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.
Bruce Edelstein
ROCHESTER, VERMONT Big Town Gallery A child of two West Coast artists, Bruce Edelstein grew up with a pencil in his hand, and his facility for imaginative form animates the clay sculptures shown in his recent exhibition “Oaxaca.”
Alicja Kwade
IPSWICH, MASSACHUSETTS Castle Hill on the Crane Estate TunnelTeller, Alicja Kwade’s first large-scale, site-specific installation in the U.S., signifies her growing reputation stateside after a recent Public Art Fund project in Central Park and a solo exhibition at 303 Gallery in New York.
Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir
NEW YORK Fort Tryon Park Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir, a highly regarded Icelandic-born artist, is best known for her androgynous figures, which sidestep gender and sexual identity issues in favor of ambiguity.
Romuald Hazoumè
NEW YORK Gagosian Benin-born Romuald Hazoumè brings wit and formal rigor to his assemblage sculptures. His recent exhibition featured bidon, 50-liter plastic storage containers (often used to transport gasoline illegally from Nigeria), refashioned into masks, some spray-painted and others festooned with feathers, pipes, brushes, and even a broom.
Sheila Pepe
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Pepe’s robustly inked drawings, square and intricate, have a macho geometric strength. Though we are not supposed to characterize art as “masculine” or “feminine,” that seems to be exactly the point for this artist; Pepe insists on it by using housewifely materials and crafts to create forceful work.
