ATLANTA Whitespace Gallery
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Documenta 14
ATHENS GREECE At the opening press conference of Documenta 14, “Learning From Athens,” artistic director Adam Szymczyk stated, “The great lesson is that there are no lessons.” These elusive words may well have been a disclaimer for an exhibition that rambled on without aim. Such large events are difficult to manage in general, but Documenta’s Athens endeavor required viewers to accept much of the responsibility for realizing the show’s potential and to make a sizable time commitment to text-based art.
Rachel Beach
CHARLOTTETOWN PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND, CANADA Confederation Centre of the Arts Much discussion about the history of 20th-century sculpture has focused on its emergence from under the shadow of painting. With Minimalism’s return to the object, the conversation with painting suddenly seemed irrelevant. Yet, as with so much in art, conversations never truly end, they evolve and spiral in new directions. The work of Brooklyn artist Rachel Beach appears, at first glance, to be a manner of painting in threedimensional space.
“/spek-tr m/ variance of sculpture and form”
KANSAS CITY Studios Inc The best group shows spark conversations between artworks, revealing new dimensions and offering fresh insights. “/spek-tr m/ variance of sculpture and form,” which showcased works by many of Kansas City’s best-known sculptors, did just that. Studios Inc is a nonprofit studio complex and residency program located just east of KC’s Crossroads Arts District. It maintains a collection consisting of works donated by resident artists as a condition of their three-year tenure. Studios Inc’s associate director, Robert Gann, drew from these holdings for “/spektr m/.”
Cody VanderKaay
ROCHESTER, MICHIGAN Oakland University Art Gallery The best group shows spark conversations between artworks, revealing new dimensions and offering fresh insights. “/spek-tr m/ variance of sculpture and form,” which showcased works by many of Kansas City’s best-known sculptors, did just that. Studios Inc is a nonprofit studio complex and residency program located just east of KC’s Crossroads Arts District. It maintains a collection consisting of works donated by resident artists as a condition of their three-year tenure. Studios Inc’s associate director, Robert Gann, drew from these holdings for “/spektr m/.”
Documenta 14
KASSEL AND MUNSTER Skulptur Projekte Munster Summer 2017 marked an art world trifecta, the Venice Biennale coinciding with Documenta (held every five years) and Skulptur Projekte Münster (held every 10 years). In Kassel and Münster, what began as modest municipal undertakings to reconnect postwar Germany with the global art community have become internationally recognized for their influence. Sources of great civic pride, these shows depart from Venice and the art fair model with their refreshing non-commercial slant.
Second Skins: A Conversation with Marcela Astorga
Marcela Astorga, an Argentine artist born in the province of Mendoza, creates work with both visual and conceptual impact. For the last 20 years, she has used art as a means to face issues of importance to her: violence, memory, identity, and construction/deconstruction as represented through architecture, as well as the marks that we leave
A Conversation with Sam Durant: Political Art Has Consequences
Los Angeles artist Sam Durant is accustomed to shining a spotlight on the sins of the world in his installations, sculptures, and gallery-sized drawings and photographs, but recently the spotlight turned on him. The creator of End White Supremacy (2008) and Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions (2005) found himself under attack by
In Search of Resonance: A Conversation with Susan Philipsz
Scottish artist Susan Philipsz has worked with sound for years, but her background is in sculpture. For her, the two fields have been intertwined from the beginning. When studying sculpture at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, in the early 1990s, she contemplated the physicality of producing sound, how
Working the Devil Out: Mitch Mitchell
Historically, sculpture has been an influence more than it has been influenced, though that changed with Modernism, when sculptors began to turn to other media, primarily painting, for inspiration. From Picasso, with the collage and Cubism, and Marcel Duchamp, with the readymade, to a host of color field and Abstract Expressionists, 20th century abstract sculpture
