures in which their colors (faded to bright) and textures (smooth or fuzzy) add essential qualities to finished forms that
Provocation and Insistence: A Conversation with Mithu Sen
Mithu Sen is a provocateur, a risk–taker in deceptively gentle guise. At the heart of her work is a compulsion to peel away received, overt notions of the self and probe beneath them. She typically turns the tables on viewers.
Deep Wisdom and Collective Fortitude: A Conversation with Sonya Clark
Unraveling, 2015-ongoing. Detail of interactive performance. Photo: Taylor Dabney. Sonya Clark uses everyday materials to address “identity politics, collective fortitude, and social justice.” Returning repeatedly to the same basic materials, including copper pennies, hair, combs, and sugar, she brings value to quotidian objects through her investigations while asking viewers to consider the embedded histories surrounding
Françoise Grossen: Total Exposure
In Françoise Grossen’s work, intense physicality and presence are wedded to conceptual underpinnings–what an object is composed of is entirely consequential, meaning and purpose lying in material choices. Her objects, made between 1966 and 1999, are deeply and totally abstract yet also metaphorical.
Unity and Variety: A Conversation with Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga
Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga makes forms with layered contexts and material processes that are very much rooted in her experiences growing up in rural Kenya and the Rift Valley. Her works partly pay tribute to local craft tradition, demonstrating how the local can indeed teach the national and international.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Rooting Dislocation
When I met María Magdalena Campos-Pons in her Boston studio, she was gestating ideas for Documenta 14, thinking about installations in both Athens and Kassel. Her thoughts, figuratively and literally, germinated in a corner, where a branch of spindly potato plant—an invasive species that takes over everything—drew an awkward but tenacious line up the wall.
Xu Zhen: Information Age
Shanghai-based Xu Zhen reconstitutes time to create “information objects.” His sculptures appropriate historical elements from different civilizations but siphon them through an insurgence of new technologies, underscoring relationships between tradition and contemporary social experience–all in an attempt to sidestep culture as a “known experience” and breathe new life into what might otherwise be considered dead
Ritual, Politics, and Transformation: Betye Saar
Betye Saar was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2018. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. For nearly 70 years, Betye Saar has created prints, collages, and assemblages that transform the cast-off and forgotten into powerful explorations of African American history and identity, the politics of race and gender,
Deviant Modernism: A Conversation with Ana Maria Tavares
The work of Brazilian artist Ana Maria Tavares provokes unforgettable experiences. Using industrial materials such as steel, glass, and mirrors in combination with organic elements, she constructs sometimes slick interventions that resemble street furniture, barriers, handles, and turnstiles.
Doubting Clarity: A Conversation with Josiah McElheny
A sculptor, performance and installation artist, filmmaker, curator, and writer, Josiah McElheny holds a unique place in the contemporary art world. He is best known for work that uses glass, but he also employs many other materials and engages in collaborations with a wide variety of voices, from artists to art historians and literary translators.
