NEW YORK Hunter East Harlem Gallery Puerta’s marvelously varied and often highly ornamented constructions translate traditional imagery and values into a contemporary language steeped in environmental concerns.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
SAN FRANCISCO SFMOMA Truly experiencing Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s work requires us to pay close attention: to make our minds and imaginations available in ways dangerously eroded by the distractions of the Internet. This is somewhat paradoxical, considering the technological complexity of his installations.
Guadalupe Maravilla
LONG ISLAND CITY, NEW YORK Socrates Sculpture Park Guadalupe Maravilla’s “Planeta Abuelx” at Socrates Sculpture Park provided a welcome respite for pandemic times. Offering a space for meditation, healing, and recovery, the project reflected Maravilla’s engagement with mutual aid and therapy, focusing on the ways that art can sustain, restore, and provide solace.
Judy Pfaff
PROVINCETOWN, MASSACHUSETTS Gaa Gallery Though filled with Pfaff’s typical energy, “opsins” is infused with a glowing vibrancy and color unusual for her frenetic forms. The exhibition hinges on gradations across light, color, and darkness, making it one of Pfaff’s most joyful bodies of work to date.
Sreshta Rit Premnath
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS MIT List Visual Arts Center Premnath combines a Minimalist context with Arte Povera sociopolitical influences, conveying a narrative that invites reflection on the psychic weight of waiting in relation to the exclusionary experiences of displacement, incarceration, immigration, and disability.
Rachel Kneebone
LONDON White Cube Mason’s Yard Seen in conjunction with the drawings, the sculptures became balletic, taking an unexpected turn away from the tragedy that inspired them. The overspilling, extended limbs, now recalling the stylized grace of synchronized swimmers, created an uncanny tension—as in Géricault’s painting—between the sublime and the monstrous, hope and despair, order and chaos.
Diana Al-Hadid
SEATTLE Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington Realized through extraordinary material accretion, Al-Hadid’s works assemble countless fragments that struggle to coalesce into a complete whole.
Anicka Yi
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.
