NEW YORK Pavel Zoubok Gallery Vanessa German paints over old, white-skinned dolls with black pigment and tar, delving into identity, race, and racism (as in the use of the term “tar baby” to refer to someone who is very dark skinned).
Maurizio Cattelan
NEW YORK Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Some years ago, I argued in favor of making a critical distinction between works of art that are significant and those that are merely symptomatic of the times.
Do Ho Suh
NEW YORK Lehmann Maupin Do Ho Suh, easily one of the most interesting sculptors working in America today, presented a lot of things in this show—models of homes (one like a dollhouse and the other done in a pale-green resin), as well as such mundane objects as a sink, a circuit-breaker, and a doorknob (the last three made of translucent cloth).
Jonathan Prince
NEW YORK The Sculpture Garden at 590 Madison Avenue Felicitously staged among stately bamboo in the soaring atrium of New York City’s IBM building, Jonathan Prince’s four monumental steel sculptures brought to mind one of Plato’s favorite sayings: God is always doing geometry. Classic forms bearing historical and symbolic associations, Prince’s obelisk, flattened sphere, cube, and torus all display rich sienna patinas that accentuate their contours.
Michael Arata
LOS ANGELES Beacon Arts Building To say that Michael Arata is prolific is almost laughable. “Arataland!,” a retrospective of this Los Angeles-based artist, recently filled more than 20 rooms in the three-story Beacon Arts Building.
“Boundaries Obscured”
NEW YORK Haunch of Venison These days, the synergy between art and life occurs so quickly that it is hard for artists to keep up. Opening a few months after the Arab Spring and only a week after Occupy Wall Street decamped from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, “Boundaries Obscured” took on the hot topics of globalization, technology, and the blurred geographic boundaries responsible for outsourcing, Facebook revolutions, and collaborative protests over economic inequality.
Terike Haapoja
HELSINKI Amos Anderson Art Museum Entropy, mazes, memory, and zones of electromagnetic radiation residing just beyond the visible spectrum play an important role in the work of Terike Haapoja.
Taraneh Hemami
SAN FRANCISCO Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Taraneh Hemami’s elegant window installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts translated a contentious season of contemporary politics into a dazzling and contemplative work. An enormous radiating star of laser-cut patterning filled the window with the ebullient celebration of the Arab Spring.
Pattie Porter Firestone
WASHINGTON, DC Katzen Art Center, American University Filling the Katzen Art Center’s “sculpture garden” is no easy task for an artist determined to present a coherent display of work. Intended as a light well to enhance the building, two L-shaped concrete rectangles offer no visual integration unless one stands at their juncture.
Greg Snider
VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA Deluge Contemporary Art Greg Snider’s eight “Models for the Public Sphere” are absurdist and visionary monuments to human, societal, and governmental follies, abominations, and questionable policies. Using the term “critical realism” to describe his approach, the Vancouver artist cleverly and humorously turns normality on its head in his meticulously crafted, speculative models.
