Daniel Giordano works on the third floor of his family’s former coat factory in Newburgh, New York (across the Hudson River from Beacon), where he makes outlandishly beautiful sculpture from the most unlikely of materials. Very much aware of Modernism but not beholden to it, Giordano represents a new kind of creative thinking.
May/June 2021
May/June 2021
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.
Oren Pinhassi
LONDON Edel Assanti and St Cyprian’s Clarence Gate The anthropomorphic sculptures of Israel-born, New York-based Oren Pinhassi hold up a strange, disconcerting mirror to humanity. Though vaguely like us in appearance, their forms call to mind structures built for specific functions. If a voting booth or a urinal, for instance, were to mate with a human, this is what their offspring might look like.
Spectral Memory: A Conversation with Liana Strasberg
What to remember and how to remember: these are the key concerns in Liana Strasberg’s work, which unearths and reworks images and symbols from the past in order to create what the Argentinian artist calls a “new memory file.”
Fragments of Interest: A Conversation with Marion Verboom
Complexly layered in thought and process, Marion Verboom’s works inhale cultural histories in order to exhale new-era imagery. By turns minimal, architectural, organic, and ornamental, her forms shape contemporary time into a fresh visual alphabet and run it A to Z through mythic narratives—from Aztec gods to the progeny of Zeus.
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.
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.
Edoardo Tresoldi: Framing Emptiness
A former scenographer who helped to design backdrops for other people’s cinema productions, Italian sculptor Edoardo Tresoldi has since found success by putting his own work center stage. His large-scale, seemingly fragile sculptures are predominantly constructed from wire mesh, a medium that reinforces their ephemeral, mirage-like quality.
Kapwani Kiwanga
ROTTERDAM Kunstinstituut Melly Kapwani Kiwanga’s recent exhibition featured three installations and a hanging cloth work—all addressing strategies of resistance, from historical slavery to the American civil rights era, to today’s anti-racist movements and demonstrations. Botany played an unexpected, and key, role in all but one of these new works, as Kiwanga drew out the histories of various plants smuggled into America by enslaved Africans.
Dubious Origins: A Conversation with Sanford Biggers
By remixing references and aesthetic values from multiple cultures and time periods, Biggers reconsiders questions of authenticity, art historical authority, and provenance, infusing his hybridized forms—which he calls “objects for a future ethnography”—with overlapping and sometimes diametrically opposed meanings that demand to be grasped simultaneously.