SAN ANTONIO Artpace Sabine Senft’s stone towers stood guard at the entrance to “Border – line Reality.” Entry portals made from massive river rocks gathered along the West Texas border, they represented the checkpoints that Senft encountered as a small child growing up in West Germany, yet they also recalled checkpoints closer to home between the U.S. and Mexico.
Paul Chan
NEW YORK Greene Naftali Paul Chan, winner of the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize, was born in Hong Kong, raised in Nebraska, and now lives and works in New York. His recent show, “Rhi Anima,” featured a group of nylon sculptures that he calls “breathers,” carefully engineered, inflated figures set in motion by fans and gesticulating wildly into empty space.
Ai Weiwei; Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron
NEW YORK Park Avenue Armory Hansel & Gretel presented a fitting cautionary fairy tale for our post- Snowden world. This large-scale interactive installation in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory was the latest collaboration between Ai Weiwei and the architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Like their “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and 2012 pavilion for London’s Serpentine Gallery, this commissioned project, curated by Tom Eccles and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, continued to engage with the politics of public space and the psychological effect of architecture.
Tania Pérez Córdova
CHICAGO Museum of Contemporary Art “Smoke, nearby,” the ambiguous title of Tania Pérez Córdova’s first major U.S. museum exhibition (organized by José Esparza Chong Cuy), alerted one to the convoluted sensibility at work in the show. Born in Mexico City, Córdova received her BA in fine art, studio practice, and contemporary critical studies at Goldsmiths College in 2005.
Sandra Muss
WASHINGTON, DC The Kreeger Museum Walking through the woods at the Kreeger Museum, visitors encounter a series of seven rather mysterious pillars (the seven pillars of wisdom from Proverbs?), although it takes a moment to identify them since they are only partly there, somewhat like a magician’s now-you-see-it, nowyou- don’t feint. Made of reflective stainless steel and enclosed by a wire trellis threaded with vines and leaves, the pillars were created by Sandra Muss, an artist based in Washington DC, New York, and the Berkshires.
Nnenna Okore
SAN FRANCISCO Jenkins Johnson Gallery In the Igbo language of Nigeria, “Osimili,” the title of Nnenna Okore’s recent show, means a huge body of water. Okore, who spent most of her childhood in Nigeria (she was born in Australia), is now a professor of art at North Park University in Chicago. After graduating from the University of Nigeria in 1999 with a BA in painting, she received her MA and MFA from the University of Iowa in 2004 and 2005.
Urs Fischer
SAN FRANCISCO Legion of Honor/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Artists’ interventions in museum collections come in many forms, but their purpose is often to bring new meaning and resonance to objects that are so familiar as to have become almost invisible. Though Urs Fischer’s contemporary perspective on the Legion of Honor’s permanent collection thrilled some visitors while horrifying others, director Max Hollein’s decision to invite Fischer and his subversions brought a definite liveliness into the Legion’s neoclassical marble halls.
Jessi Reaves
PHILADELPHIA Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania In Jessi Reaves’s recent exhibition, her sculptural furniture was integrated both formally and functionally with a group of surreal still-life paintings by fellow New Yorker Ginny Casey. Curator Charlotte Ickes described these complementary bodies of work as “two solo exhibitions.” The juxtaposition with Casey’s intensely colored paintings of unfinished objects and hovering body parts set in cavernous ateliers placed Reaves’s work within a context of conversations about the artist’s studio and the erotics of the psychoanalytic part-object.
Laura Amussen
GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA Schmucker Art Gallery, Gettysburg College In Laura Amussen’s recent exhibition, nature provided relief from the pressures of an increasingly stressful world. The works in this intimate, meditative installation were formed from twigs, leaves, reeds, moss, and seeds. The walls were painted a dark red-brown color, the earthiness reinforced by low lighting focused only on the objects.
Diana Al-Hadid
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA Mills College Art Museum and San Jose Museum of Art Simultaneously delicate and monumental, familiar and inexplicably strange, Diana Al-Hadid’s work draws on an astounding range of cultural references, only some of which are visible to the naked eye. Fragments of images from paintings, often of biblical subjects, as well as allusions to literature, history, architecture, and science, all invest her sculpture with a backstory.
