WASHINGTON, DC Renwick Gallery The Renwick Gallery’s biennial invitationals highlight mid-career artists pushing the boundaries of craft. According to curator Nora Atkinson, the 2016 edition, “Visions and Revisions,” focused on the “degradation of society and the reinvention and rebirth of it.” Featuring the works of four American artists—Jennifer Trask, Steven Young Lee, Norwood Viviano, and Kristen Morgin—the exhibition went beyond mere ruin porn to examine the meticulous processes of each individual artist.
Roxana Alger Geffen
WASHINGTON, DC Flashpoint Gallery Though the chaotic world of parenting is all consuming when one’s children are young, it remains a risky theme for art-making. Roxana Alger Geffen boldly titled her multi-part installation Motherload with full awareness of the feminist artists who came before her and who were dismissed or pilloried for daring to valorize this elemental experience. She expands on motherhood’s—in her words—“messy box of intimacy” with broader themes addressing the construction of familial memories and notions of domestic labor.
Boaz Vaadia: Finding Equillibrium
Serenity and a pervading stillness characterized Boaz Vaadia’s recent retrospective at Grounds For Sculpture. Admirably displayed both outdoors and in two major buildings, 125 works spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career fostered a psychological centering for the viewer.
The Void Is Never Empty: A Conversation with Gaspar Acebo
Gaspar Acebo, who trained in the fields of painting and drawing, combines these mediums with other techniques and disciplines, including photography. His work is perhaps best defined by its reflection on the interaction of plane and volume, the concept of emptiness serving as an engine that generates not neutral space, but a balance of forces
Michael Gitlin: Minimalist Lyricism
While the work of American Minimalist masters such as Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd has begun to seem slightly dated, it has not lost its impetus, and the early- and middle-period sculptures of these artists continue to challenge us.
Why Did Petah Coyne’s Work Make Me Cry?
Eleven years ago, I wept openly in the middle of Petah Coynes touring survey “Above and Beneath the Skin.” Within compulsory, regulated social systems the ones that determine what options are available for a subject’s action and identification uncontrolled crying is a breach of those mores, a breakdown and demonstration of the effects of life
Brian Dettmer: Paging Through Time
How can history, memory, and cultural knowledge become the materials of sculpture? In Brian Dettmer’s hands, books that have lost their original function do just that. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference volumes represent the physicality of gathered knowledge with their moving pages, solid bindings, and words and illustrations.
Taryn Simon: The Spectacle of Loss
In the fall of 2016, Taryn Simon presented a unique interactive work, An Occupation of Loss, at the Park Avenue Armory in collaboration with Artangel, London. (Loss, in the work’s title, represents the fugitive nature of things, a theme that runs through all of Simon’s work.)
Lynda Benglis: I Choose My Dreams
Lynda Benglis was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2017. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Over the course of her long career, Lynda Benglis has defied easy categorization.
Harry Leigh
OLD WESTBURY, NEW YORK Amelie A. Wallace Gallery Octogenarian Harry Leigh has made a long career of constructing Minimalist sculptures that are highly evocative in their Shaker-like simplicity. Educated at SUNY, Buffalo, and at Teacher’s College, Columbia University – supplemented by stints of private study with Peter Voulkos and Richard Pousette-Dart, and numerous stays at Yaddo and Mac – Dowell Colony residencies – Leigh is clearly well-trained and historically versed in late-modern and contemporary art.
