BEXHILL-ON-SEA, EAST SUSSEX, U.K. De La Warr Pavilion Renee So’s exhibition “Ancient and Modern” centered on themes of gender, playfully upending preconceived ideas about crafts such as knitting, weaving, and ceramics. The show, which followed So’s residency at the West Dean College of Arts and Conservation, demonstrated her joyful experimentation across media and disregard of traditional art/craft hierarchies.
AAPI
Hayoon Jay Lee
NEW YORK Gallery 456 “Eternal Mother,” a recent show of painting, sculpture, and performance by Korean-born, New York-based multimedia artist Hayoon Jay Lee, demonstrated a remarkable merger of Asian content and Western contemporary art methodologies.
Liu Wei
CLEVELAND Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland “Invisible Cities,” Liu Wei’s ambitious two-part exhibition, took its name from Italo Calvino’s poetic novel recounting an imaginary conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, who asks the explorer to describe the cities he has seen on his travels.
Vessels of Life: A Conversation with Manav Gupta
Manav Gupta affirms the age-old sanctity of earth and clay, assembling everyday objects made by potters from across India to create huge installations that convey hope, passion, and the journey and transience of life.
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.
Anne Duk Hee Jordan: Changes
Anne Duk Hee Jordan takes evolution and adaptation as her primary themes, traveling on a personal odyssey from the Neanderthal era into an imaginary vision of a post-Anthropocene future of mechanical anthropomorphic hybrids that she’s dubbed Homo-Stupidus.
Ruth Asawa
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI Pulitzer Arts Foundation While “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work” did not present her life experience idealistically, her creative, ethical response to her experience and her tenacious devotion to labor became almost transcendent models of work-arounds for obstruction.
