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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Roxana Alger Geffen
WASHINGTON, DC Flashpoint Gallery Though the chaotic world of parenting is all consuming when one’s children are young, it remains a risky theme for art-making. Roxana Alger Geffen boldly titled her multi-part installation Motherload with full awareness of the feminist artists who came before her and who were dismissed or pilloried for daring to valorize this elemental experience. She expands on motherhood’s—in her words—“messy box of intimacy” with broader themes addressing the construction of familial memories and notions of domestic labor.
Harry Leigh
OLD WESTBURY, NEW YORK Amelie A. Wallace Gallery Octogenarian Harry Leigh has made a long career of constructing Minimalist sculptures that are highly evocative in their Shaker-like simplicity. Educated at SUNY, Buffalo, and at Teacher’s College, Columbia University – supplemented by stints of private study with Peter Voulkos and Richard Pousette-Dart, and numerous stays at Yaddo and Mac – Dowell Colony residencies – Leigh is clearly well-trained and historically versed in late-modern and contemporary art.
Drew Conrad
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Kustera Projects Red Hook Drew Conrad’s exhibition, “The Cold Wake,” offered a view of Red Hook through a literary lens. Using H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror of Red Hook” as a launching point, the Red Hookbased artist researched local historical events to construct a sitespecific installation and self-portrait. Conrad took new materials, like lumber and metal, then aged them through a labor-intensive process of oxidizing, soiling, breaking, and shaping. Dwelling No. 11 (Jacobs Ladder) suggested a half-sunken dock and a boat on the precipice of collapse.
Kennard Sculpture Trail
NEWTON MASSACHUSETTS Kennard Park Because few venues can, or will, show large-scale outdoor sculpture, a community tends to forget how much talent is available to be tapped. Curator Allison Newsome isn’t letting Boston forget. It took three years of petitioning, permitting, and organizing, but a littleknown green space on Newton’s south side recently hosted a display of outdoor art of surprising quality. Although Newsome stressed the goal of developing works inspired by the site, not every piece conformed. The epitome of the idea was best expressed in Jean Blackburn’s Kennard Web.
Cara Despain
SALT LAKE CITY Central Utah Art Center Despite appearances to the contrary, the 23 rocks protruding from the walls in Cara Despain’s Seeing the Stone were not the final end game. The installation was more like a veneer or mirage pointing to the actual artwork. Attached to the walls with sturdy iron hooks, the stones ranged from pea- to melon-size and undulated between knee- and eye level. Accompanying GPS coordinates signaled the original locations of the rocks, which were found scattered around Utah.
