Across a four-decade-long career, Isabelle Plat has upended art genres addressing people, places, and things by (re)constructing and (re)assembling familiar materials and then inviting viewers to interact with them. She calls these works sculpture d’usage (“usable sculpture”), but metaphor runs riot as this Parisian artist channels the stuff of everyday life into art.
An artist of shreds, remainders, and lost objects, Helen O’Leary, like the great memoirist Joseph Cornell, infuses scraps of the forgotten and overlooked with the poetry of recognition. Channeling the latent energy concealed in wood fragments, scraps of fabric, and pigments, she translates detritus into objects that bear the aura of previous lives.
For nearly five decades, Didier Vermeiren has been producing works that deal with sculpture’s long-term subordinate—the plinth. His approach, which is rigorous, investigative, and hinges on traditional materials and processes, involves exploring structure, placement, distribution, and links with the history of sculpture.
Artist and architect Amanda Williams grew up in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. On a map produced by the federally sanctioned Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), this area was colored red, designating residents as ineligible to receive federal housing loans—a discriminatory, racially motivated practice known as “redlining.”
Hiroshi Sugimoto makes little distinction between the two- and three-dimensional. Photography, sculpture, and architecture are all part of his project to find “a creation of human consciousness.”
Recipient of the 2024 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award Melvin Edwards began his now mythical “Lynch Fragments” in Los Angeles in 1963, when he was 26, and he has continued welding and forging them in New York, New Jersey, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Brazil, and elsewhere.
Recipient of the 2024 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award Petah Coyne’s spacious studio is located in a tight-knit, working-class neighborhood in northern New Jersey, a community she loves.
GATESHEAD, U.K. Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art Tended largely by community members who have experienced forced displacement and are seeking refuge in the area, this is a garden among the ruins. Like all of Rakowitz’s works, it bears witness, serving as a metaphor for the overlapping histories of war, oppression, migration, trauma, and adaptation that affect cultural objects and plant life, as well as people.
