On the Cover:
Beili Liu, The Mending Project, 2011. Iron scissors, fabric, thread, needle, table, and chair, detail of performance. Photo: Rino Pizzi.
Editor’s Letter:
In an interview this month, Texas artist Beili Liu says, “I’m always combining the personal with the political. Although my work appears abstract, it’s conceptually based, and my materials speak to the concept.” Her installations, made up of repeated objects such as tarred feathers and scissors, reflect on her experience as a Chinese immigrant. Indeed, all the artists featured here can be said to take a personal approach to the political. Young Joon Kwak explores mutability, conceiving of their art practice “as similar to how I think of all bodies as assemblages of all different forms of matter—not just physical, but political, environmental…with the potential for unknown transformations to occur in between all of these fragments.” Glenda León, who divides her time between Havana and Madrid, makes work out of her body and other materials to reflect on our common aspirations, how we yearn for change. Jay Critchley draws on his activist background to create semi-satirical companies that foster socially useful ends. And Polish-born American Krzysztof Wodiczko “re-animates” public monuments, projecting the faces and voices of marginalized, oppressed, or forgotten people onto them.
Putting an individual, human face to a monument; exploring how particular bodies or hopes are politicized: such efforts speak to our abiding desire for transformation. At Sculpture, we aim not only to give voice to this longing but to chart the many, mutable, and compelling forms it takes. —Daniel Kunitz
