Chin Chih Yang is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses sculpture, performance, installation, video, photography, computers, lighting, painting, and other media to create his own brand of human body sculpture/performance art. Yang, who was born in Banciao, Taiwan, has lived in New York for over 30 years, earning a BFA from Parsons in 1986 and an
The Catalyst of Arts and Heritage at the Carrie Furnaces
Almost 100 feet tall and constructed of 2.5-inch-thick plate steel lined with refractory brick, the iron cupolas at the Carrie Furnaces National Historic Landmark in Swissvale and Rankin, Pennsylvania, are extremely rare examples of pre-World War II iron-making technology.
Hélio Oiticica: Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero
During his lifetime, Hélio Oiticica exhibited in major art centers in London and New York, including Whitechapel Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, where he took part in the 1970 exhibition “Information.” That same year, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and settled in New York for the following eight years.
Cristina Schiavi
BUENOS AIRES Miranda Bosch Gallery An important artist in the history of Argentine art, Cristina Schiavi is also a curator and manager of major projects, including Basilico, which she developed for international residencies. After several years without a solo exhibition, Schiavi recently reappeared with works that establish a dialogue between abstract geometric Modernism and the figuration that she says defines her. What stands out in her shows, however, are not recognizable human presences or clearly identifiable objects. Schiavi plays with structure, volume, color, and materials— in this case, MDF and acrylics—while installing her works in a larger spatial web of words and sketches.
Alina Szapocznikow
NEW YORK Andrea Rosen Gallery Alina Szapocznikow was a supreme bricoleuse. She treated the odd assemblage of parts constituting the human body as her scrap box, junk heap, and obsession. During her brief life (1926–73), she used all aspects and conditions of the body as a resource, and she experienced most of them herself. A concentration camp survivor, a mother, a cancer victim, she mined spectacles of fatality and mortality for her subject matter. If this sounds grim, it isn’t—her work deals with abjection and suffering in a fondly ironic way—and even depictions of suffering and grief are witty and mordantly funny. Szapocznikow conceived of the body as a variable semantic assemblage, referring to it as “that complete erogenous zone.”
Andrew Lyght
NEW PALTZ, NEW YORK Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York “Full Circle,” the recent retrospective of Guyana-born Andrew Lyght, featured five decades of sculptures, installations, drawings, paintings, and prints—categories that blur and overlap through his work. Lyght’s concerns are volume, surface, space, and light, as well as forms that can adapt to changing circumstances. His most recent wall works, for instance, are constructed from curved pieces of plywood, vellum, or paper, painted in solid fruity colors and pinned to underlying wooden crosspieces, an elegant and economical solution that allows the work to be freed from the plane.
Pat Lay
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.
