Guttersnipe (detail), 2012. Steel, 8 x 6 x 40 ft. Cal Lane was a recipient of the International Sculpture Center 2001 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Awards Critics define Cal Lane as a female sculptor-welder, a woman using male-oriented, working-class technology to make art.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Absurdities as Absurd as Reality
“They’re like spies everywhere, filming everything,” Ilya Kabakov grouses to his wife, Emilia. He’s jokingly dissing the ubiquitous film crew—not the KGB of years ago bugging his rooftop Moscow studio. She flashes a knowing smile, then hits her cell phone buttons; there’s a snag to fix in one of the biggest art events that Russia
Objects Are Alive: A Conversation with Abraham Cruzvillegas
Abraham Cruzvillegas’s Autoconstrucción works ricochet back and forth between categories, from intriguing, aesthetically constructed, found-object compositions to emotionally charged, socioeconomic/political statements. Rooted in the real world situation of Mexico City specifically, and to some extent of Latin America generally, this ongoing series builds on the art historical vocabulary of Duchampian readymades, Arte Povera, and assemblage.
New Orleans Airlift’s Insouciant Vernacular Modernism
As arts organizations go, New Orleans Airlift is one of a kind. Following a multi-disciplinary trajectory that has often seemed more improvised than programmatic, it has staged a number of unusually broad-based events that blur the boundaries between object and performance, vernacular and contemporary art, local and global.
Policy of Truth: A Conversation with Fiona Foley
Imagine a proposed and completed public artwork recording the locations of 94 fire and flood disasters in Queensland, Australia; then imagine the unveiling of the work, as the artist reveals that the list doesn’t document natural disasters at all, but a series of 19th-century atrocities against indigenous peoples.
Light, Sky and Fire: A Conversation with Otto Piene
A pioneer of light and kinetic art, Otto Piene, who lives and works in Düsseldorf and Groton, Massachusetts, has been pursuing a utopian synthesis of aesthetics and science since the 1950s. After studying painting and art education at the Academy of Art in Munich and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, as well as philosophy at the University
Margo Sawyer: Synchronicities
Margo Sawyer’s work process is one of escalating complexity. She starts with specific grid formulas, determining proportions while drawing in Illustrator. Her drawings are further developed via CAD, establishing colors, dimensions, edge treatments, and the arrangement of sheet metal panels.
Carola Zech: Magnetic Attraction
Carola Zech, an Argentinian artist recently recognized with the Grand Prize of Honor at the 2013 National Salon of Visual Arts, combines sculpture, installation, and painting to create unique, frequently site-specific, magnetic structural systems. She entered the art world at the age of nine, when she started private classes in drawing, painting, and clay modeling.
The Object of Painting: A Conversation with Bill Thompson
Bill Thompson’s aquiline sculptures are meticulously executed: simple abstract shapes carved in rigid polyurethane foam coated and recoated with resin, sanded until pristine, then painted monochromatically in various shiny colors. This painstaking craftsmanship also carries over into elements never seen by viewers, including the belabored hanging mechanisms mounting the pieces to the wall and the
Carolee Schneemann: The Persistance of Her Memory
In 1959, Bard College suspended Carolee Schneemann—for “moral turpitude,” she says. “I painted a full-length frontal nude portrait of my partner, James Tenney.”1 It wasn’t until the early ’70s that Erica Jong could write Fear of Flying, extolling the “zipless fuck,” and Judy Chicago begin her iconic feminist installation, The Dinner Party.
