On the Cover:
Vanessa German, installation view of “$lang: Short Language in Soul,” at Gavlak, Los Angeles (in collaboration with Pavel Zoubok Fine Art), 2019. Photo: Ed Mumford, Courtesy the artist and Gavlak Los Angeles.
Editor’s Letter:
This issue of Sculpture, the second put together remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic, also comes on the heels of the international Black Lives Matter protests. Although all the articles here were assigned and completed long beforehand, this edition very much reflects the current spirit of outrage and dialogue. The artists you will find here fall along a spectrum of oppositional intensity, yet each contributes to the necessary discussions the global “we” are having about exclusion, oppression, and intolerance. Vanessa German seamlessly combines art—in the form of performance, installation, portrait collages, and her “power figures”—and activism in Pittsburgh. In his boat installations, reliefs of Queen Elizabeth II, and other sculptures and installations, Scottish artist Hew Locke addresses colonialism and the legacies of slavery. Adejoke Tugbiyele, who lives in Burkina Faso, has written that her sculptural pieces “are charged with symbolic meanings that bridge and layer historical, cultural, and political ideas around race, gender, sexuality with that of class, economy, sex politics, and religion.” Luanne Martineau employs textiles to make objects that explore the “politics of the body,” while Joana Vasconcelos, among other aspects of her practice, reimagines crochet as a feminist act. Together, the artists here represent a congregation of voices speaking truth to power and to us all. —Daniel Kunitz
