BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery To walk into Andy Moerlein’s “wood stone poem” (on view through June 6, 2021) is to enter a magical space, filled with fanciful and ecstatic forms stretching out in welcome. A three-foot-tall, 60-year-old Ficus retusa bonsai from Taiwan at the entrance to the exhibition offers a clue to Moerlein’s recent explorations, which continue his longtime interest in Asian art and poetry.
Theaster Gates
NEW YORK Gagosian For Theaster Gates, the gallery operates not as a place for pleasurable viewing but as a performative space of social practice focused on cultural recuperation and empowerment.
Kapwani Kiwanga
ROTTERDAM Kunstinstituut Melly Kapwani Kiwanga’s recent exhibition featured three installations and a hanging cloth work—all addressing strategies of resistance, from historical slavery to the American civil rights era, to today’s anti-racist movements and demonstrations. Botany played an unexpected, and key, role in all but one of these new works, as Kiwanga drew out the histories of various plants smuggled into America by enslaved Africans.
Beverly Fishman
NEW YORK Miles McEnery Gallery The untitled sculptures and reliefs in Beverly Fishman’s recent show, “I Dream of Sleep,” hide dark subject matter behind attractive appearances.
Desert X 2021
COACHELLA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA Desert X 2021, on view through May 16, 2021, is the third edition of a biennial site-specific sculpture exhibition “explore[ing] the desert as both a place and idea.” The arid Coachella Valley in Riverside County, southern California, includes the winter resort city of Palm Springs and several other, smaller communities.
Casey Curran
SEATTLE MadArt Seattle-based Casey Curran creates carefully crafted kinetic sculptures and environments that question basic human drives (innovation and discovery) and assumptions (progress), along with their effects and legacies. His new exhibition at MadArt, a studio residency program in the heart of South Lake Union, Seattle’s tech quarter, echoes the mushrooming skyline of the neighborhood (with more than 60 new buildings in 10 years), but with a twist.
Frank Stella
RIDGEFIELD, CONNECTICUT Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum “My art is about building things,” Frank Stella told Alina Cohen in an Artsy conversation about his 2019 Marianne Boesky Gallery solo show, which included Jasper’s Split Star and Nessus and Dejanira—two of the star sculptures currently on view (through May 9, 2021) at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
Joaquín Orellana
NEW YORK Americas Society “The Spine of Music,” an intriguing, spirited exhibition of works by 90-year-old Guatemalan artist and musician Joaquín Orellana (on view through April 24, 2021), features a selection of his handmade percussive instruments—which visitors may play—as well as works by other artists acquainted with his practice.
Haegue Yang
ST IVES, CORNWALL, U.K. Tate St Ives The day I visited Tate St Ives to see “Strange Attractors” (on view through September 26, 2021), nature seemed perfectly aligned with Haegue Yang’s vision—charcoal clouds scowled across the sky as Atlantic rollers thundered deafeningly onto the beach below.
Shinichi Sawada
NEW YORK Venus Over Manhattan Shinichi Sawada’s dynamic, wood-fired ceramic sculptures teem with energy. In this show—the first U.S. presentation of works by the self-taught, 38-year-old artist, who is based in Shiga, Japan—a few dozen figures arranged on two long tables form a modern-day bestiary of creatures drawn from Japanese mythology and reality.
