DES MOINES, IOWA Des Moines Art Center The title of Miguel Angel Rios’s recent exhibition, “Walkabout,” suggests the idea of a spiritual quest through unknown terrain. Rios traverses multiple spiritual and physical landscapes as he transforms memories from his roots in Catamarca, a remote area of Northern Argentina, into videos, sound installations, sculptures, and drawings.
Paris Triennale
PARIS Palais de Tokyo Not the Paris Triennale of yesteryear, Okwui Enwezor’s ambitious “Intense Proximity” was a post-identity, post-national exhibition that argued for a common visual language shared by contemporary artists the world over, all similarly preoccupied with the complexities of the globalized world.
Swoon
BOSTON Institute of Contemporary Art Self-styled street artist and activist Swoon (a.k.a. Caledonia Curry) recently contributed a site-specific work to the ICA’s 75th-anniversary celebrations. While officially part of a series on the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall, Anthropocene Extinction leapt off the wall as soon as possible, erupting into a long, ribbony chain of paper and cloth, like a giant kindergarten art project, that culminated in a 400-pound, suspended sculpture next to the ICA’s glass elevator.
“Jesús Soto: Paris and Beyond, 1950–1970”
NEW YORK Grey Art Gallery, New York University Venezuelan-born Jesús Soto, a major figure in avant-garde, mid-20th-century sculpture, left his country for Paris in 1950. As the intriguing and historically informative “Jesús Soto: Paris and Beyond, 1950–1970” points out, he took quickly to the progressive Parisian milieu, making friends with Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely.
Ruben Ochoa
MIAMI Locust Projects Ruben Ochoa’s many talents include excavating and revealing hidden truths. His recent installation at Locust Projects was a fitting “last show” for a soon-to-be-demolished building. In conjunction with this exhibition, Ochoa also created the ironically and literally titled A Bit of Detritus for the James Cohan Gallery at Art Basel Miami.
Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse
NEW YORK The Lab Gallery Breath of Water, an installation created by the collaborative team of Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse for the window space of The Lab Gallery, consisted of thin strips of light-colored wood radiating outward from a central nexus. Attached to beams above them and gently moving, the strips echoed what might be described as the wind’s breath over water.
“Light & Landscape”
MOUNTAINVILLE, NEW YORK Storm King Art Center “Light & Landscape,” organized by Storm King associate curator Nora Lawrence, was inspired by Alyson Shotz’s Mirror Fence (2003), a 130-foot-long stretch of mirrored pickets that reflect the viewer’s every movement, along with the beauty of the surrounding landscape.
Masayuki Oda
SANTA MONICA Lora Schlesinger Gallery Masayuki Oda’s recent work consists of familiar-looking things made more interesting and sculptural because they are out of proportion, funny, or very abstract. Several objects are strange re-makes of the ordinary and overlooked, and all of them are cute to some degree.
Olympics: London 2012 Festival
As the finale of the Cultural Olympiad, the London 2012 Festival fulfilled its pledge to create a nationwide celebration of the arts in conjunction with the Olympic Games. This kind of celebration is designed to appease people, make them feel involved and patriotic.
Frieze Art Fair Sculpture Park
NEW YORK Randall’s Island Park The arrival of London’s huge and trendy Frieze Art Fair was the New York City art world event of May 2012. A long, subtly slithering, gigantic white tent was erected on Randall’s Island for the occasion, to accommodate the gallerists’ individual booths.
