The International Sculpture Center is proud to present the winners of the 2016 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Awards. This year’s program attracted a large number of nominees from university sculpture programs in North America and abroad.
International Sculpture Day 2016
The second iteration of International Sculpture Day (IS Day) was celebrated on April 24, 2016 by an estimated 10,000 participants in more than 20 countries around the world. Since the initial event in 2015, these numbers have more than tripled, which confirms the enthusiasm for IS Day and the foresight of Johannah Hutchison, executive director
Seducing Consciousness: A Conversation with Paul Villinski
Robert Preece: Why is the idea of flight important to you? What sorts of memories does it evoke, and how do they relate to your work? Paul Villinski: I was an “Air Force brat.” I spent my first 14 years on or near USAF bases.
Chin Chih Yang: Human Body Sculpture
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.
