HAMILTON, NEW JERSEY Grounds for Sculpture “Joyce J. Scott: Harriet Tubman and Other Truths” featured 74 works that tell stories from African American and world history, including two imposing new outdoor sculptures, as well as early works and a selection of objects collected within an installation called Harriet’s Closet.
Hemali Bhuta’s journey into the world of installation has been fascinating. Her multi-disciplinary work focuses on the notion of in-between space, which she considers a plane where the limitations of dimensionality do not apply. By attempting to translate one medium or form into another, she questions the authority that determines the nature of a space.
Graeme Patterson makes multi-disciplinary sculptural installations, often with the end game of stop-motion animation in mind. His work is rarely still, fusing robotics, video, sound, objects, and performance into immersive environments that address dislocation, alienation, nostalgia, identity, and, recently, the fraught relationship of humans, our artifacts (physical and cultural), and the natural world.
Sofi Zezmer’s early biomorphic abstractions, made predominantly of plastic and occasionally loaded with hues integral to her unorthodox materials, burst into my line of vision toward the beginning of the new millennium. Though playful, her constructions touch on the intersection of science and technology while being imbued with the pulse of life, their forms continuing
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Sideshow Gallery The ceramic sculptures featured in Tony Moore’s recent exhibition, “Children of Light,” invoke themes of conflict, community, and survival. Alongside the work, Moore posted a warning from Dr. Martin Luther King: “Our generation will have to repent not only for the words and acts of the children of darkness but also for the fears and apathy of the children of light.”
Kendall Buster makes large-scale sculptures out of repeated modular units. Much of her work blurs the line between architecture and sculpture by playing on the notion of scale: while some sculptures are large enough to walk into, others put viewers in a position of power by offering a birds-eye view.
MILAN Pirelli HangarBicocca “Ambienti/Environments,” curator Vicente Todolí’s ambitious reappraisal of Lucio Fontana’s spatial installations and light interventions, focused attention on a little-known aspect of Italy’s leading Modernist, successfully re-constructing nine of these works as life-size cabinets of curiosity. Though less familiar than the “Holes,” “Cuts,” or “Spatial Concepts,” Fontana’s installations marked a comparable break with traditional forms of sculpture and painting, foreshadowing later explorations by Gruppo Zero and Yves Klein.
Alistair Wilson, who was born in Wales, came to Northern Ireland in the 1970s, after a period in London. For the better part of 30 years, he managed two careers–as a sculptor and as a lecturer in sculpture at the Belfast College of Art.
NEW YORK Cassina Projects The German sculptor Gerold Miller lives and works in Berlin. This show, his first in the U.S., offered an anthology of works for which he is well known in Europe. Ostensibly, these sculptures veer toward Mini – malism, but they are more deeply connected to theory than works from the American movement, even if this tie is downplayed and hard to uncover.
WASHINGTON, DC Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum The “mother of forensic science,” Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962) was a wealthy heiress from Chicago, who gave a large portion of her inheritance to Harvard University to create the first Department of Legal Medicine in the U.S. She was also the first female police captain in the country.
