While hundreds of museums and galleries across the country and around the world are currently closed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a number of sculpture parks, gardens, and arboretums remain open to visitors, offering valuable spaces to connect with art and the outdoors.
It’s Personal: A Conversation with James Surls
Winner of the 2020 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award It’s been a long, strange trip over the last six decades for James Surls. His wood, bronze, and steel sculptures evoke a sense of ancient, present, and future worlds, from earthly landscapes to outer space, from visible nature to the inner eye.
Public Sector, Gallery Weekend Beijing
BEIJING 798 Art Zone “Form | Impression,” the Public Sector exhibition in Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, China’s largest contemporary cultural district, opened on May 22 in conjunction with Gallery Weekend Beijing 2020.
Inhabiting Resilience: A Conversation with Rita Simoni
Rita Simoni produces the kinds of works that don’t fit into ordinary spaces. Her multidisciplinary practice covers the entire spectrum of visual art, from painting, photography, video, and digital design to sculpture and site-specific installation. Originally trained as an architect, Simoni, who is based in Argentina, focuses her attention on the creative possibilities of color and space.
Beverly Pepper
NEW YORK Marlborough Gallery Over the course of a prolific seven-decade-long career, Beverly Pepper, who died in February 2020, proved herself a virtuoso of three-dimensionality, regardless of material. Marlborough’s recent “concise investigation” covering 50 years’ worth of Pepper’s work (from 1968 to 2018) offered everything from Cor-ten steel to green onyx, from oxidized copper to polished chrome.
Object Lessons: Mildred Howard
When I got this commission from the County of Sacramento and the Sacramento Airport, they requested a house—something consistent with my many previous house-shaped sculptures and installations. I began by conducting research, reading the letters of those who came to California during the Gold Rush.
Ai Weiwei
ST. LOUIS Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University “Bare Life,” which inaugurated the Kemper Museum’s newly expanded and renovated galleries, operated on several levels at once. First and foremost, this dense and multifaceted exhibition was a retrospective of Ai Weiwei’s work from the past 15 years; dozens of works in an array of media addressed themes ranging from human rights to political dissent to globalism.
Anxious Objects: A Conversation with Anna Reading
The futuristic blends with the primordial in the work of British sculptor Anna Reading. Her otherworldly forms call to mind remnants of a crashed space capsule overgrown with foreign matter or submerged manmade structures that have succumbed to marine accretions.
Paula Winokur: Formative Landscapes
Paula Winokur’s sculptures, which resonate with dignified authority and considered focus, take porcelain to its limits and transform it beyond expectations. Organic forms built with a sense of restraint declare her resolve through thoughtful attention to detail.
Trevor King: Understanding Utility
Trevor King’s ceramic sculptures aim to understand utility. Over the course of his career, he has quietly but steadily been building a body of work that is autobiographical, sure in its handling, and aware of the contemporary art scene.
