In 2000, Anna Eyjólfsdóttir, president of the Reykjavik Sculptors’ Association, invited me to cover a couple of sculpture exhibitions celebrating Reykjavik as the European Capital of Culture. In the following years, this city of 120,000 witnessed a remarkable building boom.
Public Art in Council Bluffs
Abraham Lincoln visited Council Bluffs in 1859 and peered across the broad Missouri River valley toward America’s fast-changing frontier. After becoming president, he designated the bustling trade center as the eastern terminus of the first transcontinental railway, and it would go on to become the nation’s fifth largest rail center.
Pat Hoffie and the Sublime Impossible
In a lush Japanese forest, adjacent to the Yokohama Zoo, Pat Hoffie’s Harvester for Disappearing Dreams of Wildness invited participants to trap and share the essence of captive animals’ dreams. Gathered in remote funnels placed throughout the forest, these dreams, caught by viewers standing on a mechanism powered by bodyweight, connected animals and humans through
Public Sculpture in an Age of Diminishing Resources: A Conversation with Cliff Garten
To enter Cliff Garten’s Venice studio is to encounter a visual dialectic of public and private that speaks to our times. On one wall is Being and Home, an impressive suite of 10 independent sculptures depicting living creatures, all meticulously rendered in different materials; on the other wall are images of the artist’s large-scale, collaborative
Dangerous Structures: A Conversation with Alice Aycock
With an encyclopedic quest for knowledge that seeks no iconic style, Alice Aycock mines the universe for all that is primeval, intuitive, technological, and irrational. Spinning millennial layers into whorls of complex structures, she asks: What’s life all about?
Making the Bridge Breathe: A Conversation with Douglas Hollis
Douglas Hollis’s three San Francisco studio spaces reflect the dimensions of his increasingly complex, collaborative public art. A square room dominated by computer monitors could be an architect’s office. The small downstairs shop is neatly gridded with what used to be familiar hand tools.
Color as Material: A Conversation with Tilman
Tilman is definitely an artist’s artist. I first encountered his two-dimensional, non-objective work about 10 years ago while staying at the Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art (CCNOA) in Brussels, where he was the artistic director. I grew quite fond of his “Tilman sandwiches”—layered horizontal stacks of painted materials that began his shift toward objects.
Robert Lobe: Nature as Effigy
The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s public art program has consistently fostered the creation and installation of temporary public art throughout the five boroughs. Robert Lobe recently joined a long list of distinguished artists who have exhibited in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, among them, Roxy Paine and Mark di Suvero.
A Conversation with Zimoun: With and Between Contradictions
Zimoun combines ordinary objects (including cardboard boxes, plastic bags, and old furniture) with mechanical components (such as dc-motors, wires, microphones, speakers, and ventilators) to create extraordinary hybrid sculptures that fuse the normative order of generative systems with the disorder of random events.
Ghosts of Things: A Conversation with Diana Al-Hadid
Diana Al-Hadid was born in Aleppo, Syria, spent most of her childhood in Ohio, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her most recent work draws inspiration from sources as varied as Renaissance tapestries, with their unusual spatial tensions, Jacopo Pontormo’s strange fresco of the Visitation in the atrium of SS.
