Sonia Gomes has been making radically intimate, fabric-based sculpture for three decades, in defiance of racism, ageism, and misogyny. Her story is the stuff of which art world myths are made, a story in which, against all odds, rags turn to riches, obscurity to worldwide recognition.
BHM
Moffat Takadiwa
LOS ANGELES Craft Contemporary The Anthropocene is the skeleton in the closet of 21st-century imagination. The consequences of more than a century of hyper-consumerism are everywhere apparent, inescapable, part of the environment and the air we breathe.
Theaster Gates
LONDON Whitechapel Gallery Though Gates is revealed as artist, educator, collector, curator, and shaman/preacher, this is not an exhibition about an individual: every object, down to the humblest brick, has a rich story, and Gates thrillingly connects us to each one and to their makers across millennia.
Paul S. Briggs
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS Lucy Lacoste Gallery At a time when irony is a mainstream aesthetic force and the art object is frequently made coherent via the glitter of popular culture, work such as Briggs’s is rare and strangely daring. Abstraction becomes a visual manifestation of poetry, bearing literary notions of metaphor and symbolism.
Veronica Ryan
BRISTOL, U.K. Spike Island “Along a Spectrum,” Veronica Ryan’s most ambitious U.K. show to date (on view through September 5, 2021), features a new body of work created during a two-year residency at Spike Island. Viewers entering the light and airy gallery space encounter a beguiling array of forms, many held within sumptuously colored netting in shades of orange, yellow, and lime-green.
Igshaan Adams
LONDON Hayward Gallery In the hands of Igshaan Adams, a sculpture is in endless evolution. As the South African artist explained during the opening of his current exhibition (on view through July 25, 2021), “My sculptures are a never-ending work. I add materials in different moments, and leave them aside in the studio for years at times because with my sculptures there is no intention or agenda. It is about trying out new ideas.”
Shinique Smith and the Politics of Fabric
Shinique Smith has often related how reading a 2002 article in The New York Times Magazine prompted a new sculptural language in her work. “How Susie Bayer’s T-Shirt Ended Up on Yusuf Mama’s Back” traces the journey of a used T-shirt from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Jinja, Uganda—part of a global trek of donated clothing from rich to poor countries.
A Conversation with Kenseth Armstead
Kenseth Armstead’s videos, drawings, and sculptures draw upon and re-envision the legacy of Africans and their diaspora in the United States. In his decade-long “Spook” project, Armstead explored the life and legacy of James Armistead Lafayette, a double-agent spy for George Washington during the American Revolution.
Poetry in Motion: A Conversation with Mildred Howard and Johanna Poethig
Cultural Corridor/Urban Flow is a nine-and-a-half-mile-long public artwork on the first Bus Rapid Transit Line in Oakland, California. Designed by Johanna Poethig and Mildred Howard, with Peter Richards and Joyce Hsu, the line’s 34 stations are visually connected with a “ribbon” of words and images rendered in laser-cut aluminum on handrail panels and decorative windscreens.
Theaster Gates
NEW YORK Gagosian For Theaster Gates, the gallery operates not as a place for pleasurable viewing but as a performative space of social practice focused on cultural recuperation and empowerment.
