KINDERHOOK, NEW YORK The School Gallerist Jack Shainman’s outpost of culture in upstate New York did a terrific job of exhibiting 50 years of work by the Ghana-born, Nigeria-based artist El Anatsui. Now in his 70s, he has had a long, prolific career fashioning shimmering panels out of bottle caps linked to each other with copper wire. After beginning his artistic career as a good painter, El Anatsui is now known as a remarkable sculptor. Early on, he worked with African ceramics.
Ruth Hardinger
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Long Island University Ruth Hardinger’s recent show, “The Basement Rocks,” arose out of her concern about how fuel extraction disturbs the earth’s foundational strata. Functioning like the best science fiction, Hardinger’s activist work projects well-founded fears into the near future, her totem-like sculptures acting as harbingers for anthro-induced ecological ruin. “The Basement Rocks” displayed an impulse toward immersive installation, although the sculptures themselves felt like individual studio experiments. Gray floors, ashen concrete sculptures, and the ovoid shape of the all-glass gallery all evoked a kind of post-industrial Zen garden.
Bill Georgenes
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO Santa Fe Community College Visual Arts Gallery Bill Georgenes’s recent work defies expectations. It is fresh and intensely focused. Made from cheap plastic toys, his constructions could be the fabrications of a young artist, yet Georgenes is a man in his mid-80s, who studied at Yale when Josef Albers was on the faculty. Georgenes’s early works were paintings, elegant and abstract, just what one would have expected from an artist with a Yale education. Yet 23 years ago, he began creating sculptures that were very different from anything he had previously made, finding his most personal creative voice.
Jay Critchley
PROVINCETOWN, MASSACHUSETTS Provincetown Art Association and Museum Jay Critchley creatively uses the codified capitalist convention of incorporation. As a CEO, he orchestrates his participation in public discourse, with fascinating outcomes regarding AIDS/HIV, nuclear energy, the carbon footprint, the impact of offshore sewage dumping, and development destabilization. His conceptualist activism is subversive. “Jay Critchley, Incorporated,” a recent retrospective curated by Bailey Bob Bailey, explored 30 years of interventionist practices.
“S, M, L, XL”
CHICAGO Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago “S, M, L, XL,” organized by Michael Darling, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, took its title from a Rem Koolhaas book of the same name—a 1,376-page tome, published in 1995 for OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), that contains essays, manifestos, diaries, fiction, travelogues, and reflections on the contemporary city as a place of change and ever-increasing scale. Unlike that innovative book, which was complex in scope and execution, this show was somewhat simplistic in its concept—it basically invited viewers to interact with sculpture.
“When You Cut into the Present the Future Leaks Out”
BRONX, NEW YORK Old Bronx Borough Courthouse Installed in the Old Bronx Borough Courthouse, a grand Beaux-Arts-style building built between 1905 and 1914 and undergoing renovation after it was closed for 37 years, “When You Cut into the Present the Future Leaks Out” featured the work of 26 artists invited by curator Regine Basha. Organized by No Longer Empty, a nonprofit group that presents curated exhibitions and public programs in underused spaces, the show took its title from William S. Burroughs.
Ruud Kuijer: Collage and Casting
At first sight, Ruud Kuijer’s “Waterworks,” seven monumental cast concrete constructions installed along the Amsterdam-Rhine canal, are a surprise. The enormous, pale “towers” seem unlikely in this nondescript, industrial area near the entrance to Utrecht harbor.
Flirting With Nature: A Conversation with Manuel Ameztoy
Argentine artist Manuel Ameztoy takes possession of architectural interiors, from museums to hotels, and even natural environments, establishing a subtle presence through delicate cutouts, abstract patterns, and vivacious colors. Though these works gently disappear, like everything ephemeral, they might reappear in other locations.
Spirit and Matter: A Conversation with Mildred Howard
Over the course of four decades, Mildred Howard has created rich and evocative work, taking common objects of daily life and infusing them with a spark that illuminates the underlying significance and historical weight of cultural forms.
Entering A Somewhat Random Universe: A Conversation with Renee Butler
Anyone who’s entered a darkened room and experienced a camera obscura might feel some deja vu inside a Renee Butler installation. Her work illuminates a wall or a structure with elements akin to that ancient optical effect real-world color, incremental movement, photographic detail, and in some cases, ambient sound.
