With every issue of Art in America that my staff and I put out, I am reminded that there are as many ways to be an artist as there are artists, and never more so than when we publish our annual “Icons” issue. As in years past, the Icons we chose to profile this year are artists whose decades of production represent single-minded commitment to a unique and deeply personal practice.
In these pages, I am struck by how, for several of those Icons, their practice emerged from their medium. Working on his early video pieces, Paul Pfeiffer said he “became hyper-aware of the grammar of images and the way one could engineer attention through subtle changes.” Consuelo Jimenez Underwood found her artistic voice in textiles: “I had to be puro hilo [pure thread] to get the viejitas [the female elders] on my side,” she said. “I could hear them asking, ‘what’s wrong with thread?’” David Diao has spent a good portion of his career referencing the work of Barnett Newman, of whom he says, “I loved the matter-of-fact way he painted—it’s somehow unfussy. It’s just what needs to be done.” The late sculptor Joel Shapiro discovered how “transformation happens” when you’re “actually physically working with wood, looking at it, cutting it, changing it, altering it, until it somehow satisfies some aspect of your unknown intent.” (Shapiro died in June as we were working on this issue; the thoughts he shared in an interview with writer Max Norman shortly before he passed make the profile of him a fitting tribute.)
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It is also worth considering art’s relationship with something larger, something ineffable that has philosophical, moral, and even political dimensions. For Tehching Hsieh, whom Emily Chun interviewed for this issue’s “Inquiry” column, art is “the more groundbreaking and creative part of freethinking,” but “freethinking is something everyone does.” He continued: “[F]reethinking means that nobody can stop you. It belongs to you only, and no one can take it away from you.”
FEATURES
The Auto-Iconoclast
Rosemarie Trockel offers lessons for staying curious and weird. Plus, a special pull-out print.
by Emily Watlington
Sporty Specters
Paul Pfeiffer shows how rituals and religion haunt sports and movies.
by Beatrice Loayza
A Matter of Fact
David Diao hijacks the history of modernism to make it more inclusive.
by Alex Greenberger
Follow the Threads
Consuelo Jimenez Underwood weaves her way through the complexities of the US-Mexico border.
by Maximilíano Durón
Building Bridges
Joel Shapiro broke sculpture down to its fundamentals, in turns both silly and serious.
by Max Norman
Seeing Isn’t Knowing
Pictures of anonymous blind people by several iconic photographers get at the medium’s existential contradictions.
by M. Leona Godin
DEPARTMENTS
Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.
Hard Truths
A curator grapples with invisibility, and a designer wonders if he’s obsolete. Plus, a goblin-themed quiz.
by Chen & Lampert
Sightlines
Bukhara Biennial curator Diana Campbell Betancourt tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton
Inquiry
A Q&A with Tehching Hsieh about his yearlong performance works.
by Emily Chun
Object Lesson
An annotation of Eric Fischl’s Barbecue.
by Francesca Aton
Battle Royale
Monet vs. Manet—two famous French painters go head-to-head.
by the Editors of A.i.A.
New Talent
Katja Seib paints canvases of pure color and mild mysticism.
by Emily Watlington
Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on anti-fascist art history.
by Ara H. Merjian
Appreciation
A tribute to Dara Birnbaum, who talked back to media and imagined new transmissions for the future.
by Lynn Hershman Leeson
Issues & Commentary
In our age of constant updates and endless microtrends, will art always be behind the times?
by Louis Bury
Spotlight
Malick Sidibé was an architect of utopia and purveyor of nostalgia.
by Emmanuel Iduma
Book Review
A reading of Okwui Enwezor’s Selected Writings.
by Lauren Cornell
Cover Artist
David Diao talks about his painting on the cover of A.i.A.
REVIEWS
Berlin
Berlin Diary
by Lauren Oyler
Copenhagen
“Kaari Upson: Dollhouse”
by Adam Kleinman
Hamburg
“Bas Jan Ader: I’m Searching…”
by Eugenie Brinkema
Miami
“Mildred Thompson: Frequencies”
by Joseph L. Underwood
Santa Fe
SITE Santa Fe International
by Emily Watlington
Toledo
“Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art”
by Kelly Presutti