Eli Gur Arie

TEL AVIV Tel Aviv Museum of Art Hairless albino squirrels, darting here and there across a crowded floor or nibbling on quasi-scientific paraphernalia, formed a visual connection across the startling installations, freestanding assemblages, and zany reliefs in Eli Gur Arie’s recent exhibition “Growth Engines.” These sinister rodents, together with robotic metallic dogs, reflect the artist’s unrelenting interest in genetic engineering and post-apocalyptic life; in this show, they played an unsettling role in an alarming, yet visually gratifying drama.

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Ant Farm and LST

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Pioneer Works Sustainability received an ironic spin in “The Present is the Form of All Life,” an exploration of time capsule works created by Ant Farm and LST. Shown at Pioneer Works, a nonprofit space dedicated to fostering crossdisciplinary practice, community, and collaboration, the exhibition took a nostalgic look at Ant Farm’s 1970s projects, even as it argued for the group’s continuing relevance as LST.

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“From Space to Field”

HOUSTON The Silos at Sawyer Yards The Silos at Sawyer Yards are slightly eerie. More than 30 vertical cylinders reach 80 feet into the yawning blackness of the warehouse’s ceiling. Scarred floors and walls speak to former industry, but the building manages to combine inhuman vastness with the more intimate scale of the individual silos. The honeycomb arrangement of the soaring tubes leaves the casual viewer slightly disoriented. In other words, the “white cube” model of an art space could not be further from Houston’s newest arts venue.

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Ruth Beer

ABBOTSFORD, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA The Reach Gallery Museum Abbotsford Ruth Beer’s recent exhibition, “States of Matter,” presented a suite of works that are beautiful in their materiality while portraying a sobering subject matter. The show arose from research that Beer had been conducting on the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline, which would carry raw bitumen from the tar sands in Northern Alberta across Northwestern British Columbia to the coast.

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Fred Sandback

NEW YORK David Zwirner The Minimalist work of Fred Sand – back does not cease to amaze, with its elegant simplicity and radical transformation of line into sculpture. Especially when presented in complex installations such as this one, the poetic depth and large range of this unique oeuvre begins to shine. “Vertical Constructions” re-created and expanded on Sandback’s landmark 1987 exhibition at the West – fälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany, which featured six thennew works, each one engaging the vertical space.

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Barbara King

NEW YORK Narthex Gallery, St. Peter’s Church Barbara King’s recent exhibition, “Ribbon Meditations,” was shown in the narthex of St. Peter’s Church in Midtown Manhattan. For over 50 years, the church, which is committed to creatively shaping the life of the city and its community, has served immigrants, the homeless— people of every race, ethnicity, and language, at every economic level, and at every point of the gender spectrum. The arts play a vital part in living out this mission. The church commissions and installs permanent and temporary art, using it to spark public conversation and dialogue.

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Sarah Sze

WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS Rose Art Museum Sarah Sze is known for her complicated, sprawling sculptures, accumulations of small quotidian things that add up to enigmatic and overwhelming impressions. The meaning of her works is often subsidiary to the simple, ungraspable, in-yourface complexity of each piece. In Timekeeper (2016), her multifarious accretion became smaller and more unified than in many of her previous works. Improbably, instead of building the work out to the edges of all three sculptural dimensions, she managed to add the fourth dimension.

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Caoimhghin Ó Fraithile

BOSTON The Back Bay Fens Caoimhghin Ó Fraithile’s remarkable floating sculpture, placed in the Fens some 400 yards from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, celebrates the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which eventually led to independence for Ireland. The artist is known for his sculptural installations, particularly in Japan, where he regularly works with local people to construct environments in the town of Fukui, near the city of Niigata.

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Gary Haven Smith

BOOTHBAY, MAINE Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens Boogie Woogie and Wiggle Room are hardly names one would expect to find for sculptures in stone, but Gary Haven Smith is hardly your ordinary stone sculptor. His approach is somewhere between a considered Zen aesthetic and playful invention. “Stone Waves,” his recent exhibition, showcased the impressive range of his freestanding work. Swept Away, perched on a pyramidal granite obelisk, looks like a twisted piece of paper.

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Renwick Invitational 2016

WASHINGTON, DC Renwick Gallery The Renwick Gallery’s biennial invitationals highlight mid-career artists pushing the boundaries of craft. According to curator Nora Atkinson, the 2016 edition, “Visions and Revisions,” focused on the “degradation of society and the reinvention and rebirth of it.” Featuring the works of four American artists—Jennifer Trask, Steven Young Lee, Norwood Viviano, and Kristen Morgin—the exhibition went beyond mere ruin porn to examine the meticulous processes of each individual artist.

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