New York Salon 94 Rashid Johnson’s “Our Kind of People” presented two facing installations — Sweet Sweet Runner and Watch Out—and two competing narratives, The first story, in the Afrocentric Sweet Sweet Runner, suggested achievement, domestic order, and upward mobility.
Willard Tucker
Cleveland The Sculpture Center A tangle of camera tripods, copper rods, and jerry-rigged, crackling electrical connections presides over one side of a windowless gallery, like a lightning-blasted tree. This strange hybrid stands sentry amid rows of cotton bolls, picked at historic plantations in Tennessee and now sprouting from the ends of rusty welded steel stalks.
Catherine Grisez
Seattle Traver Gallery “Lick,” a term normally reserved for gustatory treats like ice cream cones, was appropriated by North- west artist Catherine Grisez as the title of her recent exhibition, where it was used to suggest wounds, orrather, the healing thereof.
Maria Nepomuceno
London Victoria Miro Gallery Climbing the stairs into Maria Nepomuceno’s recent exhibition was like entering a lush clearing in the Amazon rainforest of her native Brazil, complete with a carnival of bright, vibrant colors; sensuous, slightly sinister shapes resembling fleshy, carnivorous plants; a hammock, perhaps made from jungle creepers by a passing Indian hunter-gatherer; and
Jen Pepper
Syracuse, New York Everson Museum of Art There is a moment at the top of a leap when we are neither ascending nor descending. It’s a weightless moment full of coiled kinetic energy when something is about to happen—something either momentous or inconsequential (supposing that energy has no consequence).
Herb Rosenberg
Akron, Ohio Emily Davis Gallery, University of Akron Herb Rosenberg’s interactive installation Dialogue with an Ancient Forest, which was selected as the first solo exhibition at New Jersey’s new Perth Amboy Gallery Center for the Arts (PAGCA), recently appeared at the University of Akron’s Emily Davis Gallery; additional venues are scheduled for 2011.
Strange Encounters in Space and Time: A Conversation with Lee Ufan
Lee Ufan is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that emphasizes process, materials, and the experiential engagement of viewer and site. Born in Seoul, Korea, he has lived in Japan since 1956 and now divides his time between Kamakura and Paris.
Christian Boltanski
Paris and Val-de-Marne Grand Palais and Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne Christian Boltanski, one of France’s most significant contemporary artists, will represent his country in the 2011 Venice Biennale. Born during World War II, Boltanski has spent his career exploring the horrors, consequences, and mixed legacies of that time, particularly the Nazi occupation of France.
James Gilbert
Dallas Dallas Contemporary “Warnings & Instructions,” James Gilbert’s mammoth show at the newly relocated Dallas Contemporary, addressed airport safety fanaticism and the loss of individual privacy. The nose, butt, and fuselage of a disarticulated pink airplane sprawled across the cavernous space, together with three pink and orange rafts (two rigged with sails and one with
