PORTLAND, MAINE Maine Jewish Museum A white taxi sat incongruously on the green lawn outside the Maine Jewish Museum. When visitors took a seat inside the cab, a heavily accented voice began relating a personal story of a journey taken from a far-off place to the streets of Portland, Maine. Irish, Italian, Greek, Eastern European, Bosnian, Somali, and Syrian immigrants have found their way to this northern seaport. Many of them were professionals, teachers, engineers, and physicians in their homelands, and then they found themselves driving cabs through Portland’s narrow streets as they transitioned to new lives in America.
Archive
Jeanne Jaffe
GLASSBORO, NJ Rowan University Art Gallery Nikola Tesla, the “genius inventor,” has been brought back to life on the page, stage, and screen; in Jeanne Jaffe’s room-size installation, his “spirit” animates multiple cast resin marionettes (some life-size and some miniature). Each figure references a chapter in Tesla’s life as seen from the outside and imagined from the inside. Created as an interdisciplinary fusion of art, science, history, theater, mythology, and psychology, Elegy for Tesla allows viewers to accompany and interact with “Tesla” by experiencing moments along his life’s journey.
Max Ernst
NEW YORK Paul Kasmin Gallery Chess Figures (1944), the wooden chess set that Max Ernst made while vacationing in Great River, Long Island, greeted visitors to “Max Ernst/Paramyths: Sculpture, 1934– 1967.” Like Marcel Duchamp, Ernst was a player of a game that conscripts intellectual wit to commandeer abstract warriors through never-ending configurations of battle. It’s play, but serious play, and that’s precisely how Ernst regarded his sculptural output—as a spirited interlude to overcome creative block.
Pablo Picasso
NEW YORK Museum of Modern Art Eighty years of Modernist bombast has masked Picasso’s work in hyperbole, diminishing comprehension and neglecting what’s most interesting about it. At this point in time, Picasso’s two-dimensional work is cliché, but his three-dimensional work astonishes. It is insanely compulsive, almost hallucinogenic. Immense biomorphic and figurative abstractions; bulbous, florid surfaces; huge bronzes impressed with irrational patterns; diagrammatic metal structures that resemble folded paper; steel cages—an enormous body of work that’s almost incomprehensible in its variety.
Rodrigo Valenzuela
SALT LAKE CITY CUAC Contemporary Art As presidential candidates muddle around in the public arena, failing to articulate a humane approach to immigration, the American public is left to wonder: Who else can take up the baton and defend the basic rights of migrant workers? We’ve all heard how laborers—from Mexican fruit pickers to Vietnamese salon workers—undertake perilous journeys only to face a profusion of obstacles once here. Perhaps most disconcerting is the apathy of the people around them.
Gregory Miguel Gómez & Rodrigo Nava
BRATTLEBORO, VT
Shawn Smith
ARLINGTON VIRGINIA Artisphere What is our relationship to the digital, and how is the digital impacting us? The answer for Shawn Smith is one pixel at a time. In his recent show, “Pixels, Predators, and Prey,” Smith mapped out the interaction between the natural and the digital, the real and the simulated, in 10 eye-popping sculptures of animals and, for the first time, humans. In his hands, clusters of painted wood sticks mutate into their subjects— a kind of 21st-century, dimensional pointillism on steroids.
Valérie Blass
VANCOUVER Catriona Jeffries One of the rewards of looking at contemporary art, and at sculpture in particular, is the opportunity to track, for want of a better description, the genealogy of the field and its many innovations. More than any other art form, sculpture deserves the historical distinction of being the most adaptive and experimental of artistic disciplines—if today’s sculpture seems set on redefining itself, it is in keeping with a longstanding tradition. Of late, it appears that artists are being mindful of the key formal and stylistic tropes of Modernism.
Simple Actions: A Conversation with Phyllida Barlow
Phyllida Barlow, one of the U.K.’s most prolific sculptors, creates large-scale installations that involve a process of crushing, wrapping, stretching, stacking, and rolling. Her practice is one of production and deconstruction, and she uses readily available materials, often discarding or recycling them for new projects.
Danh Vo
COLOGNE Museum Ludwig “Ydob eht ni mraw si ti,” the title of Danh Vo’s recent exhibition, was first growled in 1973 by a satanically possessed girl in The Exorcist. The phrase also represents the backward spelling of “It is warm in the body.” No medium or material typified the works in the show, but a strategic scattering of the photographs of Peter Hujar (1934–87) amplified Vo’s extended lament about human suffering. We the People, a 20-foot-tall, copper-plated iteration of Lady Liberty’s draped armpit, was the largest sculptural object.
