NEW YORK SculptureCenter This exhibition of the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Plantation Workers Art League or CATPC) could not have been timelier. It arrived at a moment when racial and economic inequalities are center stage, and the voices of the suppressed are being heard. Featuring a series of chocolate sculptures made from molds obtained from 3D prints of the clay originals, the show brought artistry from the rural hinterland of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the U.S.
Fred Eversley
WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS Rose Art Museum However much Minimalism may be out of fashion, the products of that movement still retain the capacity to delight the eye. The 13 works in Fred Eversley’s recent exhibition, “Black, White, Gray,” date from the mid-1970s; they eschew chromatic qualities, yet they contain tricks and delights that on analysis produce a kind of optical circus. All but one are made of cast polyester resin, hand-polished to the perfection of an astronomical lens. Most are circular.
Kemang Wa Lehulere
CHICAGO The Art Institute of Chicago Kemang Wa Lehulere, an artist, performer, photographer, and filmmaker,was born in Cape Town in 1984 to a white father (the son of Irish missionaries) and a black mother when mixed-race relationships and the children of such unions were illegal. The end of apart heid in 1994 came too late for Wa Lehulere’s parents, who were never able to live together, and who both died before he was 12. This personal history conjoined to the larger history of South Africa under apartheid forms the conceptual base of his work, which is never literal.
Matthew Angelo Harrison
DETROIT Museum of Contemporary Art The first order of business when entering Matthew Angelo Harrison’s “Detroit City/Detroit Affinities” was to identify what, precisely, was the art. The two freestanding 3D printers, titled The Consequence of Platforms? The oddly misshapen and sometimes incomplete heads 3D-printed in clay throughout the run of the show? The benches and display cases rendered in precision-cut clear acrylic, some intimately intertwined with zebra and wildebeest skulls?
Ree Morton
NEW YORK Alexander and Bonin Although Ree Morton started her career late and was active as an artist for less than a decade, her influence continues some 40 years after her death. Today, many artists present their work in constructed environments, but in the ’70s, Mor – ton was among the first to disturb the white cube of the gallery, setting up installations that used walls, corners, and floors. At the same time, she moved away from making singular sculptural objects, using non-traditional and craft-based materials to explore the creative potential of process and the provisional.
Ernesto Neto
NEW YORK Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Brazilian artist Ernest Neto has established himself as one of the leading sculptors of his generation. To create the works in “The Ser – pent’s Energy Gave Birth To Human – ity,” his remarkable recent exhibition, he collaborated with the Huni Kuin, an aboriginal community in the Brazilian Amazon. Neto works primarily with fabric installations, drawing from various traditions-Minimalism, Arte Povera, and Neoconcretism. In 2014, he began to work with the Huni Kuin, who are known for their spiritual insight, their desire to live in harmony with nature, and the centeredness they experience through a communal exchange with the earth.
Carol Ross
EAST HAMPTOM, NEW YORK Guild Hall Carol Ross has an impressive exhibition history, dating from the mid- 1960s through the present. Her recent exhibition, titled simply “Carol Ross,” featured works from the last 20 years or so, with 16 mid-size outdoor sculptures installed in the Guild Hall’s Furman Sculpture Garden—the tallest reaching almost 13 feet, but most between five and seven feet tall—and seven indoor, wall-hanging pieces and several colored-pencil works on paper.
deCordova New England Biennial 2016
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum deCordova’s 2016 New England Biennial left me struggling with the definition of “sculpture” as it’s currently understood. The work of Heather Leigh McPherson is a case in point: it hangs on the wall, looking like a painting. But it’s made of an acrylic puddle poured over chiffon dyed in sorbet colors, and encased in each acrylic sheet is a scribble pad crayoned with two-dimensional scrawls. One sheet of plastic even contains a cigarette lighter. Multi – media, video, wall-hung pieces, interactive readymades-this biennial had them all, but not much in the way of traditional sculpture.
“New Sole of the Old Machine: Steampunk Brockton— Reimagining the City of Shoes”
BROCKTON, MASSACHUSETTS Fuller Craft Museum Steampunk can be described as a fantasy world at the intersection of Victorian history, science fiction, and advanced steam-powered technology. Fuller Craft Museum curator Beth McLaughlin and “Steampunk Guru”/artist Bruce Rosenbaum recently invited artists to be part of a “retro-future exhibition”—”New Sole of the Old Machine,” which used the tenets of steampunk to reimagine the city of Brockton by fusing a modern sensibility with industrial antiques. Participating sculptors were interested in objects not only as artifacts, but also as signifiers of other realities, both past and future.
Christopher Saucedo
NEW ORLEANS Good Children Gallery “Out of my own great woe,” wrote Heinrich Heine, “I make my little songs.” Analogous to the German writer’s transformation of “woe” into poetry, Christopher Saucedo turns natural disasters into prankish sculpture. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded his home in New Orleans, leaving the living space covered with “exotic, colorful mold.” In 2011, soon after he moved to New York, Hurricane Sandy flooded his house and studio in Rockaway Beach, Queens. These catastrophes nonetheless are but grist for Sau – cedo’s comic mill.
