NEW YORK MoMA “Surrounds: 11 Installations,” part of MoMA’s reopening schedule last year, featured a selection of works from the collection that renegotiate and reimagine architectonic boundaries of display. Visitors ascending to the sixth floor were greeted by Sheila Hicks’s Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column (2013–14), an acrylic fiber work occupying the full height of the space.
Rachel Harrison
NEW YORK Whitney Museum of American Art Rachel Harrison’s sculptures possess a wild and perplexing eclecticism that makes it difficult to ascertain the exact meaning and emotional tenor of her imagery. In her assemblages—which could be called monuments since they memorialize both a series of actions and a juxtaposition of things on a large scale—ideas and processes coming out of sculpture, painting, architecture, popular culture, and the banality of everyday life are placed side by side or on top of each other, without, or at least rarely, becoming one.
Material Space: A Conversation with Sheela Gowda
Claude Monet saw painting entirely as an act of abstraction, even with his easel rooted en plein air, saying of representation, “Try to forget what objects you have before you—a tree, a house, a field.
Dislocations: A Conversation with Elana Herzog
Elana Herzog’s work explores how civilizations merge, overlap, and sometimes become as threadbare as a piece of cloth. Her practice involves subtraction and addition, deconstructing everyday materials then adding patterns, staple tracks, and other gestures to create uniquely tactile objects.
Shoplifter / Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir
REYKJAVÍK Reykjavík Art Museum Shoplifter’s complex sculptures, murals, drawings, and intimate installations numinously transform the places that contain them. Her themes vary from beauty to fashion, mythology, and more recently, the earth.
Held Firm: A Conversation with Ramekon O’Arwisters
Sculptor and social practice artist Ramekon O’Arwisters has lived in the Bay Area since the early 1990s, but he was born and raised in North Carolina. In 2012, his deep connection to African American craft traditions led him to develop the Crochet Jam, an experience of shared making using outsize crochet hooks and strips of
Chiachio & Giannone: Love is in the Air
Familia “queer,” tal como ellos mismos se definen, Daniel Giannone y Leo Chiachio son una pareja de artistas argentinos unidos no solamente por el amor que se profesan el uno al otro sino por su amor al arte, llevando a cabo hace décadas una obra conjunta que los tiene como protagonistas—juntos a sus tres “hijos mascotas”—donde la pintura deviene bordado.
Sarah Sze: Fractured Infinities
Little things mean a lot to Sarah Sze. In her kaleidoscopic installations teeming with found objects, disjunctive arrays of familiar ephemera—tied, clamped, taped, and cantilevered with deft architectural and engineering savvy—hold aloft fragile universes. Sze’s work is about the finite and the infinite, the mundane and the sublime, time and timelessness.
Nicole Eisenman: Walking Together
Until recently, Nicole Eisenman was best known as a figurative painter. Crafted with thick painterly brushstrokes, the bodies in her paintings oscillate between representation and abstraction, bright colors intertwined with neutrals and, more often than not, the pallid yellow skin tones we associate with seasickness.
A Conversation with Shirazeh Houshiary
In her paintings, sculptures, animations, and site-specific installations, Iranian-born artist Shirazeh Houshiary often employs a process of meticulous repetition in order to create forms reminiscent of webs or networks. While her paintings weave together minute lines of words in Arabic script, generating abstract waves in pictorial space, her newest sculptures, built from glass bricks, physically