NEWARK, NEW JERSEY Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art Pat Lay, who retired not long ago from the MFA program that she founded at Montclair State University, recently mounted a major retrospective at Aljira, a prominent nonprofit space in downtown Newark. Curated by Lilly Wei, the show covered decades of work, from late-’60s clay pieces to works made as recently as 2015. There was a good mix of three-dimensional and two-dimensional work, including archival prints whose exquisite symmetry is constructed from computer-parts imagery, but Lay has acknowledged that the true turn of her work is sculptural.
Laura Evans
BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery Laura Evans is best known for her bronze versions of brown paper lunch bags—crinkles, folds, and all. Real lunch bags are meant to be disposable ephemera. Evans’s bronzes will last for the ages. They’re comical. Tucked in a bookcase indoors or sitting on the grass outside, they sometimes make people giggle. While still engaged with the lunch bags, Evans moved on to tree branches in her recent show, “The Aching Web.” These antic constructions had a presence even before you entered the gallery. One of them started on the floor of the large room, struggled to climb over a railing, and ended up on a shelf just below the big windows looking onto the street.
Nari Ward
MIAMI Pérez Art Museum Miami “Sun Splashed,” Nari Ward’s recent retrospective, employed penetrating humor and quotidian materials to recalibrate views about race, culture, and faith. The opening themes included immigration, social justice, the urban milieu, and citizenship. Amid the sounds of moving wheels accompanied by Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark was the Night,” Land (2002–14), a rootless tree made of a small wheel wrapped onto a cylindrical metal base, evokes the migrant experience of mobility and change. Rock, Booked, Scissor, Vice (2010) repositions a reference book, Black’s Law Dictionary, in relation to the children’s game of rock-paper-scissors.
Jeff Spaulding
WASHINGTON, DC Curator’s Office Almost a decade ago, Curator’s Office led a conspicuous cultural shift by avoiding DC’s usual gallery locations of Georgetown and Dupont Circle and opening on 14th Street in Logan Circle. Faced with skyrocketing rents when the lease ran out in 2013, owner Andrea Pollan was forced to close her doors. This hurdle didn’t deter her, however, and today she remains an indomitable force for contemporary art in Washington and beyond, branching out to organize pop-up exhibitions at different venues, as was the case with Jeff Spaulding’s recent show, “Vintage Spaulding,” at the 703 Edgewood Street Studios in a developing Northeast neighborhood.
Paul Kos
NAPA, CALIFORNIA di Rosa Paul Kos’s career as a major figure of Bay Area Conceptualism began during an extended visit to di Rosa, back when it was still a fledgling vineyard and Rene di Rosa, its owner and founder, was beginning to accumulate what would become the world’s largest collection of Northern California art. In 1968, Kos—then 26 and still in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute—spent a good part of the summer grafting vines and building sculpture.
Elmgreen & Dragset
TEL AVIV Tel Aviv Museum of Art “Powerless Structures,” part of a series begun in 1997, was also the title of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s first exhibition in Israel and the third installment of “Biography,” a joint project with the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo and the National Gallery of Denmark. Influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault, Elmgreen & Dragset view power as an everyday phenomenon, with the ability to change or evolve into something else. The “Powerless Structures” specifically critique accepted procedures and systems relating to public spaces and institutions.
Sweat Equity: A Conversation with Ruben Ochoa
Sandra Wagner: You frequently use cement slabs lifted from gallery floors, some raised on tall rebar legs, as in the exhibition “Crooked Under the Weight” at SITE Santa Fe (2009). The site-specific photomural Fwy Wall Extraction (2006–07) alludes to what lies beneath a massive retaining wall, and Extruded Masses (2013) consists of a tower of
Slippery Things: A Conversation with Anne Hardy
Anne Hardy’s architectonic forms and assemblages of decorated debris appear as alien building blocks governed as much by a calculated configuration of misshapen objects as by Duchampian conceits. Part of a poetic platform, these elements, when combined, are meaningful in the moment, yet curiously irrelevant.
The Creator Does Nothing: A Conversation with herman de vries
herman de vries (who deliberately renders his name in lowercase) lives in Eschenau, Germany, close to the Steigerwald. This forest-and nature in general- is his studio. According to de vries, nature is our primary reality. Not only is it the place where he creates his works, it is also his subject, because he addresses the
Behind the Scenes: A Conversation with Mark Dion
Mark Dion creates sculptures and installations that explore and critique the history of science and institutional representations of nature. For decades, he has attempted to “understand the ideas that have shaped our social history of nature and have led us to our current suicidal relationship to the global environment.”
