May/June 2020

It’s Personal: A Conversation with James Surls

Winner of the 2020 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award It’s been a long, strange trip over the last six decades for James Surls. His wood, bronze, and steel sculptures evoke a sense of ancient, present, and future worlds, from earthly landscapes to outer space, from visible nature to the inner eye.

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Inhabiting Resilience: A Conversation with Rita Simoni

Rita Simoni produces the kinds of works that don’t fit into ordinary spaces. Her multidisciplinary practice covers the entire spectrum of visual art, from painting, photography, video, and digital design to sculpture and site-specific installation. Originally trained as an architect, Simoni, who is based in Argentina, focuses her attention on the creative possibilities of color and space.

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Beverly Pepper

NEW YORK Marlborough Gallery Over the course of a prolific seven-decade-long career, Beverly Pepper, who died in February 2020, proved herself a virtuoso of three-dimensionality, regardless of material. Marlborough’s recent “concise investigation” covering 50 years’ worth of Pepper’s work (from 1968 to 2018) offered everything from Cor-ten steel to green onyx, from oxidized copper to polished chrome.

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Object Lessons: Mildred Howard

When I got this commission from the County of Sacramento and the Sacramento Airport, they requested a house—something consistent with my many previous house-shaped sculptures and installations. I began by conducting research, reading the letters of those who came to California during the Gold Rush.

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Ai Weiwei

ST. LOUIS Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University “Bare Life,” which inaugurated the Kemper Museum’s newly expanded and renovated galleries, operated on several levels at once. First and foremost, this dense and multifaceted exhibition was a retrospective of Ai Weiwei’s work from the past 15 years; dozens of works in an array of media addressed themes ranging from human rights to political dissent to globalism.

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Lee Ufan

WASHINGTON, DC Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden A crunch on the ground, wavelets in a pool, a reflection here, a cast shadow there—the effects of ambient light, air, and sound perform integral roles in Lee Ufan’s subtle drama of stone and steel, the star being space itself. For the first time in the Hirshhorn’s 45-year history, an artist has been given the 4.3-acre outdoor plaza to explore and reinvent.

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Building Andy Goldsworthy’s Walking Wall

A blanket of fine, dry snow greeted the wallers on their first morning of work in Kansas City. It was the beginning of March, and Andy Goldsworthy, with the help of a select crew led by four veteran U.K. wallers and two handfuls of local stone movers, was conjuring up his latest site-specific installation, Walking Wall, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

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