Serenity and a pervading stillness characterized Boaz Vaadia’s recent retrospective at Grounds For Sculpture. Admirably displayed both outdoors and in two major buildings, 125 works spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career fostered a psychological centering for the viewer.
Archive
The Void Is Never Empty: A Conversation with Gaspar Acebo
Gaspar Acebo, who trained in the fields of painting and drawing, combines these mediums with other techniques and disciplines, including photography. His work is perhaps best defined by its reflection on the interaction of plane and volume, the concept of emptiness serving as an engine that generates not neutral space, but a balance of forces
Michael Gitlin: Minimalist Lyricism
While the work of American Minimalist masters such as Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd has begun to seem slightly dated, it has not lost its impetus, and the early- and middle-period sculptures of these artists continue to challenge us.
Why Did Petah Coyne’s Work Make Me Cry?
Eleven years ago, I wept openly in the middle of Petah Coynes touring survey “Above and Beneath the Skin.” Within compulsory, regulated social systems the ones that determine what options are available for a subject’s action and identification uncontrolled crying is a breach of those mores, a breakdown and demonstration of the effects of life
Brian Dettmer: Paging Through Time
How can history, memory, and cultural knowledge become the materials of sculpture? In Brian Dettmer’s hands, books that have lost their original function do just that. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference volumes represent the physicality of gathered knowledge with their moving pages, solid bindings, and words and illustrations.
Taryn Simon: The Spectacle of Loss
In the fall of 2016, Taryn Simon presented a unique interactive work, An Occupation of Loss, at the Park Avenue Armory in collaboration with Artangel, London. (Loss, in the work’s title, represents the fugitive nature of things, a theme that runs through all of Simon’s work.)
Lynda Benglis: I Choose My Dreams
Lynda Benglis was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2017. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Over the course of her long career, Lynda Benglis has defied easy categorization.
Harry Leigh
OLD WESTBURY, NEW YORK Amelie A. Wallace Gallery Octogenarian Harry Leigh has made a long career of constructing Minimalist sculptures that are highly evocative in their Shaker-like simplicity. Educated at SUNY, Buffalo, and at Teacher’s College, Columbia University – supplemented by stints of private study with Peter Voulkos and Richard Pousette-Dart, and numerous stays at Yaddo and Mac – Dowell Colony residencies – Leigh is clearly well-trained and historically versed in late-modern and contemporary art.
Drew Conrad
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Kustera Projects Red Hook Drew Conrad’s exhibition, “The Cold Wake,” offered a view of Red Hook through a literary lens. Using H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror of Red Hook” as a launching point, the Red Hookbased artist researched local historical events to construct a sitespecific installation and self-portrait. Conrad took new materials, like lumber and metal, then aged them through a labor-intensive process of oxidizing, soiling, breaking, and shaping. Dwelling No. 11 (Jacobs Ladder) suggested a half-sunken dock and a boat on the precipice of collapse.
Kennard Sculpture Trail
NEWTON MASSACHUSETTS Kennard Park Because few venues can, or will, show large-scale outdoor sculpture, a community tends to forget how much talent is available to be tapped. Curator Allison Newsome isn’t letting Boston forget. It took three years of petitioning, permitting, and organizing, but a littleknown green space on Newton’s south side recently hosted a display of outdoor art of surprising quality. Although Newsome stressed the goal of developing works inspired by the site, not every piece conformed. The epitome of the idea was best expressed in Jean Blackburn’s Kennard Web.
