Steven Holl Architects, a 40-person firm with offices in New York and Beijing, has built museums, libraries, health centers, chapels, university buildings, houses, and mixed-use urban complexes consisting of hundreds of housing units and retail and community space, but no matter the configuration, scale, or location, each building has the same beginning: a small watercolor sketched out by Steven Holl.
Due to a wrong turn on the country roads that connect Kingston to North Adams, not far from the Massachusetts state line, I arrive late for the press briefing about the new, 120,000-square-foot building opening May 28 at MASS MoCA.
The retrospective of Andres Serrano’s work at The School, the spectacular exhibition space established by Chelsea gallery owner Jack Shainman in Kinderhook, is a rare event, given that the artist’s work is shown far more frequently overseas than in the U.S. “I’m a person non gratis in my own country,” said Serrano, who attracted instant fame in 1987 for Piss Christ, a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in urine, which helped spur the culture wars.
Dia:Beacon, a museum of mostly 1960s and 1970s vanguard art located in a former box factory on the Beacon waterfront, has put the Hudson Valley on the international art-world map. Stepping through the doors of the low-slung building into the narrow, high-ceilinged, brick-lined foyer, resembling the entrance to an ancient tomb, one stands on the threshold of 240,000 feet of exhibition space, whose sky-lit expanse of maple flooring surely constitutes one of America’s most sublime interior spaces.
Carl Andre’s self-effacing, ground-hugging assemblages of thick, squared-off timbers, firebricks, aluminum ingots, and metal square plates look completely at home in the sprawling galleries at Dia: Beacon. As a former factory with industrial-size spaces, the museum is a perfect complement to an art predicated on the system of industrial production.
Mary Frank has been making art for more than six decades. Her exploration of wood, plaster, wax, clay, monotype, ink, cut out paper, paint, and photography has yielded a rich body of work. She sculpts, draws, paints, prints or cuts out of paper archetypal figures that raise their arms, crouch, leap, recline, stride purposefully, or clutch their breasts, as well as spectral robed figures, animals, plants, and architectural fragments.