NAPA, CALIFORNIA di Rosa Robert Kinmont’s recent one-person show, “Trying to Understand Where I Grew Up,” was a mini-retrospective with works from his early years in the 1970s through pieces created as recently last year. Kinmont, one of the California Conceptualists, rose to prominence in the ’70s, then dropped out of the art world in the ’80s and, for about 20 years, studied Buddhism and made his living as a carpenter. Around 2000, he returned to making sculpture, and he still lives and works in Sonoma, California—an important factor for work that explores the peculiarities of place and the human relationship with nature.
John Outterbridge
LOS ANGELES Art + Practice The most salient aspect of John Outterbridge’s recent retrospective was its powerful originality. A prominent and influential Los Angeles artist and activist, Outterbridge creates works that embody erased, obscured, or neglected histories. Though he evokes the writings of Langston Hughes to convey an essentially African American cultural history and experience, Outterbridge converts these elements into forms that oscillate between encoded meaning and the opacity of pure abstraction.
Matt Hope
BEVERLY HILLS ACE Gallery Matt Hope’s recent solo exhibition was a complex conceptual show that welded together art and science. With formal art degrees from England and California, Hope combines artistry with a knowledge of metal fabrication, structural design, and sound engineering to create his “Sun Dragon Hardware” hybrid creations. The show included two distinct series: a group of finely crafted metal “Tools” and a congregation of mechanical “Towers.”
Vibha Galhotra
NEW YORK Jack Shainman Gallery “A river runs through it” could be the subtitle for Vibha Galhotra’s recent exhibition inspired by the Yamuna River, a legendary tributary of the sacred Ganges, which is also one of the world’s most polluted waterways. Tapestry-like constructions, sculptures, an installation, and a film all continue Galhotra’s examination of the effects of globalization and development by focusing on the critical role of water in daily life, not just in the artist’s native India and hometown of Delhi, but for all of us.
Words Hurt: A Conversation with Milagro Torreblanca
Milagro Torreblanca was born in Chile but has lived in Argentina since she was little. With expertise in scenography, murals, and restoration, she creates works that challenge the viewer’s critical point of view, causing discomfort and catching the attention by surprise.
Strange Relationships: A Conversation with Richard Wentworth
Richard Wentworth’s way of seeing requires a spatial intelligence that perceives the world as a system of interlocking signs. He habitually walks the streets of London observing minutiae often missed by the untrained eye, and these observations then provide the nucleus for new ideas.
Arlene Shechet: Body-to-Body Experience
Arlene Shechet seems to be having a moment. “All At Once,” a 20-year survey of her work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, received critical acclaim last year. “Slip” (2013), a solo show at Sikkema Jenkins in New York, also caused a stir.
Kneading the World From Scratch: A Conversation with Adrián Villar Rojas
Born in Argentina in 1980, Adrián Villar Rojas has taken the contemporary art world by storm. Working in high-profile places (from Venice, Istanbul, and Sharjah to London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery and New York’s High Line), he transforms his sites with temporary works that lean toward extreme performance.
Melvin Edwards: Liberation and Remembrance
Melvin Edwards has been welding sculpture for more than five decades and bearing witness to the continuing history of race relations in the United States. His recent works include incisive new examples of his iconic “Lynch Fragments” series and monumental public projects installed in various locations, including Japan, Senegal, Cuba, and the U.S.
Bananas and Bamboo: Yi-chun Lo
In the hands of Taiwanese artist Yi-chun Lo, bananas and bamboo become the primary ingredients for large indoor and outdoor sculpture installations. Lo received her MFA in sculpture from Taipei’s National Taiwan University of the Arts in 2010.
