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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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