NEW YORK Gladstone Gallery The work in Wangechi Mutu’s recent exhibition-installed to create a loose circle inside a square space- was aesthetically sophisticated, empathic, and symbolic. On the surface, Mutu’s 23 new sculptures are formal and classical, a visual contrast to her sensorial mixed-media installation, A Fantastic Journey, which traveled to four U.S. museums during 2013–14. The elegant, finished surfaces in burnt sienna, brown, gray, and black conjure the earth-its wounds and diseases, people, and species nearing extinction.
Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs
NEW YORK SculptureCenter This exhibition of the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Plantation Workers Art League or CATPC) could not have been timelier. It arrived at a moment when racial and economic inequalities are center stage, and the voices of the suppressed are being heard. Featuring a series of chocolate sculptures made from molds obtained from 3D prints of the clay originals, the show brought artistry from the rural hinterland of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the U.S.
Fred Eversley
WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS Rose Art Museum However much Minimalism may be out of fashion, the products of that movement still retain the capacity to delight the eye. The 13 works in Fred Eversley’s recent exhibition, “Black, White, Gray,” date from the mid-1970s; they eschew chromatic qualities, yet they contain tricks and delights that on analysis produce a kind of optical circus. All but one are made of cast polyester resin, hand-polished to the perfection of an astronomical lens. Most are circular.
Kemang Wa Lehulere
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.
