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.

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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.

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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.

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SALT LAKE CITY Central Utah Art Center Despite appearances to the contrary, the 23 rocks protruding from the walls in Cara Despain’s Seeing the Stone were not the final end game. The installation was more like a veneer or mirage pointing to the actual artwork. Attached to the walls with sturdy iron hooks, the stones ranged from pea- to melon-size and undulated between knee- and eye level. Accompanying GPS coordinates signaled the original locations of the rocks, which were found scattered around Utah.

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BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery David Lang’s room-size multimedia installation Journey, an elegant flying machine apparatus suspended about a foot above the floor, communicated a kind of retro sci-fi fantasy. With slowly rotating, frictionless gears to suggest a dreamy traverse across space and time, the sculpture’s delicate metal lattice engaged an upper tier of feathered paper wings that moved ethereally in simulated flight. On the underside of the wings, Lang projected moving imagery synchronized with music, audible only in close proximity.

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DENVER Museum of Contemporary Art Laura Shill works across media, maximalist artist operating at the intersection of collecting, costuming, performance, installation, and photography. For her first solo museum exhibition, curated by Nora Burnett Abrams, Shill sprawled “Phantom Touch” across nearly the entire second floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Building on a tradition of soft sculpture from a feminist perspective, she ambitiously stretched her practice – and broke some museum “rules” in the process.

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SAN FRANCISCO Yerba Buena Center for the Arts In the world of art-speak, some words are used to the point of nonsense – “liminal” was one, not so long ago – while others, though perennially revived, manage to retain some kind of meaning. “Bricolage,” as used by Tom Sachs to describe his method of working, seems to fall into this latter category. Virtually all of the objects in his sprawling recent exhibition (Sachs is the only artist ever to have filled YBCA’s cavernous first-floor galleries with a solo show) were united by their method of manufacture and the philosophy behind it: the bricoleur’s practice of cobbling something together out of a diverse assortment of available materials.

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LOS ANGELES Spruth Magers Hanne Darboven describes her methodology as “writing without describing.” Her enormous installations are encyclopedic in nature, densely packing walls from floor to ceiling. Viewers of her difficult and challenging works have multiple alternatives for comprehending her vision. It may be dismissed as opaque and recherché. It can be read as brilliant Minimalist innovation, the residue of specific conceptual choices.

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NEW DELHI Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Himmat Shah’s recent retrospective formed one third of a three-part showcase at the Kiran Nadar Museum. Like the other two artists featured in “Abstraction in Indian Modern Art 1960s Onwards,” Nasreen Mohammedi and Jeram Patel, Shah is associated with the Faculty of Fine Arts Baroda. His show, “Hammer on the Square,” considered his prolific output from 1957 to 2015. The title work, Hammer on the Square, consists of an unpretentious cube and a hammer with no hand holding it.

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PITTSBURGH Mattress Factory Dennis Maher is an artist, architect, and educator whose undertakings over the past 15 years have focused on the process of deconstruction and reconstitution. For years, he has been investigating an art/architectural method of building that involves demolition, renovation, and restoration. Using a variety of media, including drawing, photography, collage, video, sound, and light, he creates works that appear to intertwine order and chaos.

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