NAPA, CALIFORNIA di Rosa Robert Kinmont’s recent one-person show, “Trying to Understand Where I Grew Up,” was a mini-retrospective with works from his early years in the 1970s through pieces created as recently last year. Kinmont, one of the California Conceptualists, rose to prominence in the ’70s, then dropped out of the art world in the ’80s and, for about 20 years, studied Buddhism and made his living as a carpenter. Around 2000, he returned to making sculpture, and he still lives and works in Sonoma, California—an important factor for work that explores the peculiarities of place and the human relationship with nature.
John Outterbridge
LOS ANGELES Art + Practice The most salient aspect of John Outterbridge’s recent retrospective was its powerful originality. A prominent and influential Los Angeles artist and activist, Outterbridge creates works that embody erased, obscured, or neglected histories. Though he evokes the writings of Langston Hughes to convey an essentially African American cultural history and experience, Outterbridge converts these elements into forms that oscillate between encoded meaning and the opacity of pure abstraction.
Matt Hope
BEVERLY HILLS ACE Gallery Matt Hope’s recent solo exhibition was a complex conceptual show that welded together art and science. With formal art degrees from England and California, Hope combines artistry with a knowledge of metal fabrication, structural design, and sound engineering to create his “Sun Dragon Hardware” hybrid creations. The show included two distinct series: a group of finely crafted metal “Tools” and a congregation of mechanical “Towers.”
Vibha Galhotra
NEW YORK Jack Shainman Gallery “A river runs through it” could be the subtitle for Vibha Galhotra’s recent exhibition inspired by the Yamuna River, a legendary tributary of the sacred Ganges, which is also one of the world’s most polluted waterways. Tapestry-like constructions, sculptures, an installation, and a film all continue Galhotra’s examination of the effects of globalization and development by focusing on the critical role of water in daily life, not just in the artist’s native India and hometown of Delhi, but for all of us.
Amber Cobb
DENVER, CO Gildar Gallery Amber Cobb’s exhibition, “Solace,” immersed viewers in a sculptural dialogue of fleshy tones and dichotomously seductive and repulsive forms. Building on a practice rooted in psychological and physical attachments, Cobb probed the space between the decorative and the grotesque, filling both rooms of the gallery with 12 wall-bound sculptures, a series of small figurines, and a large, centrally located sculpture in the round. Cobb gathers and treats a range of domestic objects—blankets, bedding, bath mats, figurines, and bedroom furniture—with silicone, resin, paint, and acrylic media.
Patrick Strzelec
NEW YORK Garth Greenan GalleryPatrick Strzelec’s recent exhibition featured a mature body of work evoking a variety of profound emotions—joy, sadness, fear, recognition, and foreboding. Composed of diverse materials, including plaster, aluminum, epoxy, steel, bronze, ceramic, wood, and detritus, the sculptures collapse recognizable and illogical forms. Strzelec uses postmodern strategies—appropriation, assemblage, and simulacra—but unlike many of his contemporaries, he crafts his work with his own hands. For over two decades, he has worked in numerous studios and foundries and taught sculpture at prestigious universities.
“Interspatial”
WASHINGTON, DC Transformer “Interspatial” was the second collaboration of the pop-up curatorial group Quota. Co-founded by Dawne Langford and Avi Gupta, Quota champions a broad definition of cultural diversity beyond notions of otherness and tokenism. Featuring installations by Rachel Schmidt, Johab Silva, and Levester Williams, the show dialogued in clever and unexpected ways with the architecture of Transformer’s shotgun gallery, as well as with the changing fabric of the neighborhood. Time became fluid in this malleable context, while space, both imagined and real, stretched to encompass in-between spaces and the jarring boundaries that define them.
Jo Israelson
PORTLAND, MAINE Maine Jewish Museum A white taxi sat incongruously on the green lawn outside the Maine Jewish Museum. When visitors took a seat inside the cab, a heavily accented voice began relating a personal story of a journey taken from a far-off place to the streets of Portland, Maine. Irish, Italian, Greek, Eastern European, Bosnian, Somali, and Syrian immigrants have found their way to this northern seaport. Many of them were professionals, teachers, engineers, and physicians in their homelands, and then they found themselves driving cabs through Portland’s narrow streets as they transitioned to new lives in America.
Jeanne Jaffe
GLASSBORO, NJ Rowan University Art Gallery Nikola Tesla, the “genius inventor,” has been brought back to life on the page, stage, and screen; in Jeanne Jaffe’s room-size installation, his “spirit” animates multiple cast resin marionettes (some life-size and some miniature). Each figure references a chapter in Tesla’s life as seen from the outside and imagined from the inside. Created as an interdisciplinary fusion of art, science, history, theater, mythology, and psychology, Elegy for Tesla allows viewers to accompany and interact with “Tesla” by experiencing moments along his life’s journey.
Max Ernst
NEW YORK Paul Kasmin Gallery Chess Figures (1944), the wooden chess set that Max Ernst made while vacationing in Great River, Long Island, greeted visitors to “Max Ernst/Paramyths: Sculpture, 1934– 1967.” Like Marcel Duchamp, Ernst was a player of a game that conscripts intellectual wit to commandeer abstract warriors through never-ending configurations of battle. It’s play, but serious play, and that’s precisely how Ernst regarded his sculptural output—as a spirited interlude to overcome creative block.
