John Van Alstine: Sculpture 1971–2018, heavy and beautiful as a coffee table book, is much more than that. It is a tribute to John Van Alstine’s long career, spanning decades of work in which his sculptures have interpreted urban and pastoral influences, with a nod to the massive undertakings of Land artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer.
2018–2020 Vancouver Biennale
VANCOUVER Various locations The Vancouver Biennale is more than an international sculpture festival—it’s a civic gestalt. Founded by Barrie Mowatt in 2002, it has consistently pushed the envelope in terms of form and content, with works that challenge the sleepy complacency and conservatism that bely the city’s reputation for cosmopolitanism.
“Allan Kaprow Series: James Hoff, Peter Liversidge, Cinzia Mutigli”
EDINBURGH Jupiter Artland As part of a series of presentations at Jupiter Artland (a 100-acre estate and sculpture park on the outskirts of Edinburgh), three artists have “reinvented” some of Kaprow’s actions and ideas, taking over separate spaces to present their work.
Daniel Lind-Ramos
NEW YORK Marlborough Gallery “Armario de la Memoria (Storage of Memory),” Daniel Lind-Ramos’s recent
show, featured seven sculptural assemblages that meditate on time, meaning, and memory by means of collecting, gathering, and building.
Liu Wei
CLEVELAND Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland “Invisible Cities,” Liu Wei’s ambitious two-part exhibition, took its name from Italo Calvino’s poetic novel recounting an imaginary conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, who asks the explorer to describe the cities he has seen on his travels.
Bridging the Nature/Culture Divide
Thinking the Sculpture Garden: Art, Plant, Landscape offers a radical rethink of how we might interact harmoniously with plants and art in an age of globalization, climate change, and urbanization.
Katie Bell
BUFFALO, NEW YORK Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center A revised reality, a rebirth, a second act—whatever you call the new existence that Katie Bell creates for the multitude of discarded building materials that she uses in her site-specific installations, one thing is certain: these materials, manufactured for a specific purpose, have broken free from their original identities and uses, taking on entirely new reasons for being.
“Surrounds: 11 Installations”
NEW YORK MoMA “Surrounds: 11 Installations,” part of MoMA’s reopening schedule last year, featured a selection of works from the collection that renegotiate and reimagine architectonic boundaries of display. Visitors ascending to the sixth floor were greeted by Sheila Hicks’s Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column (2013–14), an acrylic fiber work occupying the full height of the space.
Rachel Harrison
NEW YORK Whitney Museum of American Art Rachel Harrison’s sculptures possess a wild and perplexing eclecticism that makes it difficult to ascertain the exact meaning and emotional tenor of her imagery. In her assemblages—which could be called monuments since they memorialize both a series of actions and a juxtaposition of things on a large scale—ideas and processes coming out of sculpture, painting, architecture, popular culture, and the banality of everyday life are placed side by side or on top of each other, without, or at least rarely, becoming one.
Shoplifter / Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir
REYKJAVÍK Reykjavík Art Museum Shoplifter’s complex sculptures, murals, drawings, and intimate installations numinously transform the places that contain them. Her themes vary from beauty to fashion, mythology, and more recently, the earth.
