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.
Paul Kos
NAPA, CALIFORNIA di Rosa Paul Kos’s career as a major figure of Bay Area Conceptualism began during an extended visit to di Rosa, back when it was still a fledgling vineyard and Rene di Rosa, its owner and founder, was beginning to accumulate what would become the world’s largest collection of Northern California art. In 1968, Kos—then 26 and still in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute—spent a good part of the summer grafting vines and building sculpture.
Elmgreen & Dragset
TEL AVIV Tel Aviv Museum of Art “Powerless Structures,” part of a series begun in 1997, was also the title of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s first exhibition in Israel and the third installment of “Biography,” a joint project with the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo and the National Gallery of Denmark. Influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault, Elmgreen & Dragset view power as an everyday phenomenon, with the ability to change or evolve into something else. The “Powerless Structures” specifically critique accepted procedures and systems relating to public spaces and institutions.
Sweat Equity: A Conversation with Ruben Ochoa
Sandra Wagner: You frequently use cement slabs lifted from gallery floors, some raised on tall rebar legs, as in the exhibition “Crooked Under the Weight” at SITE Santa Fe (2009). The site-specific photomural Fwy Wall Extraction (2006–07) alludes to what lies beneath a massive retaining wall, and Extruded Masses (2013) consists of a tower of
Slippery Things: A Conversation with Anne Hardy
Anne Hardy’s architectonic forms and assemblages of decorated debris appear as alien building blocks governed as much by a calculated configuration of misshapen objects as by Duchampian conceits. Part of a poetic platform, these elements, when combined, are meaningful in the moment, yet curiously irrelevant.
The Creator Does Nothing: A Conversation with herman de vries
herman de vries (who deliberately renders his name in lowercase) lives in Eschenau, Germany, close to the Steigerwald. This forest-and nature in general- is his studio. According to de vries, nature is our primary reality. Not only is it the place where he creates his works, it is also his subject, because he addresses the
Behind the Scenes: A Conversation with Mark Dion
Mark Dion creates sculptures and installations that explore and critique the history of science and institutional representations of nature. For decades, he has attempted to “understand the ideas that have shaped our social history of nature and have led us to our current suicidal relationship to the global environment.”
Heroic Inventions: A Conversation with Lewis Colburn
Philadelphia artist Lewis Colburn creates whimsical objects and installations that embrace a histrionic sensibility of character- with materials playing the starring role. From elaborately staged photographs and performances to meticulously sculpted objects and museum simulations of Americana, his work exudes fabricated stories and generalized dictations of history.
Zipporah Camille Thompson
ATLANTA Whitespec Project Space Started a few years ago by a documentary about the moon’s gradual drift away from the earth’s gravitational pull, Zipporah Camille Thompson began to reflect on the moon’s significance and its scientific and archetypal role in human life. The deflection of the moon, however slight, she realized, is a crisis meriting much more attention. Inspired by moonscapes and the satellite’s effects on myriad aspects of the earth’s diurnal patterns—from tides and weather to births and suicides—Thompson’s recent work delves into personal experiences, as well as the oneiric realms of myth and alchemy, to probe the mysteries of life, death, and renewal as symbolized by the moon, particularly its darksome phases.
