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.
Beverly Buchanan
NEW YORK Andrew Edlin Gallery “Shacks and Legends, 1985–2011,” a recent mini-retrospective that also included works on paper and photographs, made a strong case for entering Buchanan (1940–2015) into the contemporary canon.
Sean Lynch
EDINBURGH Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop Rather than become embroiled in a “should it stay or should it go” brawl over the monument’s future, Lynch shifted eyes away from what he describes as “the egotistical grandeur” of city monuments in a small but busy exhibition in one of ESW’s courtyard studios.
Paul S. Briggs
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS Lucy Lacoste Gallery At a time when irony is a mainstream aesthetic force and the art object is frequently made coherent via the glitter of popular culture, work such as Briggs’s is rare and strangely daring. Abstraction becomes a visual manifestation of poetry, bearing literary notions of metaphor and symbolism.
