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.
Stanley Rosen: Radical Roots
Despite the radical openness and pluralism that characterize contemporary artistic practice, the phrase “ceramic sculpture” can still be interpreted as an oxymoron. There are exceptions, of course, such as Turner Prize nominee Rebecca Warren’s evocative figures and Ken Price’s colorful abstractions.
Fluidity and Fixedness: A Conversation with Richard Deacon
Richard Deacon deliberates over a conversation as though it could become a physical object pinned together by ideas, treating words almost like buildings blocks for a sculpture. He explains everything as part of a process and sees materials and language as the elemental skin and bones of his sculptures, allowing them to make contact with
Vincent Fecteau: Submerged Forces
In The Shape of Time, anthropologist George Kubler organizes a history of objects and ideas from the perspective of innovation, replication, and mutation from an original, a “prime object.” Such prime objects can’t be reduced to something else; they arise from deep needs, not fashion, and they are fundamental to their specific function.
Alice Aycock: Systems of Energy
Alice Aycock was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2018. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Alice Aycock’s recent works bristle with an iconic energy. Curving tendrils of aluminum in dynamic repetition, like Futurist force lines freed from the canvas, erupt from the earth with propulsive power.
