BIRMINGHAM, U.K. Midlands Arts Centre Tatiana Wolska’s intuitive, materially driven practice is founded on clear political and ethical principles. The Polish artist takes an open, democratic approach to art-making, inviting viewers to activate the exhibition space through participation and exchange.
Sinead McKeever
BELFAST QSS Gallery It would seem that McKeever’s ambitions escalate according to the size of the space she is offered. At QSS’s new, large-scale gallery—roughly triangular with two protruding corridor sections and a small zig-zag area—she took on the entire, oddly shaped space.
Celia Pym
PENZANCE, CORNWALL, ENGLAND Hweg Gallery Like contemporaries in London such as Caroline Achaintre, who shoots wool through canvas with an air compressor to make her work, Pym is taking materials and processes traditionally associated with the applied arts into a contemporary art practice that can be said to occupy a new space between traditional definitions.
Kehinde Wiley
HOUSTON Museum of Fine Arts Nearly all of the figures in the exhibition are deceased, wounded, or in repose, in striking contrast to Wiley’s previous works in which his subjects are (almost) invariably dynamic, assertive, and commanding.
Kelly Akashi
SEATTLE Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington Fired into inertia, despite their malleable clay origins, the sculptures have a static, rigid quality, reinforced by the bronze and glass casts. In this sense, they are more ecological memorials than myths of origins.
Jeneen Frei Njootli
VANCOUVER Macaulay + Co. Deftly combining sculpture, photography, performance, and poetry, Frei Njootli’s meditations on Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, and the body read like a nuanced, multifaceted story that takes off from and remains grounded in place, time, and memory.
“Forest of Dreams: Contemporary Tree Sculpture”
GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park Rather than a strict arrangement or an all-out sprawl, the show unfolded in four porous sections that encouraged cross-referencing.
Thomas Hirschhorn
NEW YORK Gladstone Gallery The cardboard suggested—symbolically—that we’ve mastered the art of packaging and marketing our wars, and that the lives of others come cheap.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins
SEATTLE Frye Art Museum Beyond the art historical references, Hutchins’s work involves so many Americana-related themes—building, sewing, lounging, eating, trashing—that it’s hard to keep track of where and how she has traveled.
