Lenox, Massachusetts The Mount For 16 seasons, sculptor Ann Jon has organized outdoor exhibitions in Western Massachusetts, attracting increasingly able artists as time has gone on. The venues for SculptureNow have also changed, as the show migrated from the Berkshire Botanical Gardens to the streets of Stockbridge, Great Barrington, and Lenox.
“Return to Earth: Ceramic Sculpture of Fontana, Melotti, Miró, Noguchi, and Picasso”
Dallas Nasher Sculpture Center Though clay has been in use for about 25,000 years, it has been slow to find acceptance as a fine art material. Ceramic works, perhaps because of their craft connotations, have always seemed a little too friable, too unserious, and too, well, “craftsy.”
New Orleans Airlift’s Insouciant Vernacular Modernism
As arts organizations go, New Orleans Airlift is one of a kind. Following a multi-disciplinary trajectory that has often seemed more improvised than programmatic, it has staged a number of unusually broad-based events that blur the boundaries between object and performance, vernacular and contemporary art, local and global.
Policy of Truth: A Conversation with Fiona Foley
Imagine a proposed and completed public artwork recording the locations of 94 fire and flood disasters in Queensland, Australia; then imagine the unveiling of the work, as the artist reveals that the list doesn’t document natural disasters at all, but a series of 19th-century atrocities against indigenous peoples.
Light, Sky and Fire: A Conversation with Otto Piene
A pioneer of light and kinetic art, Otto Piene, who lives and works in Düsseldorf and Groton, Massachusetts, has been pursuing a utopian synthesis of aesthetics and science since the 1950s. After studying painting and art education at the Academy of Art in Munich and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, as well as philosophy at the University
Margo Sawyer: Synchronicities
Margo Sawyer’s work process is one of escalating complexity. She starts with specific grid formulas, determining proportions while drawing in Illustrator. Her drawings are further developed via CAD, establishing colors, dimensions, edge treatments, and the arrangement of sheet metal panels.
Carola Zech: Magnetic Attraction
Carola Zech, an Argentinian artist recently recognized with the Grand Prize of Honor at the 2013 National Salon of Visual Arts, combines sculpture, installation, and painting to create unique, frequently site-specific, magnetic structural systems. She entered the art world at the age of nine, when she started private classes in drawing, painting, and clay modeling.
The Object of Painting: A Conversation with Bill Thompson
Bill Thompson’s aquiline sculptures are meticulously executed: simple abstract shapes carved in rigid polyurethane foam coated and recoated with resin, sanded until pristine, then painted monochromatically in various shiny colors. This painstaking craftsmanship also carries over into elements never seen by viewers, including the belabored hanging mechanisms mounting the pieces to the wall and the
Carolee Schneemann: The Persistance of Her Memory
In 1959, Bard College suspended Carolee Schneemann—for “moral turpitude,” she says. “I painted a full-length frontal nude portrait of my partner, James Tenney.”1 It wasn’t until the early ’70s that Erica Jong could write Fear of Flying, extolling the “zipless fuck,” and Judy Chicago begin her iconic feminist installation, The Dinner Party.
Paul McCarthy: Rotten to the Core
Paul McCarthy’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s gigantic 18th Street space included sculpture carved out of blocks of walnut that were pieced together from dark and lighter segments of wood. From these composite blocks, McCarthy produced medium-size to colossal tchotchkes (a genre that is dear to him), thereby entering the arena in which Jeff Koons
