Flashback- Nick Cave at Columbus Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Columbus, Conceptual Art, Dance, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Ohio Art Shows, Performances, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film, Washington D.C.
Feb 272026
 

Pictured is one of Nick Cave‘s Soundsuits, created using found fabrics and metal and wood toys. It was on view at Columbus Museum of Art in 2024.

From the museum about the work-

Nick Cave’s Soundsuits are sculptural costumes, some of which were made to be worn, others to remain stationary. Although these suits often appear whimsical and joyful, they also respond to suffering and injustice. Cave created his first suit in response to the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, an event that focused attention on discriminatory policing and racial profiling. Reflecting the artist’s lived experience as an African American man, the Soundsuits camouflage the wearer’s body, concealing markers of race, gender, and class.

In the Art21 video below you can see some of his Soundsuits in motion. He studied with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and that influence can be seen here as well.

Art 21-Nick Cave in Chicago- Season 8

Cave’s latest exhibition, Mammoth, recently opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. and will be on view until January of 2027.

About that show from SAAM-

In Mammoth, Cave remakes the museum’s galleries into an immersive environment marked by the crafted hides and bones of mammoths, a video projection of the long-dead animals come to life, and hundreds of transformed found objects—from vintage tools to his grandmother’s thimble collection—presented like paleontological specimens on a massive light table. By showcasing the ordinary and often forgotten bits and pieces of the world we live in, Cave’s work shines light on what we value and how we make meaning together. It evokes the lives and cultures we have lost, as well as the magical possibilities of a universe created through imagination and the humblest of materials.

Focused on the fundamental connections between people and their environment, Cave asks how we can begin to make sense of our relationship with a landscape that continues to evolve. How might we adapt, persevere, even thrive? As the contemporary world increasingly challenges what it means to be human, Cave envisions a space of both grief and possibility.

 

Robert Gober at Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Columbus, Ohio Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 262025
 

Robert Gober‘s Untitled, 1993-1994 was on view at Columbus Museum of Art last year, on loan from Art Bridges.

About the sculpture from Art Bridges–

Robert Gober’s Untitled assumes an entirely familiar form that triggers a multi-sensory response. By representing a stick of Breakstone butter, the artist conjures up memories of the food’s texture, aroma, and taste. Gober manipulates these senses with Untitled, leaving the viewer mildly disoriented. Although the object is immediately recognizable, it has no odor, and its glistening beeswax sheen varies slightly from the creamy tactility of actual butter. Significantly, the artist has expanded his representation of butter to roughly the size of a human torso.

The artist’s work often functions with a corporeality that relates to the body, and as Untitled lies unwrapped with its impressionable surface exposed, a commensurate feeling of naked vulnerability is evoked. Because butter can be transformed and clarified, it has associations with spiritual awakening and purity. These notions are echoed in the near-monastic rigor of Gober’s craftsmanship, elevating the familiar object to a profound level.

Two for Tuesday- Public Art- Julian Voss-Andreae’s Sculptures in Palm Springs and Columbus, Ohio

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Columbus, Conceptual Art, History, Ohio Art Shows, Palm Springs, Palm Springs Art Shows, Public Art, Quotes, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jul 292025
 

Isabelle, by German sculptor Julian Voss-Andreae is located in Palm Springs, California. Voss-Andreae creates sculptures designed to change their appearance- disappearing at times when viewed at a certain angle. His background in science helped to influence this work when he went on to study art.

Below is a section of his biography from his website-

Prior to his art career, Julian Voss-Andreae studied quantum physics and philosophy at the Universities of Berlin and Edinburgh. As a graduate student at the University of Vienna, Voss-Andreae was one of the small team led by 2022 Nobel Prize Laureate Anton Zeilinger that conducted a ground-breaking experiment in quantum mechanics in 1999. The researchers showed that even molecules as big as C-60 “Buckyballs” can reveal their fundamentally quantum nature under the right conditions. Zeilinger’s group found that a beam of them, passed through a diffraction grating, will exhibit the purely wavelike property of interference. Subsequent experiments showed how interactions with the environment (in the form of infrared photons and background gas of different densities) will gradually wash away the ‘quantum-ness’ thanks to the process of decoherence, which is now recognized as the way the classical world emerges from the quantum.

Our Single Garment of Destiny, (pictured below) is located in  Washington Gladden Social Justice Park in Columbus, Ohio. It was specifically designed for the park and takes its name and inspiration from the Martin Luther King Jr. quote below.

“All [people] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”  – Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)

The video below explains his process when creating the sculptures.

Ohio Art Shows- Frank Stella at Columbus Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Columbus, Mixed Media, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 222024
 

Pictured above is Frank Stella’s 1986 work, La vecchia dell’orto, on view at Columbus Museum of Art, part of New Encounters: Reframing the Contemporary Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art– a reinstallation of the museum’s contemporary galleries.

About the work from the museum-

In the 1960s Frank Stella began creating paintings with a composition of lines that closely followed the shape of the canvas. These works often resisted any sense of depth, but in the following decade, Stella would go on to create exuberant works like this, composed of brightly painted cones and other shapes that extend beyond the surface of the rectangle behind it.

The title of this work, like others in his Cones and Pillars series, is taken from an Italian folktale in which a mother’s only daughter is kept by a witch as payment for a cabbage she stole from the witch’s garden.

Stella’s practice was always evolving. In his most recent large painted sculptures, currently on view at Deitch in NYC, you can see how he expanded on the concepts he was working with here.

Mel Chin’s “Spirit” at Columbus Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Columbus, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, Ohio Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 182024
 

There’s an unsettling tension in the room that houses Mel Chin’s installation Spirit (1994), at the Columbus Museum of Art. Is the rope strong enough to support the barrel? What will be its breaking point?

Some details from the museum about the work-

The rope that seems to carry the weight of Spirit’s enormous cask is made from tallgrass. This native plant was once central to a vast prairie ecosystem spanning over 170 million acres of North America. By 1930, most all of this was decimated as a result of agricultural and industrial settlement, and what remains is protected habitat (Chin received special permission to harvest a portion for this sculpture).

Wooden barrels are traditionally used to measure and transport dry goods like grain, beans, as well as beer, oil and wine, and were central to the process of European settlement and trade in North America. Here, the image of this rope bearing such a massive weight suggests the precarious status of nature in a world of outsized human development. Even the gallery walls, which curve inwards on all sides, seem to respond to the strain.

 

Ohio Art Shows- “Arbus, Sherman, Woodman: American Photography from the 1960s and 1970s” at Columbus Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Columbus, Films, Ohio Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Mar 072024
 

Francesca Woodman, “Untitled (Rome), 1977-8, Gelatin silver print (image via Columbus Museum of Art)

Two of Cindy Sherman’s “Film Stills”, Gelatin silver prints from the 1970s

Four Gelatin silver prints by Diane Arbus

Francesca Woodman’s “Italy”, 1977-1978 (printed later) Gelatin silver print

Currently on view at Columbus Museum of Art is Arbus • Sherman • Woodman: American Photography from the 1960s and 1970s. Although many of these photographs by Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman are well known, it’s great to see the work of these three exceptional artists in person. The black and white images still captivate, even in our current image saturated world.

About the show from the museum-

This selection of monochromatic prints reflects a shared interest in capturing the world outside oneself as well as the world within. Perspective is an elemental link between each work: the images speak to how we see ourselves as individuals, how we are perceived, and how we observe others.

While Arbus was known for photographing families, children, pedestrians, performers, and celebrities, both Sherman and Woodman turned the camera on themselves. Dressing as anonymous female film characters from the 1950s and 1960s, Sherman poses in the series “Untitled Film Stills”. However, these works are not considered self-portraits, but rather carefully constructed performances of various female identities. Conversely, Woodman’s surrealist images might be called non-traditional self-portraits. By obscuring, blurring, or cropping parts of herself out of the final image, the photographs become intimate, personal snapshots that reflect a wider human fragility.

Arbus, Sherman, and Woodman are considered among the most prominent twentieth-century photographers and remain influential to contemporary artists today. By including aspects of feminism in their work and pushing the limits of the medium, these women challenged societal norms of their time while contributing to the elevation of photography as an art form.

It’s always interesting to hear artists discuss each other’s work. Included in the exhibition is this quote by Cindy Sherman about Francesca Woodman-

“She had few boundaries and made art out of nothing: empty rooms with peeling wallpaper and just her figure. No elaborate stage set-up or lights… Her process struck me more the way a painter works, making do with what’s right in front of her, rather than photographers like myself who need time to plan out what they’re going to do.”

For more on Francesca Woodman, her short life, and her artistic family, The Woodmans is an excellent documentary.

Edward Hopper’s “Morning Sun” at Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Columbus, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Mar 052024
 

Edward Hopper’s oil painting Morning Sun, 1952, is part of Columbus Museum of Art’s permanent collection. The model for the painting was his wife, Jo.