On the Cover:
Nathaniel Rackowe, Spin, 2004. Electroluminescent wire, control system, and electronics, 14 x 14 x 6 meters. Photo: Courtesy the artist.
Editor’s Letter:
Anina Major’s beguiling ceramics reflect, and reflect on, her experience as a migrant from The Bahamas, with particular attention to that island’s tourist economy. In this focus on origins and identity, she stands apart in this issue, which brings together artists with an excitingly disparate set of concerns. In utterly different ways, both Larry Bell and Nathaniel Rackowe use light as a primary material in their practices: Bell, famously, by working exclusively in glass colored through various means; Rackowe by employing tube lighting in his installations and sculptures. Agustina Woodgate and Gregor Schneider could each be said to address the built environment, and indeed Woodgate’s statement, in her fascinating interview, “I think of art as part of a system of recycling, both material and symbolic,” could apply to both artists. Woodgate repurposes the stuff of the urban environment to examine infrastructures and information technologies, while Schneider remakes the spaces we inhabit. In another conversation this month, Asim Waqif, the International Sculpture Center’s recipient of the 2021 Innovator Award, says he wants “to change the value scale of things that we throw away.” One might say his fluid, collaborative practice aims to defamiliarize the world so that we may see it anew, but that would be true of all the magnificent artists included in this issue. —Daniel Kunitz
