CHICAGO The Art Institute of Chicago Kemang Wa Lehulere, an artist, performer, photographer, and filmmaker,was born in Cape Town in 1984 to a white father (the son of Irish missionaries) and a black mother when mixed-race relationships and the children of such unions were illegal. The end of apart heid in 1994 came too late for Wa Lehulere’s parents, who were never able to live together, and who both died before he was 12. This personal history conjoined to the larger history of South Africa under apartheid forms the conceptual base of his work, which is never literal.
Matthew Angelo Harrison
DETROIT Museum of Contemporary Art The first order of business when entering Matthew Angelo Harrison’s “Detroit City/Detroit Affinities” was to identify what, precisely, was the art. The two freestanding 3D printers, titled The Consequence of Platforms? The oddly misshapen and sometimes incomplete heads 3D-printed in clay throughout the run of the show? The benches and display cases rendered in precision-cut clear acrylic, some intimately intertwined with zebra and wildebeest skulls?
Tom Bevan: Weapons of Indirect Attack
Irish sculptor Tom Bevan came to New York in 1993 for a year-long PS1 residency. A noted sociopolitical artist who had engaged with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, he was a major presence in exhibitions, catalogues, books, and articles, including my own Directions Out in Dublin (1987), Art Politics and Ireland (Open Air, Dublin 1989),
Traveling the Road to Freedom: A Conversation with Dominique Moody
Last summer, assemblage artist Dominique Moody brought NOMAD, a “tiny house” on wheels that serves as her living and creative space, to Harrison House Music, Arts & Ecology, located in Joshua Tree, California. The 140-square-foot mobile shotgun house, whose title stands for “Narrative, Odyssey, Manifesting, Artistic, Dreams,” is a gem of a compact, self-sufficient dwelling
Action and Magic: A Conversation with Navjot Altaf
Over the course of a long career, Navjot Altaf has experimented with a host of media and materials. Her work, which has evolved to embrace new dimensions, reflects a personal journey, celebrating relationships and mourning losses while making strong statements about socioeconomic trends, especially in India.
Martha Dimitropoulou: Pine Needle Pixels
Despite the Greek economic crisis, art is thriving in Athens thanks to a growing number of nonprofit and alternative exhibition venues. One such space, the Contemporary Greek Art Institute (iset), a nonprofit archive and gallery, recently featured the work of an unusual sculptor in the exhibition “Devalue/Value/Surplus Value: between ‘work’ and ‘art,’” curated by Charis
Unknown Extremes: A Conversation with Tania Kovats
Tania Kovats’s work encompasses sculpture, installation, and large-scale, time-based projects that investigate the layered aspects of landscape—that which lies beneath and beyond what is perceived with the naked eye. These unknown spaces— shifting tides, weathered rock faces, wood grain, and even the uncharted territories of outer space—are mysteries to be unraveled.
Gravity’s Pull: A Conversation with Mathilde Roussel
Sculpture is traditionally about the body. Mathilde Roussel alludes to the body indirectly, by way of sheets of paper or rubber hanging from the wall, which she refers to as skins, and amorphous columns built up of masses inspired by her study of overdeveloped musculature.
Ree Morton
NEW YORK Alexander and Bonin Although Ree Morton started her career late and was active as an artist for less than a decade, her influence continues some 40 years after her death. Today, many artists present their work in constructed environments, but in the ’70s, Mor – ton was among the first to disturb the white cube of the gallery, setting up installations that used walls, corners, and floors. At the same time, she moved away from making singular sculptural objects, using non-traditional and craft-based materials to explore the creative potential of process and the provisional.
Ernesto Neto
NEW YORK Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Brazilian artist Ernest Neto has established himself as one of the leading sculptors of his generation. To create the works in “The Ser – pent’s Energy Gave Birth To Human – ity,” his remarkable recent exhibition, he collaborated with the Huni Kuin, an aboriginal community in the Brazilian Amazon. Neto works primarily with fabric installations, drawing from various traditions-Minimalism, Arte Povera, and Neoconcretism. In 2014, he began to work with the Huni Kuin, who are known for their spiritual insight, their desire to live in harmony with nature, and the centeredness they experience through a communal exchange with the earth.
