OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA Pro Arts Gallery The title of Allison Leigh Holt’s recent exhibition, “The Beginning Was The End,” calls up images of endless loops, along with apocalyptic scenarios and intergalactic explosions. Oscar Kiss Maerth used the same words in the early ’70s to title a controversial pseudo-scientific book in which he argued that humans evolved from apes that ate the brains of other apes and that we are now de-evolving because our brains are too big and this cannibalistic practice has made us insane.
Rachel Whiteread
LONDON Tate Britain Tate Britain removed interior walls for its recent Rachel Whiteread retrospective, creating an open 1,500- square-meter space—an unusual modification that allowed all of the sculptures to be viewed with a single sweep of the eyes. A mesmerizing quietude pervaded the space— individual pieces, sedate and pale, appeared to evaporate into their environment. The show spanned White – read’s output from the 1980s through the present, using a regimented manner of display to create an allencompassing effect.
Deep Wisdom and Collective Fortitude: A Conversation with Sonya Clark
Unraveling, 2015-ongoing. Detail of interactive performance. Photo: Taylor Dabney. Sonya Clark uses everyday materials to address “identity politics, collective fortitude, and social justice.” Returning repeatedly to the same basic materials, including copper pennies, hair, combs, and sugar, she brings value to quotidian objects through her investigations while asking viewers to consider the embedded histories surrounding
Françoise Grossen: Total Exposure
In Françoise Grossen’s work, intense physicality and presence are wedded to conceptual underpinnings–what an object is composed of is entirely consequential, meaning and purpose lying in material choices. Her objects, made between 1966 and 1999, are deeply and totally abstract yet also metaphorical.
Unity and Variety: A Conversation with Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga
Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga makes forms with layered contexts and material processes that are very much rooted in her experiences growing up in rural Kenya and the Rift Valley. Her works partly pay tribute to local craft tradition, demonstrating how the local can indeed teach the national and international.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Rooting Dislocation
When I met María Magdalena Campos-Pons in her Boston studio, she was gestating ideas for Documenta 14, thinking about installations in both Athens and Kassel. Her thoughts, figuratively and literally, germinated in a corner, where a branch of spindly potato plant—an invasive species that takes over everything—drew an awkward but tenacious line up the wall.
Xu Zhen: Information Age
Shanghai-based Xu Zhen reconstitutes time to create “information objects.” His sculptures appropriate historical elements from different civilizations but siphon them through an insurgence of new technologies, underscoring relationships between tradition and contemporary social experience–all in an attempt to sidestep culture as a “known experience” and breathe new life into what might otherwise be considered dead
“David Smith: The White Sculptures”
NEW WINDSOR, NEW YORK Storm King Art Center Did David Smith intend to leave eight large white sculptures white, the state in which they were seen at Bolton Landing, when he died suddenly in 1965? That question, which has periodically vexed art historians, drove an intriguing exhibition at Storm King Art Center, where six of the white-painted steel constructions were installed outside on the lawn, including the three Primo Piano sculptures on view together for the first time.
Ritual, Politics, and Transformation: Betye Saar
Betye Saar was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2018. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. For nearly 70 years, Betye Saar has created prints, collages, and assemblages that transform the cast-off and forgotten into powerful explorations of African American history and identity, the politics of race and gender,
Roni Horn
POTOMAC, MARYLAND Glenstone “Roni Horn,” a survey of work from the last four decades curated by the artist from the museum’s permanent collection, featured photographs, sculptures, and drawings divided into eight rooms: the earliest work, Ant Farm, dates from 1974, but the majority of the works were produced from 2000 to 2015. Horn’s work was ideal for Glenstone, a private museum outside Washington, DC; architecture, site, and art melded seamlessly together into a total experience that allowed for contemplation of complex ideas.
