NEW YORK Bridget Donahue If a Noguchi glass-top coffee table was the sophisticated pride and joy of the family, Reaves’s “knockoff” version was the offbeat black sheep, with a base made of gloppy sawdust and glue or car fenders rather than carefully carved walnut.
Diana Thater
BOSTON ICA Watershed The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston launched its new exhibition space, the Watershed, last year with a large-scale exhibition of Diana Thater’s installations.
Manifesta 12
PALERMO Manifesta 12 The biennial, piggybacking on the reformers’ momentum, proceeded from mutual consultation with city officials and communities. “Manifesta 12 is not a foreign body fallen upon the city like a meteorite but the result of sharing and fostering visions, aspirations, projects, and dialogue,” the mayor later declared.
Matthew Barney
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT Yale University Art Gallery Matthew Barney’s comprehensive and layered “Redoubt” explores themes of hunting, predation, guns, voyeurism, dance, landscape politics, metallurgy, and transformation through a unique take on the myth of Diana and Actaeon.
John Bisbee
ROCKLAND, MAINE Center for Maine Contemporary Art “For the first time in my life, I’m doing basically three things that I have mocked my entire adult creative career—realism, political satire, and text,” Bisbee says. The show’s title is itself a capacious metaphor that embraces a multitude of references, including American labor, economics, and culture.
Fawn Krieger
NEW YORK Assembly Room Fawn Krieger’s “Soft Power” inaugurated the new Assembly Room, a gallery run by curators Natasha Becker, Paola Gallio, and Yulia Topchiy with the mission to celebrate and empower independent women curators. “Soft power” typically describes a technique of using cultural and economic persuasion, rather than military coercion, to achieve political ends.
Magali Hébert-Huot
WASHINGTON, DC Hamiltonian Gallery Isolation and estrangement, tinged with a dark humor, haunt a long, narrow gallery where sculptures lie about like remnants of a forgotten journey or stage props awaiting human agents. Magali Hébert-Huot has cloaked them in white for the most part, pops of acid green and pink disrupting the palette of oblivion and challenging gender conventions.
Tyree Guyton
DETROIT Museum of Contemporary Art As with much of Guyton’s work, he wants you to live simultaneously in two worlds: one of harsh social reality and the other of infinite possibility. The title of the show, “2+2=8,” alludes to a philosophy that embraces the latter condition.
Marguerite Humeau
NEW YORK New Museum “Birth Canal,” Marguerite Humeau’s first solo exhibition at a U.S. museum, featured 10 new bronze and stone sculptures configured in a darkly cavernous spatial installation.
Douglas Coupland
VANCOUVER Vancouver Aquarium Composed of debris retrieved from the once pristine shores of British Columbia’s Haida Gwaii, “Vortex” tackles the complex contextualizing of the nebulous Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest of several floating plastic garbage gyres around the world and a sprawling, slimy mass of filth.
