SAVANNAH, GEORGIA Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art “A Kind of Confession,” Jeffrey Gibson’s captivating recent exhibition, borrowed its title from James Baldwin, who wrote that “all art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists…are forced, at last, to tell the whole story.” A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half-Cherokee, Gibson drew from his Native American heritage, as well as from his experience living overseas. His paintings, along with embellished works bearing messages, hung from the walls, but viewers could not help but be immediately drawn to his mesmerizing, three-dimensional work.
Alison Knowles
PITTSBURGH Carnegie Museum of Art For five decades, Alison Knowles has been expanding the parameters of art with performative works and participatory installations. A founding member of Fluxus with George Maciunas, she moved through the 1960s downtown New York City art scene with the likes of Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, and Nam June Paik. Working alongside Marcel Duchamp and John Cage influenced her development significantly. What set Knowles apart from other Fluxus artists, however, was the element of touch.
Space as Object: A Conversation with Natalia Abot Glenz
Space, abstraction, geometry, remnants of a Minimalist aesthetic, balance of force and weight, and light: Natalia Abot Glenz’s work brings all of these words and concepts to mind. She thinks about space not only as a means, but also as an end-the sculpture may determine the construction, but space designs the route.
Motion and Matter: Ryszard Wasko’s Exile
Ryszard Wasko, a somewhat legendary Polish artist, has lived and worked in Berlin since 2008. This is not his first period of residency in Germany, just the first time that he has stayed there of his own accord.
Not Just About the Revolution: A Conversation with Humberto Dìaz and Holly Block
In early April of this year, I had the good fortune to travel with Holly Block, executive director of the Bronx Museum, on a visit to Cuba, where I visited Humberto Díaz in his Havana studio.
Nicole Eisenman
NEW YORK New Museum Starting with a deflated Captain America sleeping-or knocked out-on a pilaster, Nicole Eisenman’s recent exhibition addressed cultural and gender identity. “Al-ugh-ories” opened with Captain America’s nondescript, battered brown head at rest on a worn baseball glove. The sculpture was surrounded by weird paintings of a deep-sea diver, an androgynous, long-haired Hamlet with sword and skull, a green head, a cuffed and shackled nude maiden (Spring Fling), and a self-portrait of the artist in an overloaded, cramped studio/houseboat on a turbulent sea.
Experimentation is like Oxygen: A Conversation with Valay Shende
Valay Shende’s resourceful and meaningful works reflect his personality as a simple man who conveys his thoughts without ambiguity in a direct manner. His ability to bring together diverse mediums and materials to tell a story-steel combined with graphic videos, for instance-stands out for its forcefulness.
A Japanese Thing: A Conversation with Gabriel Orozco
Many expats who have lived in Japan acknowledge its deep impact, and Gabriel Orozco is no exception. For the past two years, he has resided in Tokyo, which he describes as offering “a new discovery every day,” a refreshing experience that he says is “influential in many ways.”
The Universe in a Pot: A Conversation with Subodh Gupta
Subodh Gupta, who has been compared to Damien Hirst, has adopted something of the attitude of that art world enfant terrible, employing the same charismatic swagger and courting the same kind of international attention with provocative works of a grandiose scale.
Stefano Cagol
TRENT, ITALY Civica/MART Civica, the Trent branch of MART, Italy’s lauded contemporary art museum, ingeniously structured Stefano Cagol’s mid-career retrospective into a cycle that evoked the return of the native son to the site of his first exhibition. Beginning with an early self-portrait (1998) compounded into four states of motion, the show traced the paradigm shift that characterizes two decades of Cagol’s work. Unity through duality is a chief preoccupation, from early video experiments to September 11 (2009), an LED of memorial events on his birthday.
