Steven Emmanuel’s sculptures are restrained, understated, and cerebral, built on a simple conceptual foundation and culminating in exquisite form. As if fabricated by a craftsman, these intellectually conceived pieces are as beautiful as they are thought-provoking.
Thomas Sayre and the Sculpture of Place
Thomas Sayre is surveying River Reels, a pair of 20-foot-tall earth castings that he created in 1999. They’re perfectly round circles of rust-colored concrete, 12 to 18 inches thick, the width of a backhoe bucket.
Connecting Rhythms: A Conversation with Radcliffe Bailey
A sculptor of emotional intensity and formal experimentation, Radcliffe Bailey has been a leading artistic voice in the exploration of African American racial identity for more than 20 years. His largest exhibition to date, “Memory as Medicine,” which is on view at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio from June 6 through September 12,
Tracking Points In Space: A Conversation with John Dreyfuss
To navigate the streamlined sculptures of John Dreyfuss, one glides over gentle swells, negotiating attenuated ridges or sudden apertures before the undulations pick up again. At times, the shifts in plane barely pass notice; at others, they induce a vertiginous thrill.
Hauntings: Susan Hiller
A pioneer of multimedia installation art in the 1980s, Susan Hiller went on to create a complex body of work that subverts our understanding of reality, offering an intellectual investigation into the darkest recesses of the human imagination.
From the Dirt: Corin Hewitt
Since 2007 Corin Hewitt has produced a series of evolving works that blend sculpture, photography, and performance. The most recent of these appeared at the Laurel Gitlin Gallery in New York last year, and a new iteration is scheduled to open at the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art in January 2013.
Between Fun and Desperation: Erwin Wurm
Since the 1980s, Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has worked to expand traditional notions of sculpture. Through his “one-minute sculptures,” which document conceptual performances in films and photographs, he invites viewers to realize that actions are more important than objects.
Andre Woodward: A Living Thing Shouldn’t Be There
Andre Woodward finds strange beauty in unexpected places. A beaten-up piece of asphalt raised on wheels and sprouting a small, frail tree becomes a grim urban landscape, mutated for speed. Blocks of concrete ordered in symmetrical grids or dispersed in random configurations miraculously burst with life, pierced by small trees that inject the irrepressible vitality
Delivering to the Moment: Manon Awst and Benjamin Walther
Manon Awst and Benjamin Walther create collaborative sculptures, performances, and paintings that combine ephemeral materials such as ice, grapes, and gelatin with plaster, metal, gold, and other materials. The husband-and-wife team take inspiration from their individual backgrounds in theater and architecture.
Brilliant Rubbish: A Conversation with Robert Cherry
Commanding the east window of Robert Cherry’s hillside studio, which he shares with his wife, painter Seraphine Pick, is the air traffic control tower of the Wellington Airport. Beyond, on the far horizon, one may glimpse a stony suburban seashore where the artist and his young son Joseph once beach-combed flotsam—forlorn, sometimes unidentifiable, mostly plastic,
