CLEVELAND, OHIO Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art Native Clevelanders, like myself, are used to national derision, enduring myriad “mistake on the lake” jokes. So, it was clearly evident to us that FRONT founder Fred Bidwell and artistic director Michelle Grabner intended to turn those Rust Belt assumptions around.
Sculpture by the Sea
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Bondi Beach Sculpture by the Sea’s 22nd edition featured 107 sculptures by Australian and international artists that merged almost organically with the prehistoric sandstone rock formations along the stretch of beach, with the grand blues of the sky and the sea as backdrops.
Cecilia Vicuña
BERKELEY AND BROOKLYN Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archives, and Brooklyn Museum The turbulent history of South America—from the advanced civilizations of the pre-colonial era up to the ravaged present—lies at the heart of Cecilia Vicuña’s work.
Gelatin
ROTTERDAM Museum Boijmans van Beuningen According to Gelatin member Wolfgang Gantner, “The question isn’t why poop, but why not poop?” A video discussion accompanying the group’s recent show of monumental turd sculptures further clarifies the choice of subject matter with references to “democratic art” and how we all create it, starting at the earliest age.
Indian Ceramics Triennale
JAIPUR Jawaharlal Kala Kendra Set in the gloriously restored Jawaharlal Kala Kendra (JKK) arts center in Jaipur, the first Indian Ceramics Triennale (ICT) kicked off
Charles Ray
NEW YORK Matthew Marks Gallery Charles Ray has produced some of the most consequential sculpture of the past 30 years.
Giuseppe Penone
WEST BRETTON, WAKEFIELD, UK Yorkshire Sculpture Park “A Tree in the Wood,” a beguiling exhibition spanning five decades, makes clear Giuseppe Penone’s lifelong obsession with the symbiotic relationship between trees and humans.
Futurefarmers
SAN FRANCISCO Yerba Buena Center for the Arts “Out of Place, in Place,” Futurefarmers’s recent retrospective, offered members of the collective a chance to think about the concerns that have driven their work since 1995.
Julia Phillips
NEW YORK MoMA PS1 Julia Phillips’s minimally expressed and disturbing works suggest isolated body parts placed in conjunction with elements that evoke instruments of torture or at least cold mechanics.
David Nash
LONDON Annely Juda Fine Art David Nash’s recent exhibition “Wood, Metal, Pigment” featured a range of large- and small-scale sculptures in wood, bronze, and iron, as well as a selection of pigment studies. The works were drawn from a period of almost 30 years, with the majority recent or newly conceived.
