What to remember and how to remember: these are the key concerns in Liana Strasberg’s work, which unearths and reworks images and symbols from the past in order to create what the Argentinian artist calls a “new memory file.”
Fragments of Interest: A Conversation with Marion Verboom
Complexly layered in thought and process, Marion Verboom’s works inhale cultural histories in order to exhale new-era imagery. By turns minimal, architectural, organic, and ornamental, her forms shape contemporary time into a fresh visual alphabet and run it A to Z through mythic narratives—from Aztec gods to the progeny of Zeus.
Andy Moerlein
BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery To walk into Andy Moerlein’s “wood stone poem” (on view through June 6, 2021) is to enter a magical space, filled with fanciful and ecstatic forms stretching out in welcome. A three-foot-tall, 60-year-old Ficus retusa bonsai from Taiwan at the entrance to the exhibition offers a clue to Moerlein’s recent explorations, which continue his longtime interest in Asian art and poetry.
Buscando la Geometría Universal: Una Conversación con Hernán Salvo
Egresado del IUNA con profesorado de escultura y un postgrado en dibujo realizado en la Universidad Torcuato Di Tella guiado por el reconocido artista Eduardo Stupia, Hernán Salvo desarrolla su obra siempre nutriéndose de los conocimientos que le aportan los grupos de análisis dirigidos por artistas y teóricos y las residencias internacionales.
A Conversation with Kenseth Armstead
Kenseth Armstead’s videos, drawings, and sculptures draw upon and re-envision the legacy of Africans and their diaspora in the United States. In his decade-long “Spook” project, Armstead explored the life and legacy of James Armistead Lafayette, a double-agent spy for George Washington during the American Revolution.
Poetry in Motion: A Conversation with Mildred Howard and Johanna Poethig
Cultural Corridor/Urban Flow is a nine-and-a-half-mile-long public artwork on the first Bus Rapid Transit Line in Oakland, California. Designed by Johanna Poethig and Mildred Howard, with Peter Richards and Joyce Hsu, the line’s 34 stations are visually connected with a “ribbon” of words and images rendered in laser-cut aluminum on handrail panels and decorative windscreens.
Theaster Gates
NEW YORK Gagosian For Theaster Gates, the gallery operates not as a place for pleasurable viewing but as a performative space of social practice focused on cultural recuperation and empowerment.
Edoardo Tresoldi: Framing Emptiness
A former scenographer who helped to design backdrops for other people’s cinema productions, Italian sculptor Edoardo Tresoldi has since found success by putting his own work center stage. His large-scale, seemingly fragile sculptures are predominantly constructed from wire mesh, a medium that reinforces their ephemeral, mirage-like quality.
Kapwani Kiwanga
ROTTERDAM Kunstinstituut Melly Kapwani Kiwanga’s recent exhibition featured three installations and a hanging cloth work—all addressing strategies of resistance, from historical slavery to the American civil rights era, to today’s anti-racist movements and demonstrations. Botany played an unexpected, and key, role in all but one of these new works, as Kiwanga drew out the histories of various plants smuggled into America by enslaved Africans.
Dubious Origins: A Conversation with Sanford Biggers
By remixing references and aesthetic values from multiple cultures and time periods, Biggers reconsiders questions of authenticity, art historical authority, and provenance, infusing his hybridized forms—which he calls “objects for a future ethnography”—with overlapping and sometimes diametrically opposed meanings that demand to be grasped simultaneously.
