BEXHILL-ON-SEA, EAST SUSSEX, U.K. De La Warr Pavilion Renee So’s exhibition “Ancient and Modern” centered on themes of gender, playfully upending preconceived ideas about crafts such as knitting, weaving, and ceramics. The show, which followed So’s residency at the West Dean College of Arts and Conservation, demonstrated her joyful experimentation across media and disregard of traditional art/craft hierarchies.
Visual and performance artist and activist Vanessa German might also be described as a full-time resident artist. Her Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood is the driving force behind her work; it is also home to the ARThouse, a community arts initiative that she founded in 2009 to bring art to local children.
“Craig Hall really loves art and artists, and he cares about getting to know them,” says Patricia Meadows, who has worked with Craig and his wife, Kathryn, for 25 years. The recipient of the ISC’s 2020 Patron Award, which was established in 1993 to recognize individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the advancement of contemporary sculpture, Hall is an entrepreneur, New York Times bestselling author, vintner, and philanthropist.
Luanne Martineau, who works in Montreal and teaches in the Painting and Drawing Department of Concordia University, uses felt, paper, and other textile-based processes to make objects and reliefs that combine a painterly sense of image and color with an often startling materiality.
NEW YORK Gallery 456 “Eternal Mother,” a recent show of painting, sculpture, and performance by Korean-born, New York-based multimedia artist Hayoon Jay Lee, demonstrated a remarkable merger of Asian content and Western contemporary art methodologies.
Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos plucks banal items from reality and repeats them on an unprecedented scale to form the bones of something utterly different. She sees our belongings—everything from pots and pans to wheel rims, fabrics, and tampons—as personal, ready-made building blocks for publicly attuned art.
Hew Locke is a self-confessed “maximalist.” His sculptures, installations, drawings, and photographs overflow with miscellanea, their materials ranging from plastic toys and beads to brass etchings and golden filigree. This physical profusion mirrors an abundance of thematic references—voodoo, slavery, migration, colonialism, globalization, media voyeurism, and corporate greed, to name a few.
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Nigeria, Adejoke Tugbiyele now lives and works in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, exploring a practice “charged with symbolic meanings.” As an artist and advocate, she bridges multiple cultures and synthesizes stubborn oppositions—masculine/feminine, dark/light, nature/culture.
NEW YORK Marlborough Gallery “Armario de la Memoria (Storage of Memory),” Daniel Lind-Ramos’s recent
show, featured seven sculptural assemblages that meditate on time, meaning, and memory by means of collecting, gathering, and building.
CLEVELAND Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland “Invisible Cities,” Liu Wei’s ambitious two-part exhibition, took its name from Italo Calvino’s poetic novel recounting an imaginary conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, who asks the explorer to describe the cities he has seen on his travels.
