Since the 1970s, Renate Bertlmann has been creating striking works that explore sexuality, gender, and eroticism, as well as their social context. Her practice has stretched across two- and three-dimensional media, including performance. In sculpture, her diverse materials include latex, polyurethane foam, silicone rubber, epoxy resins, plaster, acrylic glass, glass, tulle, silk, velvet, organza, linen,
New Orleans native Zarouhie Abdalian, who recently returned to her hometown after stints in Philadelphia and Oakland, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work often interrogates site-specificity. Using sound, performance, and sculpture, she draws attention to the overlooked by framing a space and restoring forgotten aspects of its layered history.
Hank Willis Thomas, who was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, has emerged as one of the most prolific artists of his generation. Formally trained as a photographer, over the last 15 years, he has considered the relationship we have to images and what they say about our priorities and privileges, focusing primarily on popular, found imagery from history, sport, and fashion.
Sometimes a hot dog is not just a hot dog. For sculptor Genesis Belanger, the humble frankfurter is a way to bitingly critique things that irk her—in this case, the patriarchy—while still maintaining a sly sense of humor.
When asked about her influences, Rona Pondick tends to reply succinctly. “Kafka and my mother,” she will often state, but when pressed further she has only been known to elaborate on the former. In looking at the hybrid metal creatures for which Pondick is perhaps best known, Kafka’s influence—from Metamorphosis to his letters to his
Oliver Ranch is one of the few American sculpture parks in which the works have all been conceived explicitly on and for the site—relationship to land being the one imposed constraint. The Olivers’ approach to commissions involves working intensively with artists and asking them to commit to a multi-season study of the land as part of the process.
NEW YORK New Museum
Amazing Grace (1993), an installation of fire hoses and nearly 300 abandoned baby strollers first shown at a firehouse in Harlem, originally referred to the crack epidemic, AIDS, and homelessness sweeping through that neighborhood. Now, as one walks through the strollers along a pathway formed from the hoses while listening to Mahalia Jackson sing the gospel song of the title, it is hard not to think of family separations and the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the border.
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO Ylise Kessler Gallery
Walking into a show of Elise Siegel’s ceramic “portrait” busts can be an unsettling and awkward experience. There they are—in this case, five works on pedestals—their gazes quizzical and eager, as though you, the visitor, are expected to bring something to the conversation.
LONDON PEER
Bucking Soviet-style Socialist Realism, Jevrić created abstract structures consisting of bulky forms that seem to float in space, held by nails or metal rods, which serve both to support and to trap. These works made her a pioneer in Yugoslavia as she developed her own vocabulary through the juxtaposition of mass and void, solidity and weightlessness, lines and curves.
“The idea of a hybrid for me represents human potential, super-human powers, and the feeling of being in transition as well as being alienated.”
