NORTH ADAMS, MASSACHUSETTS MASS MoCA If people know one thing about James Turrell, it’s his vast Roden Crater project in the desert northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona. He acquired the site in 1977 and has been working on it ever since.
Urs Fischer
NEW YORK Gagosian In Jacques Tati’s genre-defying masterpiece Playtime (1967), Mr. Hulot, Tati’s unwitting alter ego, drifts haphazardly through a stylized, ultramodern Paris, interacting with a host of inanimate objects brought to life through technology and camera work within a massive, specially constructed set known as “Tativille.” In many ways, Urs Fischer’s recent exhibition, “PLAY,” with choreography by Madeline Hollander, picks up where Tati left off, but with a major upgrade in technology.
The Vessel
NEW YORK Hudson Yards An Object of Affection: Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel is quickly assuming its role as Manhattan’s newest—and lasting—icon.
Les Lalanne
NEW YORK Kasmin Les Lalanne, the French husband-and-wife team of Françoise-Xavier Lalanne (1927–2008) and Claude Lalanne (who died on April 9, at the age of 93), worked and exhibited side by side, like flora and fauna.
Nancy Holt
NEW YORK Dia:Chelsea Describing Nancy Holt’s 1968 photographic series of Joan Jonas traversing sand dunes, Alena J. Williams, in her introduction to Nancy Holt: Sightlines, notes that “the constitution of landscape is bound not only to the physicality of the earth, but also to the physiology and psychology of the viewer, as well as the sensibility of the person framing its view.”
Alexander Archipenko
NEW YORK Eykyn Maclean Sculpting was never just a matter of formalism for Archipenko, but a metaphysical exercise in harnessing the creative impulse and injecting that spirit into art.
David Wojnarowicz
NEW YORK Whitney Museum of American Art Assuming familiarity with Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre, his obsession with his dreams, and his deep involvement with AIDS activism, “History Keeps Me Awake at Night” prompts two related questions: First, how does someone dream when they cannot sleep? And second, what are dreams to a person who, like Wojnarowicz, a victim of AIDS, knowingly has no future?
Jim Sanborn
WASHINGTON, DC American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center Best known for his challenging, coded bronze work in the courtyard of the CIA, Jim Sanborn still relishes secrets. His recent exhibition, “Without Provenance: The Making of Contemporary Antiquity,” presented a new puzzle: Why fill the museum’s third floor with an “auction preview” of stone works from “ancient Khmer?”
Fujiko Nakaya
BOSTON Emerald Necklace Parks Fog x FLO, Fujiko Nakaya’s first installation in Boston, was commissioned by the Emerald Necklace Conservancy to honor its 20th anniversary and to celebrate the ring of public parks created by Frederick Law Olmsted and dedicated in 1891.
Heidi Bucher
LONDON Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art Is memory embedded in place? Can a room hold vestiges of trauma? Heidi Bucher’s eerily beautiful latex casts of doors, window casings, and rooms pose such questions.
