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art reviews from around new york

Let me finally wrap up my review of 2025 New York summer sculpture now that it has all finally had its chance. To start with a bit of context, when Melvin Edwards brought summer sculpture that year to City Hall Park, it seemed only fair to New York. A city of unmatched achievement and diversity deserved a black man of exceptional achievement.

But that was the year of Covid-19 in the arts, when just soldiering on counted, and a pillar by Thaddeus Mosley towered over the scant crowds braving the art fairs. Now Mosley returns with the same dual commitment to Modernism and black America, and that dualism makes it shine, but its very nature has changed. When Edwards makes a point of welding and sculptural weight, he recalls both a slave’s manacles and David Smith. When Mosley turns to bronze in the same park as Edwards before him, he gives modern art a longer history and a softer edge, through November 16.

Just short of a hundred, Mosley has himself a history, and here he casts bronze after his own past sculpture in wood. Black abstraction has become a staple, and he should know. That whole time he has been living, working, and learning in Pennsylvania, between the Carnegie museums and steel country. His idea, though, of a city dweller is caught up in the woods. One could easily mistake his sculpture for wood at that, between its comforting brown and rounded surface. He takes care, he says, to retain the experience of differently kinds of trees as he gathers and cuts into them.

Sculpture for him also looks back all the way to Surrealism, with nested biomorphic shapes. Human forms peep out as dancers and pre-industrial actors rather than Smith’s icons of postwar American labor. David Q. Sheldon prefers Smith’s sharp edges overlaid and multiplied, typically with Smith’s steel shine. Up in Harlem, at one entrance to St. Nicholas Park through October 30, this version is bright yellow. If that were not welcoming enough, Michel Bassompiere sets down bears on the Park Avenue South median strip through next May 11. If that sounds more sentimental than Mosley and Sheldon combined, it is.

At least one sculpture park this summer had to do without summer sculpture. As plans tanked at the last minute and work promised online failed to appear, Socrates Sculpture Park fell back on its Socrates Annual, starting just days before summer itself bid its normal overhasty exit. Meanwhile Queens locals and others could settle for summer picnics, the view of Manhattan from Astoria, and scheduled performances by Pioneers Go East, a collective. It could be what they came for in the first place. Besides, they could always hold out for the emerging artists set for a colder New York, next through April 6. Better still, the park this year has boiled its selection down to just four contributors and the waterfront. That and New York City.

While I must defer a proper encounter to a later review, allow me to end in a more central location and on a more upscale note. Alma Allen starts her stroll along Park Avenue at 52nd Street, in the shadow of the great Seagram Building and within blocks of the Museum of Modern Art, through September 30. No wonder she creates sculpture pared down to late Modernism. A variant on a tube snakes back on itself to end at the top, with a resting place for an equally glittering bronze ball. Further up on the avenue’s median strip, self-closure has a change in spirit, but not in clarity and shine. There metal strips come from behind to land in what might be the sculpture’s lap.

Has Minimalism become rough fabric or raw flesh? Either way, it retains a dedication to symmetry, mass, and shine. Come to think of it, that earlier ball could be a seed, and Allen’s sculpture in the 2014 Whitney Biennial took the form of a giant nut. The works along the course of nearly a mile offer further variations on those themes, like the figure, headless but still gleaming, wrapping its arms around what could be a stack of waste baskets or an oil drum. An older man, fully formed and slightly daft, raises his cane in attack or defense. The poles of elegance and nature’s wildness could stand for the entirety of summer sculpture. Like Allen, it goes first and foremost for charm.

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For once, it makes sense to have started on New York’s summer sculpture with the Met roof. True, it is not public sculpture in the city’s abundant parks, but the view brings it close enough. That is especially so with the roof about to close to bring it fully into the Met, as part of a redesign of its modern and contemporary wing.

It has also been each year’s first to open (and I take you to more after their late openings, but first a quick tour of solo acts). With her interest in music, you might say that Jennie C. Jones set the tone for everything to come. In particular, it had me asking about the place of Minimalism in sculpture a mere half century after artists and critics alike pretty much moved on. Sure enough, Edra Soto and Torkwase Dyson could pass for the real thing.

Both adopt industrial materials, with the warm browns of rusted steel. Both, too, work on a scale a bit larger than life, to invite viewers into the work. You can see through Edra Soto’s gates to others out for a stroll with Central Park behind them. If, like Jones, it is not quite art in the parks, it is this year’s commission for the park’s southeast entrance, across from the Plaza Hotel, and it welcomes the view, through August 24. Torkwase Dyson, in turn, creates a pavilion, with seating. The closer you get, though, the more it opens to the sky.

Both works do the unexpected for Minimalism, in accord with the eclectic “neo-Minimalism” common enough today. For such large, heavy sculpture, Soto’s could pass for painting. It divides neatly into four panels, each a geometric abstraction. Slim metal rods radiate outward, forming a surface at their center that reflects sunlight. And their radiance tells a story, about crossing borders. They recall for Soto the wrought-iron screens outside homes in her native Puerto Rico, and they rest on terrazzo within the picture plane, as if decorative tiling had taken flight.

Where Soto calls her work Graft, grafted onto her adopted city, this is Dyson’s Akua, meaning born on Wednesday, although I hesitate to ask why. Fresh off the 2024 Whitney Biennial, she has a lawn in Brooklyn Bridge Park, set back just far enough to make Brooklyn Heights, Dumbo, and the East River already distant memories. One can, though, see a shifting role for the work and its surroundings, through next March 8. What at first looks broad and solid, tapering in and out like the cooling tower of a nuclear reactor, reaches easily overhead. It also breaks up that much more clearly into metal beams with a circular opening above. A metal sheet on the ground could be the royal carpet inside.

Not that others can let go of Minimalism either, so long as they can run wild. Steve Tobin has his industrial roots, too, in more ways than one. His New York Roots, through February 28, began as piping before taking off in all directions exactly as the title would suggest. The half dozen works might have grown out of the ground here and there in the Garment District entirely on their own. Carl D’Alvia brings much the same party colors to the Upper West Side—and only a bit more restraint. His new work, on the Broadway median strip through November 1, plays on its compact shapes and single colors. It keeps threatening to settle down into geometric or alphabetic form, mostly near subway stops, only to refuse the offer.

But enough of abstract art, whatever the story line. How about the real New York, where pigeons are ready to prey on whatever you can offer? The spur of the High Line, near West 30th Street, has a history now of single works, through November with Iván Argote. Like a white drone by Sam Durant not long ago, Argote is thinking in terms of motion, although he titles his work Dinosaur, as if it were well past its prime. Like a bare tree by Pamela Rosenkranz just last year, he is thinking, too, in terms of natural life. His oversize pigeon, while beautifully detailed, looks a trifle obvious all the same.

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Ever tempted to dismiss Minimalism as a little too quiet and a little too apart? Jennie C. Jones is listening. She takes her silent music to 2025 New York summer sculpture, as Ensemble, on the the Met roof through October 19. As the rubes in Shakespeare’s The Tempest say to one another, in hope of reassurance, “this isle is full of noises.”

Rather than approach her from scratch, I invite you to read my review of her at the Guggenheim Museum in 2022, some of which follows but her command of music, geometry, and silence has only grown. But let me introduce her with the details of her latest. Tall slabs, a trapezoid, and a V-shape seem to change in proportions as one circulates. Their colors run to a deep red that could pass for Minimalism’s dark steel, but with accents white concrete and blood red that evoke soundproofing, the museum’s travertine tone, and a scream. Pins and wires allude to the bridge of a violin or the single string of Mississippi blues. If one part of her trilogy makes her think of an Aeolian harp, its melodies celebrated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in poetry in 1796 and driven by the wind, this is Minimalism as poetry waiting to be heard.

Jones prefers quiet noises, just as her mixed media nurture the quiet. At the Guggenheim, she worked not with paint on canvas, but rather the materials to eliminate unwanted noises, felt and acoustic panels. You may never have noticed before their contrasting texture or their similarity to Minimalism itself. Jones titles one work for Agnes Martin, and her influence is unmistakable in the simple divisions of a work between panels or along horizontals—and the gradations of dark and gray. When a red panel or gray diagonal intrudes, it is all the more resonant. When a red slice tops a panel, where you can barely see it, its “aura,” as she puts it, is the visual equivalent of the hum.

Jones had the lower floors of the Guggenheim ramp, just after another woman with a feel for quiet, Etel Adnan. A musical score, the form of her works on paper, is for her what landscape is for Adnan. Music has long had a place in Minimalism as well—an entire genre of music with such composers as John Adams and Philip Glass, also the subject of portraits by Chuck Close. While most definitely not a Minimalist, John Cage recognized the visual potential of a score, and he will always be famous for less than five minutes of silence. Cage also embraced chance, while Jones leaves nothing to chance, and she is not one to count off the seconds. Still, the staff lines in her scores are compositions in themselves.

Is the parallel between art and music only a metaphor? It may be only figurative language, but it has entered English. One does speak of a quiet composition or go to a museum in search of quiet. Jones finds the parallels in technical and informal language alike—most often in digital music and analog art. Titles speak of Soft, Pitchless Oxide Edge and Toward the Pedal Point, while a bright red painting is a Tone Burst. The show’s title, “Dynamics,” refers to music’s gradations in volume, but dynamics in physics (as opposed to statics) is the study of forces and motion. And she does think of her paintings as “active surfaces” and the “physical residue” of sound.

Panels like these are also elements of architecture, and their interdisciplinary art extends there as well. The view down from the ramp onto the two-level High Gallery offers a glimpse of red accents on the top of paintings that one might otherwise have missed. When (rarely) curves enter a drawing, they pick up on Frank Lloyd Wright and the Guggenheim. Quiet being what it is, one might find oneself talking around another point of reference, too. Jones is black, and past shows have been eager to find markers of African American identity in her art. They have also featured objects that this small show takes pains to omit.

She contributed a SONY Walkman to a show of “conceptual art and identity politics” and looped audio cables to a tribute to Romare Bearden, both at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She appeared there among the emerging artists in “Freestyle” as well. One of her scores turned up just last year in “Grief and Grievance” at the New Museum, a show about white grievances and black grief. Is Jones out to leave all that behind, in favor of recent work and an homage to Martin? The Guggenheim quotes her dismissal of black abstraction as bombast. Her visual and sonic aura is anything but.

Still, she seems like the last person to indulge in apologies or evasions. If she minimizes the references, it is to maximize what she finds in music and an installation. They exist both in the moment and in an extended time, the “sustain” of a pedal point, and that alters how one perceives her painting as well. Like Adnan before her and Cecilia Vicuña to follow, the walk up the ramp leads to another abstract painter, Wassily Kandinsky. His late work seems busy and bombastic by comparison, but again Jones is listening. Adds Shakespeare’s Caliban, “When I waked, I cried to dream again.”

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.