As the finale of the Cultural Olympiad, the London 2012 Festival fulfilled its pledge to create a nationwide celebration of the arts in conjunction with the Olympic Games. This kind of celebration is designed to appease people, make them feel involved and patriotic.
The Potency of Ordinary Objects: A Conversation with Liz Magor
Vancouver-based Liz Magor uses found materials, often from the domestic sphere, as a springboard for investigating the social and emotional life of objects. In mining their history, use, and relationship to the body, she molds, casts, and alters them to explore issues of authenticity, replication, consumption, waste, value, and status.
The Meditative Eye: The Sculpture of Ron Mehlman
If not enough has been written about the sculptures of Ron Mehlman, it might be because they absolutely insist on direct visual engagement. These contemplative objects fashioned from resistant elements (stone, steel, and glass) and combined with ephemeral ones (water and light) are best approached in silence.
Personal Histories: A Conversation with Do Ho Suh
Do Ho Suh’s Fallen Star is a 70-ton house teetering off the roof of the Engineering School at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Living and working in New York, London, and Seoul, Suh has created a body of work that consistently addresses tension—between home and migration, individual and collective, reality and illusion.
Frieze Art Fair Sculpture Park
NEW YORK Randall’s Island Park The arrival of London’s huge and trendy Frieze Art Fair was the New York City art world event of May 2012. A long, subtly slithering, gigantic white tent was erected on Randall’s Island for the occasion, to accommodate the gallerists’ individual booths.
Thinking About Things We Can’t See: A Conversation with Tony Cragg
From plastic bits of detritus orchestrated into almost-geometric form to meticulously choreographed, shifting compositions rendered in wood and bronze, Tony Cragg has turned sculpture on its ear. His work has pushed the medium in new directions, and his experiments with materials continue to evolve, expanding notions of sculpture’s unseen, inner energies and values.
“Carved and Whittled Sculpture: American Folk Art Walking Sticks from the Hill Collection”
COLUMBUS, OHIO Columbus Museum of Art Former Cranbrook Academy of Art sculptor-in-residence Michael Hall has challenged art world conventions for more than four decades. Though he has created a significant body of work during that time, his efforts as a critic, curator, and collector have been arguably more influential.
China Blue
NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND Newport Art Museum Over the last 10 years, sound has established itself on solid footing, solid enough to be considered seriously by museums and critics as another form of sculpture. During this same period, China Blue, a forerunner in the so-called contemporary sound art movement, began to think about scientifically mining this territory in the most original and unorthodox ways.
David Askevold
OTTAWA, CANADA National Gallery of Canada As David Askevold’s recent retrospective “Once Upon a Time in the East” demonstrated, Pop, Minimalism, and media culture could all be part of conceptual art.
Antony Gormley
SAN GIMIGNANO, ITALY Galleria Continua San Gimignano, a historic town in the heart of Tuscany, recently hosted an absorbing exhibition of new and older works by Antony Gormley. At the heart of the show was Vessel, a site-specific work conceived for the former theater and cinema that forms the central part of the labyrinthine Galleria Continua space.
