On the Cover:
To honor both recipients of the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award, this issue features one of two covers.
Petah Coyne, Untitled #1379 (The Doctor’s Wife) (detail), 1997–2018. Photo: Christopher Burke Studio, © Petah Coyne, Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York
Melvin Edwards, Dancing in Nigeria, 1974–78. Painted welded steel, dimensions variable. Photo: © 2024 Melvin Edwards / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
Editor’s Letter:
This issue celebrates the two recipients of the 2024 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, which is presented at the ISC’s annual gala, the Night of Excellence. The name is apt. In essays here, Michael Brenson sums up the rich career of contemporary giant Melvin Edwards, and Nancy Princenthal considers the lush maximalism of the masterful Petah Coyne. Beyond these two especially deserving awardees, the artists featured in this edition can, it seems to me, all claim a distinguishing excellence. In conversation, Didier Vermeiren discusses the central role of the plinth in his practice, while Isabelle Plat, explaining her beguiling and often whimsical works, considers the importance of, among other things, “gesture—how the viewer’s physical interaction with an art object can alter its meaning while also changing someone’s perspective, and even behavior.” And in an incisive colloquy with Helen O’Leary, Kay Whitney explores the artist’s radically DIY approach to making sculpture. In other words, the heights reached by the artists featured this month beautifully complement the peaks of the two awardees. Read on to see why. —Daniel Kunitz, Editor-in-Chief
