HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA Studio 21
After several decades in New York, including 17 years teaching at the Parsons School of Design, Sydney Blum moved to Nova Scotia. Her recent exhibition “Icarus–Colour–Space” (her first solo show in her adopted home) featured five sculptures that seem to float, rippling, in space—like sections of soap bubbles hovering just on this side of corporeality before winking out of existence.
NEW YORK Mitchell-Innes & Nash
While Braman is known for large-scale works, her smaller sculptures command equal recognition. Related to Minimalist traditions, these works use deceptively simple components to create a consortium of forms and effects, often highly colorful.
WAKEFIELD, U.K. The Hepworth Wakefield
By lucky happenstance two of Britain’s foremost 20th-century sculptors, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, were born a mere six miles from each other, in West Yorkshire’s Castleford and Wakefield, and only five years apart, in 1898 and 1903 respectively.
VENICE U.S. Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale
“Liberty/Libertà,” Martin Puryear’s U.S. pavilion exhibition, uses subtle, disarming, and purposeful juxtapositions to create a mindful meditation on what it means to be an American artist and citizen today.
BERKELEY Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives
Attia, a French Algerian artist currently living in Berlin and Algiers, has been working with the concept of repair from the trauma of war for more than a decade. He is particularly interested in the process of healing—for individuals and for societies—and in repairing the damage caused by conflict and by colonization.
NEW YORK New Museum
Amazing Grace (1993), an installation of fire hoses and nearly 300 abandoned baby strollers first shown at a firehouse in Harlem, originally referred to the crack epidemic, AIDS, and homelessness sweeping through that neighborhood. Now, as one walks through the strollers along a pathway formed from the hoses while listening to Mahalia Jackson sing the gospel song of the title, it is hard not to think of family separations and the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the border.
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO Ylise Kessler Gallery
Walking into a show of Elise Siegel’s ceramic “portrait” busts can be an unsettling and awkward experience. There they are—in this case, five works on pedestals—their gazes quizzical and eager, as though you, the visitor, are expected to bring something to the conversation.
BRUSSELS Mendes Wood DM
Best known for freestanding and hanging sculptures made from found and gifted fabric, thread, and wire, Gomes was born in Caetanópolis, a center for the Brazilian textile industry.
LONDON PEER
Bucking Soviet-style Socialist Realism, Jevrić created abstract structures consisting of bulky forms that seem to float in space, held by nails or metal rods, which serve both to support and to trap. These works made her a pioneer in Yugoslavia as she developed her own vocabulary through the juxtaposition of mass and void, solidity and weightlessness, lines and curves.
NEW YORK Kasmin
It’s vocabulary that reminds us how mathematics and philosophy like to orbit one another. Finite and infinite, rational and irrational, predictable and unpredictable, determinate and indeterminate—these are crucial complements to French conceptual artist Bernar Venet, who employs indeterminacy as both a mathematical concept and a philosophical guidepost.
