BEACON, NEW YORK Dia:Beacon Minimal Art evolved into prominence in the early 1960s. At the outset, the major sculptors included Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, and Robert Morris. I recall the term “epistemological Minimalism” associated with these five, coming from a critical essay by Robert Pincus-Witten. LeWitt soon made it clear that he was a “conceptual artist,” as noted in his well-known series of propositions published in 1967. Similarly, Judd, who worked as a critic at the outset of his career, thought of his sculpture as “empiricist,” not minimal—a refinement on his important 1965 essay, “Specific Objects.”
Ann Hamilton
PHILADELPHIA Fabric Workshop and Museum In an interview published by Phila – delphia’s FringeArts (2016), Ann Hamil ton described the dual impulses behind her four-decadelong practice and the multi-site exhibition she had recently mounted in the city: “Watching a raw material become a single thread, join other thread to become a warp or weft of a cloth or carpet, holds for me all the possibilities for making; sewing and writing are for me two parts of the same hand.”
David Sherry: Wrong Art
Ever since Duchamp produced his readymades, the definition of sculpture has loosened and mutated, like an object plunged into an acid bath and slowly eroding. In England, Gilbert and George presented performances of themselves as living sculpture, while in the United States, strange cross – overs between installation and happening- between non-text-based theatrical troupes like
Coleen Sterritt: A Rotation of Facts
Coleen Sterritt’s odd and idiosyncratic work prods at the spaces between manufacture and nature, anonymity and authorship, art and craft. Offering an extended meditation on artifice, her objects teeter between variants of reality and their opposites.
Extracting Art From Almost Nothing: A Conversation with Jose Dàvila
Born in 1974, Jose Dàvila was raised in Guadalajara, Mexico. While interested in art, he chose not to attend the classically focused fine art university, enrolling instead in the architecture department at the Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara.
The Dance of Beauty and Failure: A Conversation with Michelle Segre
Michelle Segre’s extraordinarily eclectic work juxtaposes forms, processes, materials, textures, colors, and ideas to exhilarating effect. Hers is difficult work that comes—as far as my own experience tells me—with a steep learning curve, because it pulls the rug from under one’s expectations regarding sculpture.
Unlikely Marriages: A Conversation with Gabriel Kuri
Contrast and juxtaposition are key principles in Gabriel Kuri’s work, guiding his treatment of formal and informal elements, texture, size, material, and color. Working with a range of materials, including found elements, Kuri takes a broad view of artistic process.
Nicole Salimbene
WASHINGTON, DC Flashpoint Gallery Mending comes alive in Nicole Salim – bene’s breathtaking work, awakening complex sensations of loss, empathy, and healing. An obsolete or forgotten activity for some, for others, it endures as a cultural norm born of economic necessity. In Salimbene’s vision, participatory installations incorporating thread, needles, and seating invite viewers to experience mending as a hands-on, multivalent art medium, rich in metaphor and ritual.
Jackie Brookner
BRONX, NEW YORK
Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
NEW YORK Catinca Tabacaru Gallery Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels re-built the floor and walls of the Catinca Tabacaru Gallery as part of her powerful installation. It seemed spare while I studied it before the opening, but not after many hundreds of people jammed inside the relatively small space—and kept coming. The exhibition title, “a DEFECT // to DEFECT,” and its question, “How do we learn to change for a future we can’t imagine?” perfectly expressed the Trump election jitters experienced by many New Yorkers.
