I’ve been working with fringe as a main element of the work for at least 10 years. Fringe was seen as an accessory, found on fancy dance shawls in powwow dances, and initially I was thinking of it in that context, using it on punching bags and wall hangings.
January/February 2022
January/February 2022
Sheila Pepe: Claiming Space
Sheila Pepe takes a gender-bending approach to process and material while also blurring the distinction between art and craft.
Guadalupe Maravilla
LONG ISLAND CITY, NEW YORK Socrates Sculpture Park Guadalupe Maravilla’s “Planeta Abuelx” at Socrates Sculpture Park provided a welcome respite for pandemic times. Offering a space for meditation, healing, and recovery, the project reflected Maravilla’s engagement with mutual aid and therapy, focusing on the ways that art can sustain, restore, and provide solace.
The Tree Within: A Conversation with Foon Sham
Foon Sham’s sculptures, made from blocks of salvaged wood, fit together like pieces of intricate puzzles, with gaps inviting the play of light.
Rachel Kneebone
LONDON White Cube Mason’s Yard Seen in conjunction with the drawings, the sculptures became balletic, taking an unexpected turn away from the tragedy that inspired them. The overspilling, extended limbs, now recalling the stylized grace of synchronized swimmers, created an uncanny tension—as in Géricault’s painting—between the sublime and the monstrous, hope and despair, order and chaos.
Turning Things Inside Out: A Conversation with Mel Kendrick
Mel Kendrick’s forte is making new things. As a student, beginning in 1971, he studied with Tony Smith and Robert Morris at Hunter College in New York and worked for Dorothea Rockburne. He also became friends with Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson at Max’s Kansas City.
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.
Abandoned Utility: A Conversation with Sean Donovan
Sean Donovan, an emerging artist living in Brooklyn, uses sculpture, video, and printmaking to call attention to environmental degradation. His works, which repurpose—and sometimes replicate—abandoned objects, including chemical containers and plastic bags, expose the myopic thinking and avaricious behavior that result in unchecked consumer and industrial waste, pollution, and a poisoned planet.
Everyday Matters: A Conversation with Jean Shin
Jean Shin has long operated in the intersection of public art and civic engagement. Site-specific and often temporary, based in community and collective collaboration, and focused on sustainability, her work invites awareness and activism. Through a labor-intensive process, she transforms raw, “crowd-sourced” material— often gathered through open calls for contributions—into immersive, large-scale sculptural installations.