The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s public art program has consistently fostered the creation and installation of temporary public art throughout the five boroughs. Robert Lobe recently joined a long list of distinguished artists who have exhibited in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, among them, Roxy Paine and Mark di Suvero.
Zimoun combines ordinary objects (including cardboard boxes, plastic bags, and old furniture) with mechanical components (such as dc-motors, wires, microphones, speakers, and ventilators) to create extraordinary hybrid sculptures that fuse the normative order of generative systems with the disorder of random events.
Diana Al-Hadid was born in Aleppo, Syria, spent most of her childhood in Ohio, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her most recent work draws inspiration from sources as varied as Renaissance tapestries, with their unusual spatial tensions, Jacopo Pontormo’s strange fresco of the Visitation in the atrium of SS.
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY Index Gianluca Bianchino is an Italian-born sculptor who studied in New Jersey and stayed, keeping his studio in the Garden State. He is part of a burgeoning, energetic group of artists living and showing in Newark and Jersey City, places not far from New York but offering far cheaper rents.
JERUSALEM The Israel Museum There is strong justification for exhibiting works by Joseph Beuys and Tadeusz Kantor in tandem, since their work shares many features. Both of these 20th-century greats extended the borders of art across a range of media, from actions, happenings, and theater performances to lectures, discussions, and more.
CAGUAS, PUERTO RICO AREA There are times when an artist unexpectedly breaks away from a trend. Puerto Rico, an island with many creative minds but few institutional frameworks to support them, has recently been the site for works that either confront its ambiguous political situation rather directly and simplistically or limit themselves to representations of tropical clichés.
NEW YORK Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Ernesto Neto’s woven, hanging sculptures show us how a playful understanding of Modernist aesthetics can advance the art of sculpture. His works in this show, crocheted from polypropylene and polyester cord, hung from the ceiling, in some cases filled with plastic balls, which acted as a balance and also as a floor for visitors to rather shakily walk across.
BASEL Beyeler Foundation Visitors strolling through Jeff Koons’s recent exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation looked happy and comfortable. It didn’t matter our age or how serious, critically involved, or skeptical we were when we entered; once inside, we looked at Koons’s works without prejudice, contagious smiles lighting up our faces, our eyes shining with childish joy.
PHILADELPHIA Grizzly Grizzly As part of the city-wide festival Fiber Philadelphia 2012, two Detroit-based artists collaborated on an installation synthesizing reactive video projection and physical structure. Annica Cuppetelli, a fiber artist concerned with issues of space, interaction, and materiality, worked with media artist and programmer Cristobal Mendoza, whose interests lie in the intersection of technology and the personal.
Like much post-conceptual art, a new group of works by the nomadic, Italian-born Not Vital rejects explicit interpretation in favor of an open approach to meaning. These sculptures, which recall landscapes, animals, and body fragments, exist in a half-familiar, but distorted world beyond the everyday.
