Peering into the hotel rooms of the budget Patricia Hotel in Vancouver was an indelicate intrusion into the most private of intimacies: a naked mother nursed her infants on a double bed while, in another room, a young couple in post-coital languor embraced under disheveled sheets.
Jim Sanborn
WASHINGTON, DC American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center Best known for his challenging, coded bronze work in the courtyard of the CIA, Jim Sanborn still relishes secrets. His recent exhibition, “Without Provenance: The Making of Contemporary Antiquity,” presented a new puzzle: Why fill the museum’s third floor with an “auction preview” of stone works from “ancient Khmer?”
Fujiko Nakaya
BOSTON Emerald Necklace Parks Fog x FLO, Fujiko Nakaya’s first installation in Boston, was commissioned by the Emerald Necklace Conservancy to honor its 20th anniversary and to celebrate the ring of public parks created by Frederick Law Olmsted and dedicated in 1891.
Heidi Bucher
LONDON Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art Is memory embedded in place? Can a room hold vestiges of trauma? Heidi Bucher’s eerily beautiful latex casts of doors, window casings, and rooms pose such questions.
FRONT International
CLEVELAND, OHIO Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art Native Clevelanders, like myself, are used to national derision, enduring myriad “mistake on the lake” jokes. So, it was clearly evident to us that FRONT founder Fred Bidwell and artistic director Michelle Grabner intended to turn those Rust Belt assumptions around.
Sculpture by the Sea
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Bondi Beach Sculpture by the Sea’s 22nd edition featured 107 sculptures by Australian and international artists that merged almost organically with the prehistoric sandstone rock formations along the stretch of beach, with the grand blues of the sky and the sea as backdrops.
Serious Frills: A Conversation with Phyllis Green
For the past 40 years, Phyllis Green has questioned the nature of objects and their social context, using a wide range of materials—video, fiberglass, steel, concrete polymer, wood, textiles, polyurethane foam—and fabrication techniques such as hand construction, sewing, and digital milling.
A Large-Scale Homage
Robert Murray says that after he arrived in New York as a young man in 1960, “I forgot to go home.” It’s a good thing he didn’t return to his native Saskatoon, for he would likely not have begun to produce the sculptures for which he is now forever known.
Cecilia Vicuña
BERKELEY AND BROOKLYN Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archives, and Brooklyn Museum The turbulent history of South America—from the advanced civilizations of the pre-colonial era up to the ravaged present—lies at the heart of Cecilia Vicuña’s work.
Cathy Wilkes: Ugly Archetypes
Cathy Wilkes, a 2008 Turner Prize nominee, has raised eyebrows with her highly charged arrangements of commonplace items and personal artifacts. Formally precise and essentially diaristic, her work employs a difficult and coded visual language that succeeds in exerting a strong psychological pull, creating shared experience from isolation.
