Karen Lemmey
Curator of sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

For a long time, sculpture was simply defined as an artwork that occupies three dimensions. On a basic level, this remains true. But since the beginning of the 20th century, sculptors have made serious play of problematizing sculpture’s third dimension, deftly manipulating it to be ever more elusive and illusionary, as if to draw attention to the instability of what had been, for millennia, the defining characteristic of their art form. A sculpture’s third dimension can be barely measurable or even just implied; purely optical; kinetic, and thus variable; or only fully realized once the work is installed.

Senga Nengudi’s “R.S.V.P.” series, begun in 1977, is made with stretched pantyhose and sand, and can shrink down to almost nothing after commanding space and sparking wonder in a gallery. Carl Andre’s 1997 series “Voltaglyph” best meets its 3D potential when someone stands on the metal plates the artist has placed on the floor. Fred Wilson’s mirrors are neither concave nor convex, yet reflect a tremendous depth of field that changes dramatically with whatever and whoever shares their space. The interiors of Iván Navarro’s boxes, constructed of lights and mirrors, seem to recede infinitely, much like the stacked, progressively smaller figures of Do Ho Suh’s curving 23-foot column Karma (2010), which ultimately become so tiny the human eye cannot really see them. By contrast, Isamu Noguchi stretched the third dimension to galactic proportions, at least conceptually, in Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars (1947), a Land art proposal depicting a human face with a mile-long nose that anticipated access to space travel. Examples abound of sculptures that insist on a flexible definition of the third dimension, making it a slippery criterion to follow.

Like three-dimensionality, the matter of medium was once a defining characteristic of sculpture. Things we call “sculpture” have, from paleolithic times on, consistently taken form in stone, clay, bone, tusk, shell, or wood, and later, in metals, plaster, wax, fibers, and plastics. But the list has now expanded to encompass assemblages of found objects, ephemera, and industrial debris, as well as sound baths, augmented reality, and virtual objects and realms. Eager as one might be to do so, it is pointless to enumerate all the materials used now. Unlike in the past, sculpture today is assembled from anything—even paint. Sarah Sze’s exquisite screens and slabs of poured paint have taken sculpture through a wonderfully heretical turn that was unimaginable in the early modern era, when European schools of thought relentlessly ordered painting above sculpture, relegating the plastic arts, with their brute substances and hard labor, to a lower rung in the creative arts hierarchy.

The limited materials that once so commonly defined sculpture also limited who was recognized as a sculptor and who aspired to become one. The cost of casting bronze or sourcing marble, for example, was and remains prohibitive for many artists. As a consequence, some major works by important sculptors have been lost, simply because they were not rendered in more permanent materials. What if Augusta Savage had cast her 1939 World’s Fair monument, The Harp, in bronze instead of plaster?
The expanding universe of mediums for contemporary sculptors suggests there will be more gateways and ideally fewer gatekeepers in a genre that, in recent centuries, was often disturbingly exclusionary.

With many monuments these days being removed from pedestals, both historical and contemporary sculptures are closely scrutinized for who represents whom and to what end. Sculpture clearly has a fraught moral history. It has been intimately tied to the body through life casts and death masks, made with and without consent. It has served as a surrogate for individuals positioned in both uplifting and deprecating ways. It has been known to elicit actions rarely aimed at paintings: people kiss, adorn, graffiti tag, and, in extreme cases, burn these artworks as effigies. Sculpture can intimidate or inspire as viewers gaze up at a towering presence, while shrinking in its shadow. Sharing the three dimensions that we too occupy, sculpture can have a triangulating effect, making us more physically aware of our surroundings and those who happen to share the space: it may call our attention to a fellow visitor’s unassuming contrapposto that seems to mimic the pose of a sculpture we are serendipitously observing together.

As communities consider what might replace toppled sculptures, it is encouraging to consider the wide possibilities of social sculpture, the most expansive addition to the list of sculpture types to date. The term “social sculpture” is credited to Joseph Beuys, who asserted in the 1970s that anyone could create art with any object or action—indeed, life itself could be seen as a kind of collective sculpture. Over time, social sculpture has become more closely associated with practices that consciously invite members of a community to cocreate a work that is invested in the needs and interests of that community. Social sculpture has the potential to work for a greater good, serve many publics, effect positive change, and literally heal—as seen in Simone Leigh’s Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014), a project that shed light on the long history of Black health care providers, while offering a number of no-cost health and healing services for one month in a building in Weeksville, Brooklyn, a historically Black neighborhood. Less durable than works in marble or bronze, social sculptures may nevertheless outlast all others, while also moving away from the environmentally extractive mediums of the past, thus freeing sculpture from its traditional three dimensions to be instead a boundless art form, one that is whatever a sculptor wants it to be.

Alexis Lowry
Curator, Dia Art Foundation, New York

What is sculpture anyway? Can a film, for example, be a sculpture? This is a question I often asked myself while working with Lucy Raven on her 2021 exhibition for Dia Art Foundation in New York, an institution with a long history of testing sculpture’s limits. Her black-and-white 45-minute film Ready Mix (2021) traces the production of ready-mix concrete from mineral extraction to hydration. Minerals flow liquidly on screen, accumulating until they settle into a compounded monolith. They are hard, then fluid; gravitational and sedimentary.

I asked Raven, who earned an MFA in sculpture at Bard but works largely with moving images, what place sculpture occupies in her own thinking. She wrote to me that her primary concern is with “form—shape, mass, material, composition, decomposition, erosion, accumulation, and the rhythms and pressures” and the way “those things form and deform each other.” What appeals to me about her answer is her reflexive understanding of form—the particular way an object appears in the world—not as something fixed, but rather something malleable, unstable even; something shifting in, around, and through various physical and contextual forces.

Her comment reminded me of something Melvin Edwards recently told me: “my whole thing about sculpture is that it’s relative.” This resonated the way good truisms do, as both obvious and profound. Just as sculptural objects look different depending on where you are standing, the discipline too is always being shaped by new contexts and perspectives.

Edwards said this while we were installing Gonogo (1970/2022) at Dia Beacon, a work made from barbed wire that stretches from floor to ceiling at regular intervals, extending from the gallery wall in two parallel planes. This corridor is then diagonally bisected by yet another plane of these punctuated lines of wire, such that the triangle formed at the right side creates what Edwards describes as a kind of cul de sac. His notes record technical details about placement and scale, while the comment about sculpture being relative suggests his concern for the perceptual unfolding of the work of art by the moving spectator (as well as the attendant formal and phenomenological debates around sculpture, particularly Minimal sculpture in the late ’60s and early ’70s that are central to Dia’s collection and which this work so pointedly addresses). Edwards went on to say, a few minutes later, “a shape is important based on the space it is in,” underscoring, in his typically understated way, his careful attunement to sculpture’s expanse into a field of spatial relationships that exist beyond the discrete object.

Twenty years have passed since art historian Miwon Kwon published her influential book One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, which identified site-specificity as the dominant concern of sculptural debates since the mid-20th century. Site-specificity continues to be a critical (if not the critical) lens through which sculptural relations emerge. And while Gonogo is not site-specific in the most literal sense—meaning its existence isn’t inextricably tied to the exact conditions (physical, institutional, or cultural) of its location—it is, like many sculptures today, site-responsive. Its physical parameters, height and width, for example, are determined in relationship to the architectural environment it’s displayed in, while its meaning is inflected by and also animates each new context.

The piece was conceived in 1970 as Edwards was planning for a solo presentation of his “B Wire” sculptures at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. There, he showed four related architecturally scaled installations, before turning away from this method of working for a while. (As artist and critic Frank Bowling dryly observed at the time, some white critics failed to grasp the biting wit of the barbed wire project and the importance of the destabilizing effects of his razor-sharp material.)

At Dia Beacon, Gonogo claims its physicality by reaching through and across the boundaries of the architectural frame, but takes on new meaning as a counterpoint to the art-historical canon Dia has helped institutionalize. It is both of its time and out of it. Its appearance, as impenetrably layered or porously loose, punishingly imposing or cripplingly beautiful, changes with each viewer’s movement around the work. It is a sculpture, it is an architectural intervention, it is the site of art historical and cultural contestation.

The contingent nature of this sited artwork reminds me of an observation that Kishio Suga—an artist who has worked with objects in various ways since the mid-1960s—made about the interdependence of things. “We might say,” he remarked, “it’s the contact point between things that do move and things that don’t move that becomes the basis for ideas of site.” Site, like form, is an unstable thing, shifting as it accommodates different types of material, conceptual, historical, and social content. 

Julieta González
Artistic director, Inhotim Museum, Brumadinho, Brazil

For the modernist avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century, sculpture was primarily a spatialized practice, demonstrated, for example, in the Constructivist sculptures of Aleksander Rodchenko, Karl Ioganson, and El Lissitzky. In the 1960s, the dematerialization of art prompted by the introduction of a cybernetic systems-oriented and relational view of the world further expanded the notion of sculpture, opening it up to consider gallery space, spectator, and sculptural object as parts of a system. Brazilian artists such as Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica created non-object works around 1960 that emphasized kinesthetic and affective dimensions within the expanding field of sculpture. These three moments are crucial to my thinking about sculpture up until the early 2000s. Each one accentuates a different problem or issue in sculptural practice: spatiotemporality, environment, and experience/feeling.

Today, artists working with sculpture consistently reflect on material cultures and their close associations with historical upheavals. In the past 15 years, I’ve found myself interested in a historiographic turn in art. I’m drawn to sculptors like Simon Starling and Leonor Antunes, both of whom work with everyday objects to probe the cultural assumptions they embody. Sculptures provide not only physical and perceptual experiences, but often symbolic ones as well. We see this in artworks that challenge the role of the monument, like Kara Walker’s recent large-scale works at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn and at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London, where she addressed problematic episodes in history, questioning the very nature of commemorative sculpture.

The freedom afforded by what Rosalind Krauss described in 1979 as sculpture’s “expanded field,” referring to how “rather surprising things have come to be called sculpture,” is at the same time a challenge for artists who work with three-dimensional objects and those who approach the language of sculpture from a novel perspective. The moments I mentioned before—Constructivism, the dematerialization practices of the 1960s and 1970s, the participatory and sensorial approach of the Brazilian artists, and the historical revisionism undertaken by artists today—are each significant ruptures that have informed successive approaches to sculpture.

Kyle Dancewicz
Deputy director, SculptureCenter, New York

While co-organizing a recent survey of Liz Larner’s work at SculptureCenter in New York, I found myself moved by the way her practice has vexed sculptural conventions since the 1980s, at the same time remaining committed to the discipline’s formal, spatial, and material questions. I think it is fair to say that many artists working today make what they want to make, and then determine after the fact whether or not it has anything to do with a disciplinary category. But in so much of Larner’s work, I sensed that her desire to make a “sculpture” came first, and its effects on viewers followed.

I found myself referring to her sculptures as “hardcore” a few times, and recall that I was lightly challenged on this during a public program we held in conjunction with the show. (By “hardcore,” did I mean sexually explicit? Or punk? Or metal?) But I felt validated a few weeks later when I read a 2003 essay on Isa Genzken by the late critic Giovanni Intra, who used the term the way I meant it: “Genzken’s work is sculpture right and proper, and, in this sense, it is hardcore.” He continued: “In its linear progression since the 1970s, when it was engaged with the optical problems in object perception via minimalism, it has increasingly thrown real moments of chaos into the void of sculpture.”

I am struck by the paradox that Intra sets up: to make sculpture “right and proper,” ostensibly to bring concrete, three-dimensional, physical objects into being, is to widen or deepen a void. Coincidentally, I found a similar reference—to a pit, which is perhaps a less forbidding subcategory of void—in the catalogue for Vincent Fecteau’s 2019 exhibition at CCA Wattis in San Francisco, which includes the transcript of a 1981 artist talk by Don Potts. Potts refers to making art as setting “the subtlest trap you’ve ever made,” and compares it to a form of meditation that “clean[s] off each sheet of glass so you can see further down,” below whatever typically bubbles up from one’s lowest level of consciousness.

Where are the edges of a void-shaped discipline, or the bottom of a bottomless pit? One of the most succinct answers I’ve ever heard came from artist Lan Tuazon, who, while visiting SculptureCenter with students, said in passing that sculpture has “dimensions elsewhere.” I was struck by how much that notion asks of sculpture: to be here, and to evoke other places and times entirely; to represent one node in a network of activity; to transport information across dissimilar contexts.

Artists today contend with the hopeless breadth of sculpture, remaining “responsive to” a site while talking about opening up new worlds or possibilities. The competing requirements are many if we consider sculpture a spatial medium, one that is critically invested in the apparatus of the exhibition or the institution. At the same time, it must contend with its own art history, though it is frequently compelled to share the concerns and techniques of video, photography, painting, performance, and other media. It often privileges process, and by now we are used to imagining that many sculptures will change and evolve over the duration of a show, or over many years—as crumbling earth, perhaps, or as memories of social interactions. It’s an art form that can integrate found objects, consumer goods, craft techniques, and industrial fabrication, along with their refuse and waste. We notice when it inserts itself into systems of exchange: it acts as a flashpoint revealing the politics of property, possession, and provenance.

An earlier essay by Intra, this time on Larner, describes how each sculpture provisionally resolves these competing imperatives while synthesizing time, place, and material. Characterizing parts of her work that have dealt with color, perception, and illusion as “jump sculpture,” Intra finds a separate space for sculpture in some version of quantum physics: “Sculpture as a swarm, a constellation of particles which stop for a moment in one place only to come apart again, a buzzing shape like a flock of birds, moving between dimensions, qualities, colors, and weights. Sculpture doesn’t sit still—like it was told to—it literally hops through space and time.” I don’t mean to reinvest all sculpture with some kind of misplaced mysticism, but it seems to me that the main reason to hold onto the idea of “sculpture” at all is that it both sharpens the immense estrangement we may feel from our own bodies, from history, from everything that is not us, and at the same time offers to link us to them physically, or invites us to glimpse the broad frames or clouds of consciousness that govern our material lives. I think the way forward involves more void-, pit-, flock-of-birds-oriented sculpture—more sculpture that opens the chasm and gives only partial directions for how to navigate it.

Sculpture can be as big and broad as a landscape, as we see in Kirsten Swenson’s story about treating land reclamation as a form of art project in the 1970s. And it can be as intimate as something a hand can hold, as Glenn Adamson suggests in a consideration of different ways that craft and sculpture connect. Analyzing the sculptures of Clementine Keith-Roach, one of which graces our cover, Adamson writes that they “prize craft not just as a practical way to get things done, but as a source of cultural resonance.” He goes on to note that “making-by-hand is a way to express a sense of belonging.”

Do Ho Suh, who made the special pull-out print in this issue, speaks of pedestals—an integral part of his work, and of sculpture’s history—sharing similarities with the way that words function in a sentence. In a roundtable moderated by Art in America Ideas Editor Mira Dayal, artist Gordon Hall says, “The thing I love about sculpture—which is also maddening and makes it difficult—is that it puts you into such a close relationship with physical stuff, with things and weight and messes.” He tells his students to think of sculpture “less as a category of artwork than as a way of approaching artmaking in general: it could involve writing or speaking, as well as any kind of making that has to do with material intimacy.”

Every article in this issue has a shape and a multitude of dimensions, and each is the result of making. I hope you’ll take each one in and consider it from a variety of vantage points. 

—Sarah Douglas, Editor in Chief 

Work by Ruth Asawa on view in “The Milk of Dreams” at the Venice Biennale, 2022.

DEPARTMENTS

SPOTLIGHT

Reviews of international exhibitions of note:

Rachel Wetzler on the Venice Biennale 

Nancy Princenthal on the American Pavilion 

Emily Watlington on the Berlin Biennale

Minh Nguyen on Documenta 15 

NEW TALENT

Yooyun Yang by Andrew Russeth

Often working from photographs, the Korean painter renders interior scenes drenched in sadness and anomie.

SIGHTLINES

Amanda Hunt, the Walker Art Center’s head of public engagement, learning, and interpretation, tells us what’s on her mind.

HARD TRUTHS

Sartorial Studies by Chen & Lampert 

Artist-curators Howie Chen and Andrew Lampert offer advice on social media and social style.

ARTIST’S CHOICE: BOOKS

Ten artists tell us about a book that has shaped their practice this year.

BOOK REVIEW

History’s Painter by Daniel Spaulding

A review of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History.

HANDS ON

Q&A with objects and sculpture conservator Emily B. Frank.

Katarzyna Kobro’s sculpture Spatial Composition 6, 1931, on view in the Neoplastic Room at the Museum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland.

FEATURES

WHAT IS SCULPTURE?

Curators Karen Lemmey, Alexis Lowry, Julieta González, and Kyle Dancewicz consider links between today’s fluid artistic practices and sculpture’s elusive definition.

FROM GRAVEL PITS TO SCULPTURE PARKS

by Kirsten Swenson

In the 1970s, a Seattle-area initiative made land reclamation a key element of artists’ earthwork designs.

MAKING SPACE

by Rachel Wetzler

Working with meager resources in interwar Poland, Katarzyna Kobro pioneered a fusion of abstract sculpture and social space.

DRAWING SUPPORT

by Mira Dayal

Do Ho Suh’s new project is a wry take on traditional monuments—as seen in a special pull-out print for Art in America.

MONUMENTS FOR THE MOMENT

by Glenn Adamson

Artists rooted in craft tell different kinds of stories in their work—some procedural, others thematic.

THING THEORY

Sculptors Gordon Hall, Abigail Lucien, Lydia Ourahmane, and Michael Rakowitz discuss their transformations of materials and objects.

AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORITY

by Joseph L. Underwood

A huge figurative monument in Dakar, Senegal, raises issues of governmental power, religious propriety, financing, creative control, and taste.

Kathleen Henderson, Cage, 2021, oil stick and oil on paper, 24 by 28½ inches.

REVIEWS

Piero Gilardi
Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring, New York
Louis Bury

Toronto Biennial
Multiple Venues
Mira Dayal

William Wegman
Sperone Westwater, New York
Emily Watlington

Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho
47 Canal, New York
Hyunjee Nicole Kim

Ani Liu
Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, New York
Diana Seo Hyung Lee

Joshua Rashaad McFadden
George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York
Jackson Davidow

Oscar Murillo
St. Louis Art Museum
Del O’Brien

“New Earthworks”
Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe
Travis Diehl

Kathleen Henderson
Track 16, Los Angeles
Leah Ollman

“Pioneers”
Musée du Luxembourg, Paris
Hannah Stamler

For this edition of our annual Summer Reading issue, we present you with a feast of approaches to the written word, from books by artists to artist biographies, from the book as a museum to reading performed in a museum. Jackson Arn takes stock of artist biographers, from Renaissance mythologizer Giorgio Vasari to Picasso chronicler John Richardson. The best of them wrestle with the tantalizing, ever-mysterious relationship between artworks and life stories. Photographer Dayanita Singh’s books take many forms. Her latest effort, she tells Tausif Noor in a lively “In the Studio” interview, includes DIY instructions for how to turn her books into exhibitions, and even turn yourself into the venue: “[B]uy a long jacket and cut pockets of a certain size, so that you can wear nine museums. You can walk into a room with them and invite everyone to a Dayanita Singh opening then and there. Pull out one of the books and hold it up: just like that, you’ve become the museum.”

There has been much talk over the past year of the prospect of a new sort of Roaring Twenties. In anticipation of our emergence from the pandemic, we were supposed to rush into a new golden age, comparable to that of the previous century, fueled by pent-up demand for sociability. Instead, we find ourselves in a world shadowed by war, fear, and recurring lockdowns, a stew of circumstances not dissimilar from those that led to Dada. And, as though on cue, we have our very own Dadaist in Nora Turato, whose performances, as writer Jameson Fitzpatrick puts it in a profile of the artist, “captur [e] the feeling of navigating the chaotic, confusing nonsense of the information age.” There is nothing passive about reading.  —Sarah Douglas, Editor in Chief 

Dayanita Singh’s Delhi studio, 2022.

DEPARTMENTS

FIRST LOOK

LaKela Brown by Hiji Nam

LaKela Brown’s “archaeological” relief plaques reference jewelry and small objects linked to Black heritage.

THE EXCHANGE

The Work of Worms by Alice Channer with Amy Stewart

An artist and a horticultural writer discuss the ecological contributions of earthworms.

HARD TRUTHS

by Chen & Lampert

Artist-curators Howie Chen and Andrew Lampert offer tongue-in-cheek takes on art world dilemmas.

CRITICAL EYE

House of Xtravaganza by Maria H. Loh

Since the Renaissance, masculinity has often been expressed through surprisingly florid attire.

BOOKS

Value and Its Sources by Caitlin Meehye Beach

A review of Henry Sayre’s Value in Art: Manet and the Slave Trade and Anna Arabindan-Kesson’s Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World.

HANDS ON

Q&A with Daniel Tobin, cofounder and creative director of UAP (Urban Art Projects).

Nora Turato reading from pool 4, 2020, in Amsterdam.

FEATURES

FROM GOD TO 10,000 HOURS

by Jackson Arn

Whether it’s Vasari’s Lives or the latest tome on Warhol, artist biographies survey stories behind works we revere.

KID STUFF 

by Hannah Stamler

Children once inspired modernist artists—and now they’re a prime demographic for aspirational art books.

EPIC PITCH

by Jameson Fitzpatrick

Nora Turato’s spoken-word performance work and publishing projects meld the bardic tradition with contemporary sales patter. A pull-out print by the artist accompanies the article.

IN THE STUDIO: DAYANITA SINGH

with Tausif Noor

The veteran Delhi-based artist explains why her wildly inventive photobooks are vital to the future of the medium.

FIT TO PRINT

by Lucy Ives

Independent presses and self-publishing have liberated artists to experiment freely with images and texts.

PLUS: 

ON ENUNCIATION AND ESCAPE

by Nicole Kaack

REVIEWS

Khalil Rabah’s installation Untitled, All is well, 2017, from his project “The lowest point on earth memorial park,” mixed mediums, dimensions variable.

WHITNEY BIENNIAL
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Simon Wu

“MATERNAR”
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Gaby Cepeda

WALID RAAD
Paula Cooper, New York
Kaleem Hawa

DOROTHEA TANNING
Kasmin, New York
Jackson Arn

ANDRÉ CADERE
Ortuzar Projects, New York
David Ebony

AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE
Iceberg Projects, Chicago
Jeremy Lybarger

RYAN PATRICK KRUEGER
MONACO, St. Louis
Jessica Baran

VICTORIA GITMAN
François Ghebaly, Los Angeles
Annabel Osberg

SABRINA GSCHWANDTNER
Shoshana Wayne, Los Angeles
Leah Ollman

KHALIL RABAH
Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah
Emily Watlington

With the art market resurging after a brief pandemic slump, young artists find themselves on the front lines of the kind of speculative art economy that results from extreme income inequality. “When you see prices like this for artists who are right out of the gate,” adviser Lisa Schiff told the Art Newspaper after a round of auctions this past fall, “the work is, more than anything else, a tradable commodity.” In our Issues & Commentary section, A.i.A. associate editor Emily Watlington calls attention to artists who are working within that system, using sales of their art to redress income inequality by redistributing their own revenue.

Finally, there’s a sustained look by artist-writers Anne Rochette and Wade Saunders at the masterful, multivalent, tough-to-categorize work of American sculptor Charles Ray, who is having a career-making moment, with multiple international exhibitions. As the authors describe it, Ray’s single-minded dedication to art-making could well serve as a model for artists starting out today: “For half a century, Ray has remained true to the course he set as a young artist at the start of his adventurous career.”

—Sarah Douglas, Editor in Chief 

View of “Dawning: dust, seeds, Coplees,” 2022, at Lubov, showing Play Humming Planting, 2022.

DEPARTMENTS

BACKSTORY

Big Bang by Cornelia Parker

The artist’s signature “exploded” artwork, Cold Dark Matter, began with a literal detonation in 1991.

THE EXCHANGE

Liberation, Invention, Reinvention by fields harrington with Katherine McKittrick

An artist and a gender studies professor discuss the troubled history of Black technical innovation.

HARD TRUTHS

by Chen & Lampert

Artist-curators Howie Chen and Andrew Lampert offer tongue-in-cheek takes on art world dilemmas.

ONE WORK

Sue Taylor on Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair, 1852–55

The immense—and hugely successful—market scene helped make Bonheur the era’s most famous animalier.

PROFILE

Ambiguity Embodied by Wade Saunders and Anne Rochette

Charles Ray’s sculptures are enigmatic, but four concurrent museum shows make clear his historical standing.

BOOKS

Zachary Fine on Gary Indiana’s Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984–2021; plus related titles in brief.

ISSUES & COMMENTARY

Spread the Wealth by Emily Watlington

Some artists are making the personal redistribution of wealth an integral part of their practice.

HANDS ON

Q&A with Annika Finne, assistant conservator at Modern Art Conservation.

Liao Wen: Almost Hysterical, 2020, limewood, silicone, stainless steel, 191/4 by 401/2 by 161/2 inches.

FEATURES

NEW TALENT

Profiles of ten artists to watch, as selected by A.i.A. editors and a global group of critics and curators. Plus a print by Laurie Kang.

LIAO WEN ⋅ ALEXANDER SI ⋅ ASTRID TERRAZAS ⋅ LAURIE KANG ⋅ SUNEIL SANZGIRI ⋅ KRISTI CAVATARO ⋅ HODA KASHIHA ⋅ WIDLINE CADET ⋅  ASMA ⋅ DIANA SOFIA LOZANO 

ON OPACITY

by Simon Wu

Many artists are working to elude overly simplistic interpretation and cross-cultural legibility.

REVERSE SHOT

Artist-filmmakers Sky Hopinka, Tiffany Sia, and Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa discuss strategies for exposing global inequities.

DOWN THE LINE

A conversation on the nature of historical lineage with Sholeh Asgary, André Magaña, Keli Safia Maksud, and Ronny Quevedo.

View of “Nikita Gale: END OF SUBJECT,” 2022, at 52 Walker.

REVIEWS

“Slip Zone”
Dallas Museum of Art
Logan Lockner

“Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities”
Tufts University Art Galleries, Boston and Medford, Massachusetts
Mahan Moalemi

Stephanie Syjuco
Ryan Lee, New York
Alexander R. Bigman

Nikita Gale
52 Walker, New York
Rachel Valinsky

Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe
Museum of Arts and Design, New York
Jackson Davidow

Quay Quinn Wolf
Jack Barrett, New York
Simon Wu

Mimi Park
Lubov, New York
Louis Bury

“Assembly Required”
Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis
Nora Kovacs

EJ Hill
Oxy Arts, Los Angeles
Travis Diehl

Yeni Mao
Campeche, Mexico City
Gaby Cepeda

Ayşe Erkmen
Dirimart, Istanbul
Kaya Genç

Defining a movement is not as simple as revisiting uncanny objects, automatic writing, and exquisite corpses. In her deep dive into the historiography of Surrealism and how various exhibitions have presented it over the years, Art in America Senior Editor Rachel Wetzler finds it eminently malleable, going from a harbinger of Abstract Expressionism to a plaything for theorists to a vehicle for global revisionism.

Surrealism casts a long shadow, and many artists working today remain very much engaged with it—in very different ways. Yasmina Price explores how Black experimental filmmakers, engaged in what cinema scholar Terri Francis in 2013 dubbed “Afrosurrealism,” have used the movement’s disorienting techniques to investigate colonialism and racism. Travis Diehl looks at a group of Los Angeles painters steeped in a twenty-first-century version of Surrealism. And Art in America Associate Editor Emily Watlington reminds us that the endlessly inventive Meret Oppenheim was far more than just the creator of a famous fur cup.

That Surrealism was born between two world wars will surely not be lost on today’s readers, who—beginning just as this issue was going to press—have been mired in images of horrific battle scenes in Ukraine. Some of Surrealism’s most brutal imagery—Salvador Dalí’s, for instance—was inspired by the conditions of war. At its heart, Surrealism has always been a prompt: how do we envision the unimaginable?

—Sarah Douglas, Editor in Chief 

Orion Martin: M.R.E., 2021, oil on linen with aluminum frame, 27 1/2 by 47 1/2 inches.

DEPARTMENTS

FIRST LOOK

Jacky Connolly by Josie Thaddeus-Johns

An interplay of real versus virtual experience pervades the work of this Upstate New York–based artist.

SIGHTLINES

Cecilia Alemani, artistic director of the Venice Biennale, shares five current interests.

THE EXCHANGE

Cross Contamination by Maru García with Max Liboiron

A chemist-turned-artist and an artist-turned-scientist discuss pollution, decolonization, and biological remedies.

ONE WORK

David Ebony on Raymond Saunders’s Beauty in Darkness, 1993–99

An enormous collage-painting evokes segregation’s random horrors and small daily humiliations.

HARD TRUTHS

by Chen and Lampert

Artist-curators Howie Chen and Andrew Lampert offer tongue-in-cheek takes on art world dilemmas.

CRITICAL EYE

The Asphalt Avant-Garde by Jackson Arn

Viewing the US highway system as a gigantic work of art.

BOOKS

Zoé Samudzi on Bénédicte Savoy’s Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat.

HANDS ON

Q&A with Anika Tabachnick, creative aging programs associate at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.

FEATURES

SURREALISM AND POLITICS

by Ara H. Merjian

A love-hate relationship played out between Surrealist dreamers and the radical Left.

WHAT WAS SURREALISM?

by Rachel Wetzler

Globalizing the movement’s history leaves its fundamental nature in doubt.

NEW IMPRESSIONS OF THE HUMAN

by Lucy Ives

Eccentric multimillionaire writer Raymond Roussel helped lay the groundwork for Surrealism’s psychological fantasias.

X=HARE

by Emily Watlington 

Meret Oppenheim’s fiercely independent, logic-defying work goes far beyond her iconic furred teacup.

SURREAL THINGS

by Travis Diehl 

Young LA artists are giving consumer items an uncanny painterly treatment. A print by Orion Martin accompanies the article.

LAMBASTING REALITY

by Yasmina Price

Using disruptive techniques, Black filmmakers challenge the social biases “normalized” in conventional movie forms.

WORD PROCESSING

by Rob Horning

Artificial intelligence belies the liberating promise of Surrealist automatic writing.

REVIEWS

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Relief, 1936, oil on wood and plywood, 19 ¾ by 27 by 3 ⅛ inches.

SOPHIE TAEUBER-ARP
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Rachel Wetzler

“CERAMICS IN THE EXPANDED FIELD”
MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts
Janet Koplos

SHANNON EBNER
Kaufmann Repetto, New York
Hiji Nam

BASEERA KHAN
Brooklyn Museum, New York
TK Smith

ROCHELLE FEINSTEIN
Bridget Donahue and Candice Madey, New York
Jackson Arn

ASHLEY BICKERTON
Lehmann Maupin and O’Flaherty’s, New York
David Ebony

PHILIP SMITH
Primary, Miami
Gean Moreno

THEODORA ALLEN
Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Leah Ollman

“WITCH HUNT”
Hammer Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Liz Hirsch

“CONGRESS”
Norval Foundation, Cape Town
Nkgopoleng Moloi