LONDON Tate Modern It is impossible not to marvel at these floating entities—Yi calls them “aerobes”—programmed using Artificial Life software, which employs biologically inspired processes to give machines perception, motivations, and decision-making tools that allow them to respond independently to changes in their surroundings.
Moffat Takadiwa
LOS ANGELES Craft Contemporary The Anthropocene is the skeleton in the closet of 21st-century imagination. The consequences of more than a century of hyper-consumerism are everywhere apparent, inescapable, part of the environment and the air we breathe.
Stephen Shaheen
HUDSON, NEW YORK Hudson House Stephen Shaheen’s imaginative exhibition “Let’s Eat Columns” (on view through January 30, 2022) features works that blend a material approach to stone with metaphysical ruminations.
Lucy Pullen
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA The Blue Building Gallery Pullen’s work expresses a poetics of numbers, a seeking for knowledge expressed in a language of abstract description that, for those conversant with it, expresses hope and wonder as much as any certainty.
John Van Alstine
GLENS FALLS, NEW YORK The Hyde Collection The 17 small-scale bronze and stone works in this intimate show revisit some of his dominant themes—including the myth of Sisyphus and the figure of the juggler, as well as his “Pyxis Awry” and “Portals and Passages” series—now repurposed to bring meaning to this unusual and politically charged time.
Theaster Gates
LONDON Whitechapel Gallery Though Gates is revealed as artist, educator, collector, curator, and shaman/preacher, this is not an exhibition about an individual: every object, down to the humblest brick, has a rich story, and Gates thrillingly connects us to each one and to their makers across millennia.
Erin Shirreff
NEW YORK Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Without passing judgment on the restless images that have proliferated around us, Shirreff examines and mobilizes what she calls the “space of not-knowing”—the missing information inherent in any photograph.
Carl D’Alvia
NEW YORK Hesse Flatow D’Alvia’s abstract sculptures, while giving the impression of being completely contemporary, fuse popular culture and a formalism that originated generations ago, when high culture often entered public awareness through a rebellious appreciation of form.
Nastassia Kotava
DETROIT Spaysky Fine Art Gallery Mail art and monumental sculpture typically inhabit very different positions within the universe of art, power, and politics. In The Head (Yakub Kolas For Detroit), Paris-based, Belarusian artist Nastassia Kotava delivers a provocative mash-up of the two forms.
“In Search of the Miraculous”
NEW YORK The FLAG Art Foundation While Rider offers an antidote of sorts to our collective trauma—we could all use a little magic—the title acquires an extra dash of poignancy in its homage to the conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader and his final project of the same name: the solo crossing of the Atlantic in a tiny pocket vessel, from which he never returned.
