Seattle Frye Art Museum “Your Feast Has Ended” brought together three young sculptors who share cross-disciplinary approaches to tribal identity, gender, and the social and political status of minorities. Co-curators Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and Scott Lawrimore gave the artists generous latitude: each piece was accompanied by a lengthy, detailed explanation, often accusatory, hectoring, and contradictory.
Zhang Dali
New York Klein Sun Gallery For decades now, Beijing-based Zhang Dali has been making art that challenges China’s status quo, which (most of the Chinese art world would agree) needs to be challenged. His graffiti and cut-out outlines of his head in the ruins of Beijing buildings—destroyed to make room for new architecture—were signs of
Rebecca Horn
Cambridge, Massachusetts Harvard Art Museums Rebecca Horn’s Flying Books under Black Rain Painting, a commissioned, performance-based installation at the Prescott Street entrance of the recently re-branded Harvard Art Museums, is visible from the street, as is Ai Weiwei’s multimedia installation 258 Fake.
Patrick Nickell
Santa Monica Rosamund Felsen Gallery If Patrick Nickell were a writer, his arena would be neither poetry nor prose, but stream-of-consciousness. Using a vocabulary of wire, plaster, and paint, he realizes a hybrid, chimerical territory consisting of partly fictional, partly poetic, quasi-realist objects made credible through their irregular, oddly elegant surfaces and idiosyncratic imagery.
Vincent Barré: Forms of Humanism
May 27, 2014 saw the official inauguration of La Journée de la Résistance—Resistance Day—in France. The newly established holiday honors the heroism of those individuals, celebrated and anonymous, who, in the words of a speaker at the dedication ceremony, “chose liberty over barbarism,” during the World War II Nazi occupation of France.
John Greer: Staging Civilization
For John Greer, civilizations are like distant islands immersed in a sea of time. He developed an early interest in how memory and the human tendency to shape forms into symbolic ideotypes (regardless of culture) result in the repeated creation of certain typologies.
Luisa Rabbia: A Sense of Kinship
Luisa Rabbia employs the human form to express existential themes, ranging from physical and spiritual transformation to the interconnectivity of all beings. Despite its figurative aspects, her eclectic body of work, consisting of sculptures, installations, drawings, and animated videos, tends toward abstraction.
Aljoscha: Germinating New Art
Dateline: Tuesday, March 17, 2009. At Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, a young man moves toward Portable War Memorial (1968), a large installation or, more precisely, an environment created by Edward Kienholz in obvious reference to the Vietnam War.
Daniel Wiener: Trojan Horses
When a natural environment is confronted with contaminants, it responds with instability and disorder. One of the byproducts of contamination is “outcrossing,” a process that allows recessive traits to migrate across a population, adding diversity and strengthening certain characteristics.
Identity in Dialogue: A Conversation with Emilie Brzezinski
Family Trees, a Hide and Seek Story, 2010. Born in Geneva, Switzerland, of Czech parents, Emilie Benes Brzezinski has lived in the United States since her childhood. Though her artistic career goes back to the early ’70s, a period in which she experimented with a variety of media, including plastic, latex, and wood fiber, she