WASHINGTON, DC Transformer In 2004, Transformer launched its “Exercise” program—a peer critique and mentorship program culminating in short exhibitions for participating artists. As last year’s roster attested, the program continues to thrive as a dynamic incubator.
Ellsworth Kelly
BOSTON Museum of Fine Arts Boston Unlike most Ellsworth Kelly shows, “Ellsworth Kelly: Wood Sculpture” was all brown. This first exhibition devoted exclusively to the artist’s works in wood bypassed the early painted pieces to focus on sculptures that celebrate the color, texture, and grain of the unadorned material.
Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen
NEW YORK Chambers Fine Art For more than 10 years, the eminent Chinese artists Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen (who had achieved individual acclaim before they started to collaborate) have been constructing an enduring project based on the chopstick. Their first “Chopstick” exhibition in 2002, which celebrated their 10-year anniversary as a married couple, engaged the eating implement as a metaphor for the personal bonds that connect them.
Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE)
NEW YORK United States Mission to the United Nations In 2011, the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE) launched one of its most expansive and comprehensive installations of sculpture, located in the United States Mission to the United Nations. FAPE began in 1986 with an art and restoration project in Beijing.
Ligorano/Reese
NEW YORK Jim Kempner Fine Art “ICED,” Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese’s recent exhibition, had genuine political clout—a real achievement for this collaborating couple, since so much political art in America undermines itself with rhetorical overstatement and callow self-righteousness.
Liliana Porter
NEW YORK Hosfelt Gallery Although many artists incorporate figurines, toys, animals, and signs into their work, Liliana Porter’s take on this strategy stands out for its overtly political, international layers. For example, one work in her recent show, The Intruder, juxtaposes a crowd of over 50 figurines varying in size, era, material, and culture.
Alysia Fischer
CINCINNATI Manifest Gallery Alysia Fischer’s recent exhibition, “Consumption,” featured seven extraordinarily handsome works made from what she calls “diverted materials,” specifically inner tubes from a local landfill.
Paul Swenbeck
PHILADELPHIA Fleisher/Ollman Gallery For more than a decade, Paul Swenbeck has made cross-media work that materially explores the translation of marginalized practices into contemporary culture. His visual and theoretical sources range from the occult (he grew up in Salem, Massachusetts), folk expression, and pre-scientific phenomena to sci-fi illustration and the debunked psychoanalytic experiments of Wilhelm Reich.
Sonny Assu
WEST VANCOUVER, CANADA West Vancouver Museum Sonny Assu, an Aboriginal artist from Vancouver, is gaining attention for his reversal of early 20th-century art history. More than 100 years after Western artists “advanced” art by looking “back” at Aboriginal culture, Assu is turning to Western art to modernize Aboriginal traditions of the Northwest Coast.
Éamonn O’Doherty
DUBLIN Kevin Kavanagh Gallery About two weeks before this exhibition opened, I was sitting at the bedside of Éamonn O’Doherty in a Dublin cancer hospital. He had been given two months to live (though, in the end, he only got three weeks), but he faced dying in the same manner that he broached his sculpture: with impish and iconoclastic good humor, a lunchtime bottle of red wine, and a request that I do a “proper” interview with him, “proper” meaning a no-holds-barred, utterly indiscreet assassination of all those he considered morally contemptible in the world of art.
