Nari Ward’s monumental works merge mystery and meaning. His 2012 exhibition at Lehmann Maupin’s Chrystie Street gallery consisted of beautiful objects with double and triple meanings. Why would shoelaces embedded in a gallery wall spell out “We the People?”
Life Might Prevail: Doris Salcedo’s Plegaria Muda
Doris Salcedo’s Plegaria Muda is a passionate cry of denunciation against injustice, crime, and abuse and a mute prayer for a better world. A space to commemorate victims of murders perpetrated all over the world, it honors people whose only fault is to have no rights, or graves to mark their existence.
The Life Through Time and Space: A Conversation with Tatsuo Miyajima
Since the 1980s, Tatsuo Miyajima, who lives and works in Ibaraki, Japan, has been making works that address time. Numbers made of LEDs count from one to nine or from nine to one; zero is not shown.
Myths of Fantastical Life: A Conversation with Meeson Pae Yang
Meeson Pae Yang understands the power of repetition. While one tree seen in isolation can be an object of breathtaking beauty, a cluster offers a very different visual and emotional experience, built up of the variations that occur across species, the contracting and expanding spaces between forms, and the fragmentation of light and ensuing tonal
Paradise Lost: A Conversation with Anna Eyjólfsdóttir
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.
