Linda Cunningham, Bridge to Somewhere, 2009. Steel beams, sand-cast military scrap, bronze, and construction materials, 8 x 5 x 4ft

Linda Cunningham

New York

Bronx Museum of Art

Few places conjure images of urban blight as immediately as the South Bronx. And yet, walking through this working-class neighborhood, one notices changes as the community reinvents itself—integrating its past into a vision for the future, without losing its identity. These tensions are reflected in the work of sculptor Linda Cunningham. Living in Berlin during the early 1990s as that city struggled to reconcile a troubled past with a desire for renewal, Cunningham became interested in memorial sculpture. As a resident of the South Bronx for more than 10 years, she strives to capture the area’s desire to remember and rebuild.

Filicinaea metallica Fossilles: Urban Regeneration, a group of Cunningham’s twister steel beam and bronze structures, stretched across an otherwise empty terrace at the Bronx Museum, bringing organic, evolutionary forms into an institutional, sanitized setting. Connecting the natural and the industrial this multi-part work wove its way through space, combining familiar construction materials, rough, pitting stones, and…see the entire review in the print version of July/August’s magazine.