sculpture – Page 3

July 20, 2026August 20, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Timothy Makepeace: From Thirty Feet to One Million Miles

Timothy Makepeace has spent nine years making art about one of the most complex machines humanity has ever built. Since his first visit to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 2016, the artist has developed an expansive body of work in response to the James Webb Space Telescope — its gold-plated beryllium mirrors, its acoustic test chambers, the light it gathers from increasingly distant points in time. The culmination of that inquiry is Ghost in the Machine, on view at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC, through August 9, 2026. We spoke with Makepeace about working with NASA engineers, the formal decisions behind his square-format drawings, and what kept drawing him back to a telescope now orbiting the Sun a million miles from Earth.

July 16, 2026July 15, 2026, by Kun Sok

Interview for He Spoke to the Birds: Matter, Memory, and Nonhuman Voices

Diego Azzola, Huang Zhe, Installation view of He Spoke To The Birds

Presented at the AAIE Center for Contemporary Art in Rome, He Spoke to the Birds brings together works by Jeremias Rumpl, Diego Azzola, and Huang Zhe in an exhibition curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Taking its title from Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s reflection on Saint Francis of Assisi and Arte Povera, the exhibition asks what it might mean to listen not only to human voices, but also to birds, ruins, pipes, smoke, and matter itself.

July 2, 2026June 28, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Dakota Gearhart: All Matter Is Alive

Dakota Gearhart grew up on a Florida coastline where algae blooms, sewage outflows, and bikini contests share the same shoreline, and her work has been carrying that mix of beauty, decay, and amusement into a much bigger frame ever since. Across animation, sculpture, performance, and sound, she builds video worlds where pixels sing, electricity becomes sentient, and the nonhuman shows up on equal footing with the rest of the cast. Her ongoing animated series Life Touching Life is hosted by Tiffany, a half-algae, half-woman figure who guides viewers through episodes shaped with collaborators — poets, scientists, activists, caretakers — whose lives already reflect the worldview the work is reaching toward. It’s funny, strange, and serious in roughly equal measure, which turns out to be the right register for the worlds it stages.

June 30, 2026June 30, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

The Whole Water of a River at TSA Brooklyn with Byron Toledo

The Whole Water of a River, installation view

A dead opossum lying in a fetal position along a contaminated riverbank in Quito became, for Byron Toledo, both an encounter and a sculpture. That moment, tender and violent at once, is at the heart of The Whole Water of a River at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Brooklyn, an exhibition that follows the Machángara River from its mountain source through the city. Ceramic animals, distilled plant aromas, and sound recordings gathered along the watershed map the river as a living system that connects hills, ravines, plants, people, and the city itself. The project carries unusual stakes: in 2024, an Ecuadorian court ruled that the rights of the Machángara had been violated, a ruling for which Toledo’s own video work served as evidence. We spoke with the artist about walking the river, collaborating across disciplines, and what it means to make art inside an ecosystem fighting to survive.

June 29, 2026June 28, 2026, by Eva Zanardi

The Biennale That Broke Itself

The 61st International Art Exhibition arrives in grief, political fury, and institutional crisis. It is one of the more galvanizing editions in recent memory.

The lagoon light still flatters everything it touches, but this year, Venice has the feel of a city that stayed up too late arguing. May 7, 2026 — the one morning of the press preview period spared by both rain and protest — was the kind of day Venice is famous for: blue sky and large cinematic cumuli drifting above the Queen of the Adriatic. Police stood watch outside the Israeli and Russian pavilions. The queues at the Giardini were long; those at the Arsenale were longer. In years of attending press previews, I have rarely encountered such a congested or physically demanding environment — the crowd, indistinguishable from a general-public opening, consumed by the compulsive and indiscriminate act of photographing everything in sight.

June 26, 2026June 24, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

From A to Z and the Bodies In Between at Nunu

Borges once described a fictional Chinese encyclopedia that classified animals into categories so incompatible — beings that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that look like flies from a distance — that the whole idea of classification begins to feel like a kind of absurd fiction. Nancy Bowen’s first solo exhibition at Nunu Fine Art invokes exactly that suspicion: that the dictionary, the archive, the great pre-internet repositories of everything, are not neutral records but constructions, and that constructions can be dismantled, embellished, and made to mean something new.

June 25, 2026June 25, 2026, by Melissa Stern

Women Across America 1945-1979 at Eric Firestone

Eric Firestone Gallery, in its continuing support of underrepresented and female artists in the 20th and 21st centuries, has mounted an ambitious and interesting exhibition on now through July 11 at the gallery’s location on Great Jones Street in NYC. The exhibition is devoted to women who worked in abstraction from 1945 to 1979, thus giving the curators a very specific window within which to work.

June 23, 2026July 15, 2026, by Art Spiel

What Remains: in dialogue with Arghavan Khosravi

Altarpieces—historically sites of devotion, revelation, and spiritual certainty—become something altogether different in Arghavan Khosravi’s What Remains, currently on view at Uffner & Liu through July 2. The exhibition brings together large-scale wall works, a freestanding sculpture, and an intimate suite of new altar-inspired paintings that continue Khosravi’s ongoing exploration of the forces that shape women’s lives under political, cultural, and religious systems of control. Drawing equally from Persian miniature painting and medieval European iconography, the artist constructs layered worlds where architectural structures become psychological spaces, symbols migrate across histories, and moments of resistance emerge within conditions of constraint. Rather than offering resolution, the works linger in states of suspension—between freedom and captivity, memory and displacement, devotion and doubt.

June 23, 2026June 20, 2026, by Noa Charuvi

Basis: Gabriela Vainsencher at Asya Geisberg

At Basis, Gabriela Vainsencher’s second solo exhibition at Asya Geisberg Gallery, the artist continues to explore themes of motherhood, domestic life, the female body, and her relationship with art history as an artist-mother, a figure traditionally marginalized. Vainsencher’s work resonates within a broader context of artists who have embraced domesticity and motherhood as central creative subjects, such as Louise Bourgeois, who explored maternal forms and the body. Vainsencher explains that she chose the title thinking about how early childhood forms the foundation for all experiences going forward, as having children does to the parent, and also since she finds herself physically becoming a basis or pedestal when her kids climb on her, a familiar experience to all parents of small children.

June 16, 2026June 17, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

No Walls Required: Stay Frosty Comes to Kingston

The gallery is a parking lot. The walls are car hoods, trunks, dashboards, and glove compartments. That is the premise of Stay Frosty, the itinerant art project launched by New York’s BravinLee programs that arrives in Kingston this June as part of Upstate Art Weekend, in collaboration with ArtPort Kingston. After a debut edition in Harlem that transformed a parking lot into a temporary neighborhood, Stay Frosty is now on home ground — a community where the car is less symbol than necessity, and where ArtPort Kingston has spent years weaving contemporary art into everyday public life. We spoke with BravinLee’s Karin Bravin and John Lee, and ArtPort Kingston’s Laurie De Chiara, about what brought them together, what they’re building, and why some of the most exciting art right now might be happening in a parking lot.