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.
Foon Sham
WASHINGTON, DC American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center Foon Sham’s sculptures evoke a myriad of forms–towers, vessels, baskets, grottoes, mountains, and even tornadoes. Often spiraling upward or outward, his works are built with layered wood, and they are participatory. Since the 1990s, he has created structures that invite viewers into intimate, light-dappled, and wood-scented spaces. Part of the thrill of his work is entering it– a sometimes acrobatic feat when faced with low, jagged passageways.
“Politicizing Space”
NEW YORK Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, John Jay College of Criminal Justice “Politicizing Space,” curated by Charlotta Kotik, took as its premise the fact that space can be made political by manmade interventions and used to control human movement and behavior. Kotik emphasized the need to understand how this stratagem works in light of Trump administration policies such as the Mexican border wall.
Zheng Lu
NEW YORK Sundaram Tagore Gallery A first impression of Zheng Lu’s recent exhibition, “Undercurrent,” brought to mind the term “sublime.” Set against pristine white walls, huge silvery waves seemed about to crash through space. The obvious association was to Hokusai’s 19th-century print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, but stylistically, Zheng’s waves have more in common with Northern Song black ink painting, adapted in Japan as Sumi-e, whose sharply delineated brushwork has been compared to samurai sword strokes by the prominent Asian scholar Sherman E. Lee.
Tove Storch
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery Danish sculptor Tove Storch app roaches sculpture as a way of thinking about materials and looking at space. Arguably, so do all sculptors, but Storch harks back to Minimalists and post-Minimalists such as Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and Jackie Winsor in her refusal to allow thoughts about anything else to intrude on her work. The content of Storch’s work is, quite simply, space and stuff, presented within the theater of the gallery.
