Julia Halperin : “What Disability Art Means Now”
As the U.S. rolls back aid and protections, these contemporary artists are making the art world, at least, more open.
The New York Times
August 27, 2025Grigely initially found the exhibit seductive. He’d lost hearing in his right ear as a baby; he became fully Deaf when he was 10, after a twig pierced his left eardrum while he rolled down a hill. “Here was a show directly addressing disability in a way I hadn’t seen up to that point,” he recalled over Zoom in June. (Grigely’s longtime sign language interpreter joined us to translate my questions.) Calle’s portraits and her subjects’ replies were accompanied by images of places, textures and colors that they’d described (“What pleases me aesthetically is a man’s body, strong and muscular”).
But as Grigely, now 68, drove back home to Washington, D.C., he felt increasingly uneasy. Stuck in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, he started scribbling notes to Calle on the scraps of paper he carries around so hearing people can communicate with him. He went on to visit the show seven more times, in the process writing 32 letters that became “Postcards to Sophie Calle” (1991), an influential work in the history of disability art.
The Calle exhibition occurred at a landmark moment for disability rights in the United States. Less than a year earlier, Congress had passed the Americans With Disabilities Act, prohibiting discrimination against disabled people. On the final day of the show, Grigely handed out copies of his text outside the gallery. “It is easy to tell disabled people what they are missing; much more difficult to listen to, and understand, what they have,” he wrote. He ended the correspondence with a suggestion for Calle. “Perhaps, Sophie, you might someday return what you have taken, might someday undress your psyche in a room frequented by the blind and let them run their fingers over your body as you have run your eyes over theirs.”
Grigely suspected “Postcards to Sophie Calle” would, before long, feel outmoded, given the sweeping social changes promised by the A.D.A. He was wrong: Today the broader culture still looks at disability as something to be hidden or fixed. And in its first six months, the Trump administration has not only cut the budgets of Medicare and food assistance, which provide aid to millions of disabled Americans, but also rolled back numerous provisions of the A.D.A. that offered guidance on how to make businesses more accessible.
In this climate, a diffuse cultural movement has emerged of disabled artists whose work is explicitly about disability and chronic illness. There’s the Canadian artist Sharona Franklin, 38, who makes sculptures out of gelatin filled with medicinal plants, metal bolts, syringes and other instruments. She sometimes incorporates expired medications prescribed to treat systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis, or Still’s disease, which she was diagnosed with as a child. There’s Carolyn Lazard, 38, who makes videos like 2018’s “Crip Time,” which tracks two hands, shot from above, as they sort pills into brightly colored boxes, the repeated clacking of capsules and snapping of lids illustrating the tedium of chronic illness like the autoimmune diseases Lazard lives with. And there’s Jerron Herman, 34, an artist and dancer with cerebral palsy who makes collaborative performances that depict what he describes as “images of freedom.”
The increased exposure of disability arts can be attributed to the fact that many people with disabilities were, until as recently as the 1980s, routinely institutionalized and cut off from the rest of the world. The arrival of AIDS transformed our culture’s relationship to disability, as more people dealt with a novel health crisis and artists began exploring its impact in their work. The photographer John Dugdale made cyanotypes as he started losing his sight because of complications from the illness. The painter Frank Moore, who learned he was H.I.V. positive in 1985, introduced new symbols into his work, including coffins, hospital beds and the mounds of pills he took, as he struggled with treatment. By the early 2010s, disabled artists were connecting with one another and developing audiences through social media. A big spike in public interest in their work came during the Covid pandemic, when the issues that many disabled artists had engaged with for decades were suddenly top of mind for the rest of the population: the way communication is mediated and distorted by technology; health care bureaucracy and the class disparities in who gets what medical treatment; isolation; the fragility of the body.
FOR MOST OF Western art history, disabled people were depicted as objects of pity, scorn or fascination. There were celebratory images of wounded soldiers, romanticized images of blind seers and ghoulish images of disabled people as freaks, beggars and court jesters. “Whether it was positive or negative, there was a lot of morality baked into it,” says Leah Lehmbeck, who’s co-curating an exhibition about art and disability from the 19th century to the present at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2028. (Scheduled to coincide with the Los Angeles Olympics and Paralympics, the show is conceived as a counterpoint to how sports champions certain body types over others.)
When the work of disabled artists entered the canon, their disabilities were often erased from the story — even if certain impairments had shaped the direction of their art. As cataracts blurred the vision of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet, he darkened his palette and applied paint more heavily to the canvas. Similarly, Charles White — whose luminous drawings and prints of Black American life made him one of the 20th century’s most influential artists — might not have created those works had he not contracted tuberculosis: Because of his sensitive lungs, he rejected painting’s toxic fumes in favor of the pencil. The British painter David Hockney, known for his brightly colored portraits and landscapes, has credited his hearing loss with his ability to “see space clearer.” Yet one reason the subject has been largely ignored by historians is that many artists have avoided the label themselves, considering their physical or mental impairments a distraction from their creativity rather than a facilitator of it. “Art history is disabled all around us,” says Amanda Cachia, an art historian who specializes in disability art activism. “Yet it has never been acknowledged as such.”
The sculptor Mark di Suvero, now 91, broke his back and left leg in a near-fatal freight elevator accident while working a construction job in 1960. At the time, he was preparing for his first solo show. To get out of the hospital after a yearlong stay, he lied to his doctors about having a wheelchair-accessible work space. In reality, he relied on leg braces and crutches to get to his third-floor studio in Lower Manhattan.
But the accident, he recalls, forced him “to change with the way I was working.” Before, di Suvero had made car-size sculptures from reclaimed timber beams and metal chains whose precarious arrangements recalled three-dimensional Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes. Now he taught himself to use a crane, which he began referring to as his paintbrush. “The crane changes the human body’s capacity to lift things,” he explains. After army-crawling from his wheelchair to the crane’s operator seat, he would assemble steel beams, steamrollers and other industrial objects into lyrical sculptures that rose several stories tall. But though his accident prompted the breakthrough that defined his career, di Suvero says he doesn’t consider his sculptures to be about disability in any way. For him, like many in his generation, disability was a tragedy to endure and overcome. “Limited mobility has made me love better,” says di Suvero, whose left foot was amputated in 2017 because of complications from a burn. “Limited mobility has forced me, like many people, to depend upon society. ... Limited mobility has made me understand what I have lost.”
In contrast, the artists who grew up after the passage of the A.D.A. often see disability as a generative force rather than a limiting one. They came of age amid the disability justice movement, which expanded on the disability rights movement of the 1970s and ’80s. The disabled activists of color who coined the term “disability justice” in 2005 — Patty Berne, Mia Mingus and Stacey Milbern — considered the fight against ableism to be at “intersecting junctures of oppression,” inextricably linked to fights against racism, sexism and homophobia. A person’s worth, they argued, should not be bound to “the level of productivity a capitalist culture expects.”
“Everyone thinks that the worst thing that could happen to you is to become paralyzed or to become sick but actually, in the U.S., ... the worst thing is navigating the systems that are built to kill you if you are no longer a body that is able to be exploited for physical labor,” says the artist Emily Barker. Their 2019 sculpture “Death by 7,865 Paper Cuts” is a pile of photocopies of Barker’s medical bills from 2012 to 2015, about as tall as a night stand. Their 2019 installation “Kitchen” is an L-shaped countertop and cabinets rendered in ghostly translucent plastic (a material they chose because it’s light enough for them to lift). Barker installed the countertop on a platform and hung the cabinets from the ceiling to mimic the way they experience most kitchens as a wheelchair user. The cabinets are just out of reach, and the counter is too high to chop vegetables on without worrying about slicing off a finger. The experience of reckoning with what Barker describes as “constraints that I live within on a daily basis” is disorienting, infantilizing and frustrating.
When we meet at a coffee shop in June, Barker is staying in Brooklyn’s Bedford- Stuyvesant neighborhood. They like ambulatory people to travel at least a short distance with them in order to get a glimpse of what it’s like to navigate the world using a wheelchair. Along our several-block journey, Barker asks if their motorized wheelchair, operating on the walk setting, is moving too quickly for me to keep up. (It is, a little.) They note that the settings were probably designed — like most things are — with a six- foot-tall, nondisabled man in mind.
Just as disability justice challenges the idea that conventional productivity is required for a meaningful life, Barker and their peers often choose to work in media — like video, installation and performance — that aren’t easily commodified by the art market. In the early ’90s, Grigely struggled to find an outlet willing to publish “Postcards to Sophie Calle” — until Calle herself put in a word with the Swiss art quarterly Parkett.
The art world has been slow to recognize its own ableism, but today institutions are engaging a bit more thoughtfully with the work of disabled artists. In February, the Whitney opened a multifloor retrospective of the Berlin-based American artist Christine Sun Kim, 44, who has been Deaf since birth and makes work about how sound operates as a “social currency,” including humorous drawings that look like musical scores with all the notes missing. Kim, who worked in the museum’s education department from 2007 to 2014, was instrumental in establishing programs like its twice-monthly tours led by Deaf educators and American Sign Language interpreters. Recent exhibitions exploring art and disability include “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time,” which toured the United States from 2016 to 2020 in various iterations; the 2021 show “Crip Time,” at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, which featured the work of more than 40 contemporary artists; and “For Dear Life,” an examination of the subject from the 1960s to the present at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2024. That show presented Calle’s “The Blind” alongside Grigely’s work.
Disabled artists remain the most dedicated advocates for accessibility in museums, in no small part because they want their peers to be able to see their work. In 2019, Lazard, Herman and others formed the collective I Wanna Be With You Everywhere to organize performances and meet-ups by and for disabled people. Herman explained that the group is constantly thinking about various forms of access — ASL interpretation, image descriptions, ramps — and not just as means of connection. In Herman’s 2023 performance “LAX,” for example, both the physical movements and the audio descriptions of those movements alternate between tight and anxious (“He steps in staccato steps”) and languid (“He discovered his peace across watery plains”). Here, access becomes a raw material, an artistic medium unto itself.
A version of this article appears in print on , Page 64 of T Magazine with the headline: Open Access
There’s not much in New York that has staying power. Every other day, a new scandal outscandals whatever we were just scandalized by; every few years, a hotter, scarier downtown set emerges; the yoga studio up the block from your apartment that used to be a coffee shop has now become a hybrid drug front and yarn store. Sometimes it’s like living in whatever the opposite of Groundhog Day is, waking up each morning in a new and unfamiliar city. That makes it a little bit easier to spot the things that have stood the test of time. This year, Saturday Night Live entered its 50th season, still defiantly delirious, still doing sketches that shouldn’t resonate further than Hoboken, still helmed by the same guy who, 50 years ago, pitched what one executive called “the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life.” Dia Art Foundation, a custodian of impossibly high-maintenance modernist art, has also been around for half a century, and so, by the way, has Eli Zabar, the Park Slope Food Coop, and the Hampton Jitney (it’s a bus). Maybe more than a city of constant turnover, we’re a city selective about what we decide to keep. Here, we’ve collected “39 Reasons to Love New York Right Now,” some of which only flared briefly, and a few that we, as a city, fought to preserve.
Ted Loos: “From One Nonagenarian Artist to Another, a Tip of the Hat”
The New York Times
October 3, 2024
One of them, Alex Katz, became the painter of some of the most recognizable portraits of our age, the other, Mark di Suvero, a welder of huge steel sculptures that are ubiquitous wherever outdoor art is found.
This is not a buddy comedy setup, but rather the philanthropic back story behind the recent permanent installation of a nearly 15-foot-tall abstract sculpture by di Suvero, “Sooner or Later” (2022), on the plaza in front of the Brooklyn Museum.
The work is a gift to the museum from the Alex Katz Foundation, picked out by the painter himself, to honor the museum’s 200th anniversary.
Katz, 97 and still making new paintings, went back to Paula Cooper Gallery three times to see it, before making the purchase; the gallery said that similar works are priced in a range from $3 million and $5 million.
“I saw it in the window and thought it was fantastic,” said Katz, known for his striking, flattened and highly stylized portraits, frequently taking his wife, Ada, as a subject. (He had a large retrospective at the Guggenheim that began in 2022.)
“I thought. ‘What the hell? Let’s get it.’”
Di Suvero’s “Sooner or Later” is a steel piece that sports a curving area on one side and short, rectangular segments on the other, with a demolition claw and a chain toward the center.
“This piece is like a culmination of his life,” Katz said of di Suvero. “It has an internal power as well as an outer power. It’s really the spirit of the Italian Baroque.”
He added, “If you took down a Bernini” — the 17th-century Italian sculptor — “and put up this piece, it wouldn’t be much of a loss.”
Katz, a lifelong New Yorker who was born in Brooklyn, established the foundation in 2004, and it has given more than 800 works to museums. He recently gave the Brooklyn Museum a 1986 Sigmar Polke painting, “Graphite painting with loops (after Dürer).”
Anne Pasternak, the Brooklyn Museum’s director, said that his current gift was part of “the long history of artists who collect their contemporaries.”
The work was the first by di Suvero to enter the collection.
The 200th anniversary kicks off on Oct. 5 with a weekend-long birthday bash and the opening of “Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art” — the reinstallation of its American Art collection — and “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition,” featuring work by more than 200 local artists.
One similarity between Katz and di Suvero is their intense work ethic. “I made 32 paintings this summer,” Katz said. “It’s insane. I don’t know what else to do.”
Di Suvero, who just turned 91 and lives in Bodega Bay, Calif., pointed out that he has a Brooklyn connection, too: In the 1960s he had a studio in the Greenpoint neighborhood.
The gift was especially surprising, he said, since, “I don’t know Alex Katz,” di Suvero said. “I don’t think I’d recognize him if I walked into a room full of people and he was there.”
Di Suvero made his name with abstract sculptures made of steel I-beams, and 10 of his works are on view at the Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley.
The sculptures have always been laborious to construct. Di Suvero does not send out plans to be fabricated elsewhere, and does not make drawings or maquettes beforehand; he works on the materials directly in his studio in Petaluma, Calif., and a large crane is employed to move the pieces around, as well as to bend them.
He gets some help from assistants, but for “Sooner or Later,” he said, “I made all the cuts and welds myself.”
When asked if he might make a reciprocal donation, buying an Alex Katz painting and giving it to the Brooklyn Museum or elsewhere, he chuckled.
“I don’t know,” di Suvero said. “That’s a good idea, though. If I do that, I’ll tell him it was your idea.”
Art is inextricable from life for Mark di Suvero, a titan of twentieth-century and contemporary art who has been making work for nearly seven decades. He’s best known for teasing poetry from industrial metals—steel, iron, and the like—to make abstract sculpture that alternately seems to dance, sway, or take flight. Alongside his sculptural work, di Suvero has also always been a painter. A major show of his paintings, entitled Spacetime, is currently on view at the Sala delle Pietre of the Palazzo del Popolo in Todi, Italy, coinciding with the fourth edition of the Todi Festival of the Arts. Organized by the Beverly Pepper Foundation, which is based in Todi, and curated by Marco Tonelli, the exhibition will also include a paragon of di Suvero’s large, outdoor works, Neruda’s Gate (2005), installed on the Piazza del Popolo. The sculpture will remain on view in the picturesque, medieval city after the exhibition closes. For di Suvero, whose parents were both Italian, it’s a fitting tribute to his heritage.
Jessica Holmes At ninety years old, it must be exciting to have a major exhibition of your work in Italy, your ancestral home. Tell me about the exhibition at Sala delle Pietre in Todi.
Mark di Suvero Italy is the birthplace of my parents, and I lived and taught in Venice for several years during the 1970s. Marco Tonelli was the assistant of Giovanni Carandente, who curated my citywide exhibition in Venice in 1995, the last time I had a solo show of work in Italy, so I feel a great sense of connection—of continuation—in this exhibition. It is always a great pleasure to work in Italy.
JH The Beverly Pepper Foundation is organizing the show. How did this collaboration come about?
MdS I have enormous respect for Beverly Pepper and her work. When I helped found Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York, in 1986, it was an important moment for us when she loaned her work Omega to be exhibited there. The recognition of an artist such as Beverly was very important for Socrates, and installation of work in those early years by artists of her caliber, along with others like Isamu Noguchi and Mary Frank, helped establish the park. So when the Beverly Pepper Foundation reached out to me in September 2023, I was honored by their invitation to place a sculpture in the main square of Todi, which is such a beautiful and iconic location. I’m delighted I can now, in turn, contribute to the public program they are developing in Todi.
JH Though you’re probably best known for your sculpture, painting has always been an important aspect of your practice. How do you see your two-dimensional works situated within your larger body of work?
MdS All my life I have learned from painting; I began as a painter. When I was in college in Santa Barbara, I saw the New York painting abstract expressionist show Paintings from the School of New York at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1954. Seeing the Philip Guston paintings in that exhibition changed my life. I immediately got some cardboard and started painting. I also liked the Yves Klein, but it was really the Gustons that got me making art. I was also very influenced by my college girlfriend, the painter Beate Wheeler, who I followed to New York City. I learned as much about painting from her as from anyone.
Painting, in some ways, is much more abstract than sculpture because you can cancel out, with a white brush, immediately any part, and it takes a few seconds to do. But if I want to change something in my sculptures, it takes me hours, days, weeks of work before I can change it. So there is already this limit, where painting has none. It never has to deal with gravity. It hangs on the wall, yes; but inside the painting, within the frame of the painting, there is never any need to reason for gravity. There are traditional ideas of background and foreground, and things that have to do with imitational art, where the art imitates what one sees. Painting never deals with the concept of structure, of the piece of sculpture being able to support its own weight or its form.
JH Do intuition and improvisation play into your painting practice, as they do in your sculptural practice?
MdS Abstract painting and sculpture have a capacity, a projective capacity, that for many people is very different—an infinite capacity to project emotions. I make paintings that have strings like a guitar, except they are like a kithara, with that kind of sliding sound. Rather than just one note, when you play the guitar you change the length of the string, so that it is one sound; that’s what the paintings look like.
JH I like the analogy to music that you just made, as I was going to say, similarly perhaps, that there’s a sense of musical movement, dance, in these paintings that is in sympathy with the kineticism—actual and implied—in your sculpture. What draws you to motion?
MdS People express themselves through movement, obviously. Dance existed before history; it’s just one of those things that human beings do. It can be terrible; it can be terrifying; and yet that sense of movement is what expresses it. I made a piece of sculpture for the poet William Butler Yeats [For W.B. Yeats, 1985–87]. He ends his great 1928 poem “Among School Children” by saying “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” It is very hard to separate the dancer from the dance. That emotion is what is needed in sculpture that moves. In order to make the space alive and work, I’ve found that one has to bring it into motion so that there is not just space, but there is that sense of space-time, which is really where we live. We live in a space-time continuum.
JH Neruda’s Gate (2005), named for another poet, Pablo Neruda, is installed in Todi’s town square. Many admirers of your work first come to it through public installations. Can you talk about the significance of public art to you?
MdS When one is an artist, one wants to do art that is meaningful to a lot of people. Most art is shown in museums and galleries, which eliminates a whole population. By putting it out on the streets, you open it up to the world. Bringing art to the people has a kind of joy, a liberation that nothing else can equal.
MdS Poetry is like the phosphorescent paint, activated by blacklight, that I use in these paintings. It changes the light. I want my work to be poetry. It’s a way of emotionally understanding and handling the world through language.
“For me, painting is the truth that colors combined together cause emotions, just like wind and humidity make a storm.” — Mark di Suvero
JH This phosphorescent and also sometimes metallic paint that you use in these canvases unsettle the typical notions of how color functions. A work like Free Fallin (2021), for instance, looks like a completely different painting in white light or sunlight versus under fluorescent light. How did you come to these materials, and what about them appeals to you?
MdS I think of these paintings as subconscious paintings. I’ve been painting for almost seventy years, and the inspiration for painting has always been the ability to use color. For me, painting is the truth that colors combined together cause emotions, just like wind and humidity make a storm. In order to see the ultraviolet dimension of these paintings, they need to be in the dark and use a black light. Some of the pigments glow in the dark; some require ultraviolet light to activate them. There are many ways to see this world, and the exploration—for example, of paintings made for ultraviolet and normal light—is a hint of the complex way that the world works.
MdS I think again of Socrates Sculpture Park. There is an ease out there now. Where there was once abandoned warehouses on a desolate piece of waterfront land, a good feeling now comes from the flowers that weren’t there before, from the gravel walks, from the pieces of sculpture that signal or speak from their feelings toward the people who are receptive to them. The idea of bringing a community together through work, through the vision of the various artists, through helping artists and having the people of the community see that it is possible to transform a place, became so important that the spirit of the place actually changed. There’s a feeling there now that never was before.
Mark di Suvero: Spacetime is on view at the Sala delle Pietre of the Palazzo del Popolo in Todi, Italy, until October 27.
Fondazione Progetti Beverly Pepper Presents Mark di Suvero: Spacetime
August 24 - October 27, 2024
Hugs at West Bund Art Museum, Shanghai
On view until November 2025
Mark di Suvero: Painting and Sculpture, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
September 9 – October 21, 2023
Jessica Holmes: “Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper”
The Brooklyn Rail
June 2023
In the Nasher’s central gallery, the lofty sculpture Swing (2008–22) is both a focal point and an invitation. A stainless steel base soars towards the ceiling from which hangs a cradle made from steel and rubber, loosely resembling a large bird’s nest. Visitors are encouraged to climb into the swing (one at a time) and are given a gentle push by a docent. This feels revolutionary in an age where works of art have been almost entirely cut off from all of the senses besides sight. In a museum, it’s standard that we look but don’t touch, and soon forget the fact that there are indeed many different ways to see.
Rocking in the swing while overlooking the vast gallery and huge picture windows facing the museum’s bucolic sculpture garden—which features a number of di Suvero’s iconic outdoor steel sculptures—the viewer has the sensation of becoming part of the sculpture, and is also imparted with a distinct awareness of being within one’s own body. That so many people who swing in di Suvero’s sculpture feel compelled to quickly jump out, a defensive measure against dawning self-consciousness, only underscores what di Suvero seems to be trying to share. Contemporary life discourages us from such intimate contact with our own human vessels. We don’t want to think about the untold goofy and heedless gestures we enact each day. A moment of vulnerability transpires when resting in di Suvero’s swing. For those who can allow themselves to linger in his refuge, swaying to and fro, the gentle action becomes a radical act of magnanimity.
Di Suvero’s name is nearly synonymous with his towering, large-scale outdoor pieces and public sculptures, and probably for that reason his work is frequently described as “monumental,” though the artist himself eschews that term. Even his largest works aren’t so much muscular in the sense of being aggressive or brawny, but rather in the somatic sense. They’re in sympathy with the body relative to its movement through space. A work like Swing provides a rejoinder to the prescribed line of thinking on di Suvero’s work; though it sails upwards, nearly grazing the ceiling, the humane quality of the sculpture is preserved.
Again and again, di Suvero’s work testifies to the exhilaration of fluidity and movement. This was true even in his earliest sculptures, but its importance cannot be divorced from the poignancy it assumed after 1960, the year the artist became paralyzed from the waist down following a devastating accident he suffered while working a day laborer’s job. At thirty-one years old, he defied his doctors’ predictions that he would never walk again, and regained mobility with the assistance of leg braces and canes. Hankchampion (1960) memorializes this critical juncture in di Suvero’s life, a work begun prior to his accident, and completed—with help of his younger brother Hank—in its wake. Salvaged from building demolitions in lower Manhattan that di Suvero frequently scrounged for materials early in his career, the chunky scraps of wood, though immobile, are pieced together in such a way as to suggest forward momentum. The sculpture simultaneously conveys precarity and sturdiness, locked in poetic limbo.
The exhibition makes a further case for the “anti-monumentality” of di Suvero’s work by highlighting a number of sculptures that are human-scale or smaller, including St. John the Baptist (1961), the first work he made completely in steel after learning how to weld following his accident. Some of the cuts to the metal appear jagged, as might befit an early work in metal but the slatted elements that dangle from one armature of the work, and resemble a twisted spine, are heart-rending. From here, audiences witness di Suvero’s increasing facility with metal across the ensuing decades. In a mature work like the tabletop sculpture WonTon (1970), di Suvero has coaxed an easy sensuality from the steel, bending and curling it into sinuous knots and corkscrews that can be shifted into various configurations, leaving open the possibility that one may never see exactly the same sculpture twice. With his implied encouragement of human interaction with the work itself, di Suvero again bucks the convention of severing object from mortal.
A number of drawings, prints, and paintings are also included in Steel Like Paper, emphasizing a less frequently seen but crucial facet of di Suvero’s oeuvre. His drawings are done in an assertive hand that communicates a warm optimism. As in a series of ink drawings from 2000–2001 titled “Eviva” for his large, outdoor sculpture Eviva Amore (2001) that sits in the Nasher’s sculpture garden as part of the permanent collection, his gestures on paper are reminiscent of the vigorous work of sculpture without ever crossing over into precise description. “If he could capture the energy of his ideas in a drawing,” Morse notes in his exhibition catalogue essay, di Suvero has said that “he could convey that energy in the finished sculpture.” Elsewhere, a nearly wall-sized canvas, Untitled (1995) is a two-dimensional surprise standout of the show. At around nine by eleven feet, the abstract painting is awash in squiggles of bold, kinetic color over a background of rich blue tones. Drawn in by the kineticism of di Suvero’s assured marks, which seem to move in a kaleidoscopic waltz across the surface, the eye can’t help but dance across the canvas. Once again, the viewer becomes one with the work, impossible to separate the dancer from the dance.
– Jessica Holmes
Scott Cantrell: “Nasher’s major Mark di Suvero show has intimacies as well as heroic sculptures”
The Dallas Morning News
February 27, 2023
The big steel sculptures of Mark di Suvero are such public presences in so many places that it can be easy to overlook them as super-size decor accessories. The gigantic red Ad Astra, towering through two levels of NorthPark Center, is surely one of the most often seen artworks in North Texas. The artist’s sprawling Ave hails visitors to the south entrance of the Dallas Museum of Art. In the Nasher Sculpture Center garden his Eviva Amore stretches arms and legs from an implied globe of intersecting circles.
Di Suvero was an early enthusiasm of the late Raymond and Patsy Nasher, who endowed the sculpture center bearing their name. Ray was also the enlightened developer of NorthPark, the rare shopping center that can be called architecturally distinguished, its interiors generously accessorized with modern sculptures.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary, and months before the artist’s 90th birthday, the Nasher is presenting the first major museum exhibition of di Suvero’s work in more than 30 years. For an artist so much associated with gigantic I-beam creations, di Suvero here is revealed as no less a master of intimacies. Small-scale sculptures have a gnarly playfulness, some even balanced for spinning. Works on paper — many, but not all, studies for sculptures — are astonishingly beautiful. The show was coordinated by Jed Morse, the Nasher’s chief curator.
If much modern art has been meant to challenge, even shock, a parallel force can be called populist modernism. The label fits di Suvero, whose longstanding commitment to peace and social justice got him arrested for anti-war protests and prompted a self-imposed European exile during the Vietnam War. For all their industrial abstraction, not to mention enormous weight, even the largest works exude a humane force field. Swing, in the Nasher’s entrance gallery, even invites you to recline in its rubber hammock.
Di Suvero was born in Shanghai to Italian parents who moved to San Francisco when he was 8. He earned a philosophy degree from the University of California at Berkeley but was increasingly drawn to sculpture. Moving to New York in 1957, he worked construction and other jobs to support his sculptural experiments, often assembled from heavy wooden beams and steel bits salvaged from building demolitions. His first solo exhibition, in 1960, attracted considerable notice.
-Scott Cantrell
Di Suvero was an early enthusiasm of the late Raymond and Patsy Nasher, who endowed the sculpture center bearing their name. Ray was also the enlightened developer of NorthPark, the rare shopping center that can be called architecturally distinguished, its interiors generously accessorized with modern sculptures.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary, and months before the artist’s 90th birthday, the Nasher is presenting the first major museum exhibition of di Suvero’s work in more than 30 years. For an artist so much associated with gigantic I-beam creations, di Suvero here is revealed as no less a master of intimacies. Small-scale sculptures have a gnarly playfulness, some even balanced for spinning. Works on paper — many, but not all, studies for sculptures — are astonishingly beautiful. The show was coordinated by Jed Morse, the Nasher’s chief curator.
If much modern art has been meant to challenge, even shock, a parallel force can be called populist modernism. The label fits di Suvero, whose longstanding commitment to peace and social justice got him arrested for anti-war protests and prompted a self-imposed European exile during the Vietnam War. For all their industrial abstraction, not to mention enormous weight, even the largest works exude a humane force field. Swing, in the Nasher’s entrance gallery, even invites you to recline in its rubber hammock.
Di Suvero was born in Shanghai to Italian parents who moved to San Francisco when he was 8. He earned a philosophy degree from the University of California at Berkeley but was increasingly drawn to sculpture. Moving to New York in 1957, he worked construction and other jobs to support his sculptural experiments, often assembled from heavy wooden beams and steel bits salvaged from building demolitions. His first solo exhibition, in 1960, attracted considerable notice.
-Scott Cantrell
January 28 - August 27, 2023
Mark di Suvero (American, born China, 1933) has long been lauded as one of the most significant sculptors of the past 60 years, renowned for monumental, abstract, steel constructions that grace urban plazas, bucolic sculpture parks, and public spaces throughout the world. Industrial studios in Long Island City, New York and Petaluma, California support the creation of these large-scale works, as well as nurture his practice on a more intimate scale. The exhibition at the Nasher focuses on the artist’s studio practice over the course of his more than six-decade career, surveying the more intimately and modestly scaled sculptures in parallel with his energetic and rarely seen drawings. Featuring 30 sculptures ranging in size from hand-held to monumental and more than 40 drawings and paintings spanning the artist’s career, Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper reveals the artist’s intimate studio practice that yields the power of his monumental vision.
In reference to the monumental works and his studio practice, di Suvero notes that, for him, plates of steel are like sheets of white paper, suggesting a facility, intimacy, malleability, and limitless potential rarely associated with his obdurate materials. The artist has pursued a largely improvisatory process throughout his career, working on multiple objects at once, occasionally allowing compositions to develop slowly over many years, and embracing chance and surprise discoveries, even when working with massive materials, large equipment, and crews of assistants. Drawing, painting, and making smaller sculptures provide opportunities to explore ideas on his own. The drawings frequently capture an initial blast of inspiration and often exhibit the freedom and dynamism also apparent in his larger sculptures. Smaller constructions perch, balance, twirl, and unfold, evincing whimsy and wonder, which also energize the monumental assemblages. The sense of play apparent in the smaller works is a constant in di Suvero’s practice and harkens back to the artist’s first forays into public sculpture, making swings and play sculptures for friends, art patrons, and neighborhood children alike. Such egalitarianism serves as a core personal foundation for the artist and finds expression in his public sculptures as well as his lifelong dedication to social justice.
Organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center, the exhibition is the most extensive survey of his work in over 30 years and the largest US museum exhibition since his first at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. In recognition of the long friendship the artist shared with Nasher Sculpture Center founders Raymond and Patsy Nasher, the exhibition takes place as part of the museum’s celebration of its 20th year.
Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper is made possible by leading support from the Texas Commission on the Arts and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger. Generous support is provided by the Sidney E. Frank Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District (DTPID). Generous support for the exhibition catalogue is provided by Paula Cooper Gallery.
In reference to the monumental works and his studio practice, di Suvero notes that, for him, plates of steel are like sheets of white paper, suggesting a facility, intimacy, malleability, and limitless potential rarely associated with his obdurate materials. The artist has pursued a largely improvisatory process throughout his career, working on multiple objects at once, occasionally allowing compositions to develop slowly over many years, and embracing chance and surprise discoveries, even when working with massive materials, large equipment, and crews of assistants. Drawing, painting, and making smaller sculptures provide opportunities to explore ideas on his own. The drawings frequently capture an initial blast of inspiration and often exhibit the freedom and dynamism also apparent in his larger sculptures. Smaller constructions perch, balance, twirl, and unfold, evincing whimsy and wonder, which also energize the monumental assemblages. The sense of play apparent in the smaller works is a constant in di Suvero’s practice and harkens back to the artist’s first forays into public sculpture, making swings and play sculptures for friends, art patrons, and neighborhood children alike. Such egalitarianism serves as a core personal foundation for the artist and finds expression in his public sculptures as well as his lifelong dedication to social justice.
Organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center, the exhibition is the most extensive survey of his work in over 30 years and the largest US museum exhibition since his first at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. In recognition of the long friendship the artist shared with Nasher Sculpture Center founders Raymond and Patsy Nasher, the exhibition takes place as part of the museum’s celebration of its 20th year.
Sponsors
Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper is made possible by leading support from the Texas Commission on the Arts and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger. Generous support is provided by the Sidney E. Frank Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District (DTPID). Generous support for the exhibition catalogue is provided by Paula Cooper Gallery.
April 14 - May 15, 2022
An exhibition of sculpture and works on paper by Beatrice Caracciolo and Mark di Suvero presents drawing in two and three dimensions. Caracciolo is known primarily for large-scale drawings and di Suvero for monumental sculpture. Here, the artists’ work across both mediums demonstrates their shared propensity for forceful and expressive lines, uninhibited improvisation, and a breadth of techniques and materials.
Alternately working from historical sources, from life, or from her imagination, Caracciolo’s drawings present scenes of nature and antiquity, abstracted through controlled yet delicate marks. In the current exhibition, Caracciolo will show works from two ongoing series, all completed in 2021. The Combattere drawings are based on paintings by eighteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo of the stock character Pulcinella engaged in a fight. Tiepolo’s forms hover beneath the surface of Caracciolo’s works, enhanced by her spontaneous markings and the collaged paper elements that add texture and depth. The Esistenza series is more representational, delighting in the dramatic forms found in nature. Caracciolo was influenced by the philosophical tradition of seeking spiritual transcendence in a sublime landscape, and took particular inspiration from Chinese calligraphy and painting.
Mark di Suvero’s sculpture combines the roughness of industrial materials with a gestural quality reminiscent of three-dimensional drawing, a metaphor emphasized here by the ink and pencil studies on the surrounding walls. Tabletop works with kinetic or interchangeable elements contradict the weight of their titanium, steel, and bronze parts, while floor-bound sculptures encapsulate the issues at the core of di Suvero’s larger work, namely the intensely physical handling of metal, the contrast between mass and weightlessness, and the balance that results from the intersection of multidirectional angular and rounded shapes. The drawings are meditative rather than preparatory, capturing, in the artist’s words, “the memory of an idea and how to transform this idea into a sculpture…they are the map of my thinking. Feeling in ink.”
Beatrice Caracciolo (b. 1955, São Paulo, Brazil) is an Italian artist based in Paris. Recent one-person exhibitions include Innocenti at Paula Cooper Gallery (2020); Créer en soi le dragon de feu, at the Temple Collection in Beijing (2016); Attraversare Il Fuoco at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris (2013); … pour que passe enfin mon torrent d’anges at the Château de Haroué in Haroué, France (2012); and Tumulti at the Académie de France à Rome, Villa Medici (2010). Works by the artist are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Morgan Library, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Mark di Suvero (b. 1933, Shanghai, China) first came to international prominence in 1975 with a display of his work in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris and a major retrospective that same year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which was accompanied by a citywide exhibition of large-scale works. The artist has had acclaimed international exhibitions in Nice (1991), Venice (1995, at the 46th Venice Biennale), Paris (1997), Governors Island, NY (2011), and San Francisco (2013), among many others. His numerous accolades include the 2000 International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, the 2010 National Medal of Arts awarded by President Barack Obama, the 2010 Medal of the Archives of American Art, and the 2013 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal. His works appear permanently installed in public spaces all over the world. The artist currently lives and works in New York and in Petaluma, California.
Alternately working from historical sources, from life, or from her imagination, Caracciolo’s drawings present scenes of nature and antiquity, abstracted through controlled yet delicate marks. In the current exhibition, Caracciolo will show works from two ongoing series, all completed in 2021. The Combattere drawings are based on paintings by eighteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo of the stock character Pulcinella engaged in a fight. Tiepolo’s forms hover beneath the surface of Caracciolo’s works, enhanced by her spontaneous markings and the collaged paper elements that add texture and depth. The Esistenza series is more representational, delighting in the dramatic forms found in nature. Caracciolo was influenced by the philosophical tradition of seeking spiritual transcendence in a sublime landscape, and took particular inspiration from Chinese calligraphy and painting.
Mark di Suvero’s sculpture combines the roughness of industrial materials with a gestural quality reminiscent of three-dimensional drawing, a metaphor emphasized here by the ink and pencil studies on the surrounding walls. Tabletop works with kinetic or interchangeable elements contradict the weight of their titanium, steel, and bronze parts, while floor-bound sculptures encapsulate the issues at the core of di Suvero’s larger work, namely the intensely physical handling of metal, the contrast between mass and weightlessness, and the balance that results from the intersection of multidirectional angular and rounded shapes. The drawings are meditative rather than preparatory, capturing, in the artist’s words, “the memory of an idea and how to transform this idea into a sculpture…they are the map of my thinking. Feeling in ink.”
Beatrice Caracciolo (b. 1955, São Paulo, Brazil) is an Italian artist based in Paris. Recent one-person exhibitions include Innocenti at Paula Cooper Gallery (2020); Créer en soi le dragon de feu, at the Temple Collection in Beijing (2016); Attraversare Il Fuoco at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris (2013); … pour que passe enfin mon torrent d’anges at the Château de Haroué in Haroué, France (2012); and Tumulti at the Académie de France à Rome, Villa Medici (2010). Works by the artist are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Morgan Library, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Mark di Suvero (b. 1933, Shanghai, China) first came to international prominence in 1975 with a display of his work in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris and a major retrospective that same year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which was accompanied by a citywide exhibition of large-scale works. The artist has had acclaimed international exhibitions in Nice (1991), Venice (1995, at the 46th Venice Biennale), Paris (1997), Governors Island, NY (2011), and San Francisco (2013), among many others. His numerous accolades include the 2000 International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, the 2010 National Medal of Arts awarded by President Barack Obama, the 2010 Medal of the Archives of American Art, and the 2013 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal. His works appear permanently installed in public spaces all over the world. The artist currently lives and works in New York and in Petaluma, California.
April 9 - June 25, 2022
December 18, 2021 – January 24, 2022
Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present a selection of modern and contemporary drawings and exceptional works on paper dating from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Treasures by canonical European and American artists will accompany exquisite drawings by gallery artists.
Artists in the exhibition: Terry Adkins, Carl Andre, Lee Bontecou, Jonathan Borofksy, Cecily Brown, Beatrice Caracciolo, Paul Cezanne, Bruce Conner, Willem de Kooning, Jay DeFeo, Beauford Delaney, Mark di Suvero, Luciano Fabro, Robert Grosvenor, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, Hans Hofmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Sherrie Levine, Sol LeWitt, Lee Lozano, Agnes Martin, John McLaughlin, Robert Motherwell, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, Joel Shapiro, David Smith, Rudolf Stingel, Atsuko Tanaka, Alma Thomas, Bob Thompson, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol.
Artists in the exhibition: Terry Adkins, Carl Andre, Lee Bontecou, Jonathan Borofksy, Cecily Brown, Beatrice Caracciolo, Paul Cezanne, Bruce Conner, Willem de Kooning, Jay DeFeo, Beauford Delaney, Mark di Suvero, Luciano Fabro, Robert Grosvenor, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, Hans Hofmann, Wassily Kandinsky, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Sherrie Levine, Sol LeWitt, Lee Lozano, Agnes Martin, John McLaughlin, Robert Motherwell, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, Joel Shapiro, David Smith, Rudolf Stingel, Atsuko Tanaka, Alma Thomas, Bob Thompson, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol.
August 14 - November 7, 2021
Every few years, the waves of our beloved coastline glow bright blue – a phenomenon caused by single-celled organisms, bioluminescent dinoflagellate, who release a flash of light in response to perceived threats. This light’s purpose is twofold: to beckon other creatures who might deter the predator, and to startle the perceived threat and scare it away. For the human viewer, the luminescence appears to be both within and on the surface of the water, an experience both otherworldly and deeply familiar.
This same glowing and familiar light is present throughout History and Its Shadow, an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by celebrated artist Mark di Suvero. While maintaining an active sculptural practice, in the past five years di Suvero has begun making paintings textured with phosphorescent and fluorescent paint. These paintings are both visible in the light of day and glow in darkness, retaining light for up to fifteen minutes when activated with black light. This series of paintings are brilliantly abstract and particularly powerful when exhibited in relationship with the other examples of di Suvero’s extensive practice.
In addition to paintings, History and Its Shadow also includes three sculptures. The Triplets are consistent in their form and design — utilizing three intersecting plates. Two hanging works are made using foam core board, a material commonly used in photography mounting and architecture classes. Di Suvero paints the sculptures with the same phosphorescent paint he uses in his paintings, giving the works multiple perspectives for the viewer. Like many of di Suvero’s large sculptures, these kinetic works gently and subtly sway with the wind as bodies move throughout the space. The materials di Suvero utilizes speak to the accessibility of the creativity available to us all. Historically making large-scale sculptures with materials complex and costly to find and transport, di Suvero now intentionally makes work daily with the materials that are at hand, ones that are easy and affordable for anyone to source. The model for the Triplets is also included in the show, made out of titanium — a material both very strong and very light, and resistant to corrosion.
Outside on the Mission Plaza lawn, the Museum presents Mamma Mobius, a transcendent sculpture that pays homage to the mobius strip, a ring of infinity. Mamma Mobius is brought to you by the City of SLO’s Art in Public Places program. The works included in this exhibition ground the viewers in between the past and the future; our consistent evolution, in between history and its shadow.
This same glowing and familiar light is present throughout History and Its Shadow, an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by celebrated artist Mark di Suvero. While maintaining an active sculptural practice, in the past five years di Suvero has begun making paintings textured with phosphorescent and fluorescent paint. These paintings are both visible in the light of day and glow in darkness, retaining light for up to fifteen minutes when activated with black light. This series of paintings are brilliantly abstract and particularly powerful when exhibited in relationship with the other examples of di Suvero’s extensive practice.
In addition to paintings, History and Its Shadow also includes three sculptures. The Triplets are consistent in their form and design — utilizing three intersecting plates. Two hanging works are made using foam core board, a material commonly used in photography mounting and architecture classes. Di Suvero paints the sculptures with the same phosphorescent paint he uses in his paintings, giving the works multiple perspectives for the viewer. Like many of di Suvero’s large sculptures, these kinetic works gently and subtly sway with the wind as bodies move throughout the space. The materials di Suvero utilizes speak to the accessibility of the creativity available to us all. Historically making large-scale sculptures with materials complex and costly to find and transport, di Suvero now intentionally makes work daily with the materials that are at hand, ones that are easy and affordable for anyone to source. The model for the Triplets is also included in the show, made out of titanium — a material both very strong and very light, and resistant to corrosion.
Outside on the Mission Plaza lawn, the Museum presents Mamma Mobius, a transcendent sculpture that pays homage to the mobius strip, a ring of infinity. Mamma Mobius is brought to you by the City of SLO’s Art in Public Places program. The works included in this exhibition ground the viewers in between the past and the future; our consistent evolution, in between history and its shadow.