Monthly Archives: February 2021

By Ernesto Gonzalez Diaz

HAVANA TIMES Cuban architecture in the first three decades of the 20th century blended Spanish Baroque and US Rationalism. It was a time when Cubans were searching for their own identity, after years of Spanish colonialism. The countrys architecture was a place of that expression.The influence left behind by Spanish architecture, as well as the architecture that came from the US marked the identity. The former was baroque, ostentatious, full of symbolism, loaded with images. The other, was a lot more rational and focused on functionality.

This Creole style was used to build public buildings, houses, and police stations designed like like medieval castles.

Even the very first phone company that existed in the country, located at the crossroads between Aguila and Dragones streets, which would become the tallest building in the city back in 1922, towering at 62m tall.

In all of the pictures, you will see how thresholds and capitals highlighted with baroque elements, reticulated columns and facades, the ballasts on balconies, round corners, which are the most common features that make this architectural period a fusion of more than one style.

Most of the citys construction took place during this time. These pictures are from the Los Sitios, San Leopoldo, Pueblo Nuevo, La Vibora and Vibora Park neighborhoods. Although you can find buildings with these characteristics pretty much all over the city.

Architecture that marked our identity, is today often a victim of neglect and apathy. Such is visible in some of the pictures.

The privately owned buildings reveal a level of conservation that their owners can afford. In the case of those buildings owned by state institutions, their conservation and maintenance depends on the heritage importance of this building.

See more photo features here on Havana Times.

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Early 20th Century Architecture in Havana (Photo Feature) - Havana Times

JANUARY 28, 2021

THEATER SYMPTOMS: Plays and Writings on Drama is the mother lode for Robert Musil aficionados, a vital piece of the authors canon. Containing the major play The Utopians, other dramatic material and fragments, and Musils theater criticism, much of it translated into English for the first time, this anthology shows Musil to be a writer of far greater range than is often assumed.

Musil was likely the most sheerly intelligent of modernist writers (which is not to say the most talented). His work entrances with its combination of rigor and passion (precision and soul, as he put it), yet it is also marked by significant lacunae. His magnum opus The Man Without Qualities, two sections of which were published in 1930 and 1933, was left unfinished at the authors death in 1942. How to square that massive achievement with Musils equally brilliant, but radically different, earlier works, such as The Confusions of Young Trless (1906), a novella, or Unions (1911), a collection of stories? Above all, how to reconcile Musils deep engagement with sociological and political theorizing with his spiritual and aesthetic yearnings? Most of Musils contemporaries fell on one side or the other of this dichotomy: Hermann Broch tended toward the sociological, for example, while Thomas Mann embraced the aesthetic. Musil is one of the very few to have attempted to straddle this line, and for that reason alone his work is immensely valuable.

The heart of this new anthology is Musils massive drama The Utopians, only the second English translation and a crucial piece of the Musil oeuvre. Published in 1921, it is a dense, hyper-concentrated work, presenting a handful of characters who are battered by each others intellects and passions (not to mention their own) over the course of a few days. There is the calm professor Thomas, his sensible wife Maria, her flighty sister Regina, and the infatuated rake Anselm, who has seduced Regina away from her husband Josef. The characters combine and recombine, at times seeming closer to archetypes than real persons, yet filled with such emotion that the play never reads as dry. It is, however, overwhelming: without the release valve of the essayistic digressions and relaxed pacing of a novel, The Utopians never lets up in intensity over its 185 dense pages, which would likely take four hours to perform. Thomass dry aloofness and Anselms inflamed capriciousness give shape to their long speeches, but it is Reginas raw desperation (she has never gotten over the suicide of a youthful lover) and Marias enigmatic stoicism that hold the play together.

Like Joyces 1918 play Exiles, The Utopians bears all the markers of a prodigious prose stylist entering a new formal space with drastically different and unfamiliar rules. Unlike Exiles, it is neither early nor slight: Musil was a decade on from the success of Young Trless when he wrote The Utopians and already deep into exploring the landscape that would grow into The Man Without Qualities.

During Musils lifetime, The Utopians was only produced in bastardized and disowned form in 1929. It has since had a handful of more reverent productions. In her superb introduction, editor and translator Genese Grill cites the assessment of Burton Pike, one of Musils most esteemed translators, that The Utopians may one day be considered his finest work. It contains in distilled form, and with the greater strength of a distillation, much of the important elements of [The Man Without Qualities] as well as many of its subordinate concerns. I cannot go as far as Pike does: The Utopians is essential Musil, but it ultimately fails to be dramatic, trying to stretch the form further than it can go, at least on stage, while on the page it lacks the glorious panoramic vision of Musils fiction. Yet The Utopians accomplishes things none of his other works manage to achieve, and thus is entirely worthy of our attention.

Theater Symptoms is also valuable for gathering and translating Musils theoretical writings on theater. These writings make clear that, unlike literature, Viennese theater (and theater more generally) was an industry, shaped around personalities and group events. And this fact explains Musils disappointment, his conviction that contemporary theater failed to realize its potential and was, for the most part, inferior to previous dramatic traditions. In Musils view, the trite statements being made by modern dramatists were ultimately less interesting than the profound processes channeled by the best actors:

Entangled, precisely in the way that the strongest, the least simple-minded intellects among us are, in five-thousand-years of never-ending considerations, at the mercy of countless consequences, the immediate or distant effects of every possible position, sometimes nothing is more redemptive than to bid the intellect be silent and to remember that one, as body, as thing, is as unaccountable, unique, and absolute as a wandering cloud or the arc that has been drawn in the air by a hawk.

Though not as bitter as Thomas Bernhard, whose later attacks on the Austrian theater scene are memorably captured in his 1984 novel Woodcutters, Musil has little patience for the pseudo-profundities and inflated clichs of most of the plays he discusses. More than Bernhard, though, he believes in the immense potential and beauty of the theater as an art form, and the writings collected here thus offer a unique opportunity to see Musils philosophical-spiritual concerns focused on the mass culture of his day.

Though often caricatured as a rationalist, Musil realized the necessity of the spiritual and the power of the ineffable, as Grill has ably discussed in her excellent 2012 monograph The World as Metaphor in Robert Musils The Man Without Qualities: Possibility as Reality. The overwhelming social critique of the first published half of The Man Without Qualities is balanced in its unfinished second half by an increasing attention to what Musil terms the other condition, a hoped-for removal from the overbearing contingencies of our politics and culture, an emancipation from the tired vocabulary and metaphors that bombard us daily. Yet Musil was also deeply skeptical of vacuous cod-Nietzschean mysticism, which rejects rational thought only to make room for its own tyrannical solipsism. This syndrome was best depicted in the absurd prophet Meingast, Musils vicious portrait of charismatic pseudoscientist and antisemite Ludwig Klages. Yet rationalism too frequently ignores the urge to such mysticism, the human instincts and passions that inform it, and portraying this contradiction was Musils most vexing challenge to himself and his readers.

Musil rejects any easy sublimity; the naked Romantic soul had become, for him, a shopworn illusion. Instead, his gestures toward the other condition pick up on hints offered in the greatest art, such as the work of Shakespeare:

The word as formed air: and at the same time, an enormous creative force; this has always been for me the most astonishing aspect of the effect of this great writer. I have the feeling, when I tune my ear to Shakespeare like this I think, one mustnt think now about the thing, but must enter in somewhere through a word [] and then Shakespeares word-world appears, and along with the word, the world.

Musils theater writings reveal his intense engagement with those sub-rational forces that guide us, biologically and spiritually. His capacity to be truly moved is unceasing, as is his insistence that raw dramatic potential should not be cheapened through exploitation of received sentiments and secondhand ideas. From the reviews collected here, we see that the theater of Musils time was predominantly anti-realistic, allegorical, or symbolic, and suffered under the weight of its constant grasp for universals (real or imagined): capitalized concepts like Soul, Love, Death, and Power. (Such concepts are, of course, always capitalized in German.)

Musils willful remoteness, his determination to stand apart from passing trends and certainly from any and all fashion, produces a paradox in his work. While The Man Without Qualities clearly portrays prewar Austria with the benefit of bitter hindsight, the influence of the interwar period is sublimated throughout, rarely manifesting explicitly. This essential anthology surfaces some of the contemporaneity Musil steadfastly attempted to elude, and consequently it offers unique and vital insights into Musils oeuvre.

As with her previous translations of Musils writing (published in two volumes by Contra Mundum in 2015 and 2019), Grill brings great skill and finesse to Musils prose. She is possibly the most graceful English translator Musil has had, her lyrical efforts emphasizing how far from his rationalist caricature the author truly was. In his more theoretical moments, Musils abstract imagery can overwhelm and oppress, but Grill manages to deftly capture his playfulness, particularly in the satirical farce Vinzenz and the Mistress of Important Men (1923), which lacks the philosophical heft of The Utopians but flows better as a drama.

I also must compliment Grills superb, judicious footnotes, which provide contemporary context without overwhelming the reader. Her knowledge of Musils work is magisterial, and her provision of biographical detail is succinct and revealing. Would that all such collections meet the standard Grill sets here, as both translator and editor. She and Contra Mundum deserve the highest plaudits.

David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer. His bookBitwise: A Life in Codewas published by Pantheon, and his book Meganets is forthcoming from PublicAffairs.

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The Other Condition: Robert Musil on Theater - Los Angeles Review of Books - lareviewofbooks

If there is one thing that 2020 has taught me, it is that the real political and cultural divide in our country is not between Republicans and Democrats, or even conservatives and liberals, but between traditionalists and progressives.

At the core of progressivism is not the optimistic American belief that things are improving and that our children can live better lives than we did, but the belief that man is a perfectible product of evolutionary forces. Rather than being made in Gods image and then fallen, progressives believe we must throw off the shackles and prejudices of the past in order to move forward to build utopia.

The traditionalist is not against growth and change, but he recognizes, as Edmund Burke did in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, the danger of trying to remake society and man in the image of a new ideology that radically redefines such words as truth, justice, and equality. The progressive has no qualms about running roughshod over the established beliefs, institutions, and mores of a nation if he can only achieve his goals. At its most extreme, progressivism can justify to itself any present-day atrocity as long as it claims to be helping usher in a future brave new world of absolute egalitarianism.

The genealogy of progressivism runs from Jean-Jacques Rousseaus nave belief in the noble savage to the bloody social engineering of the French Revolution to the deterministic dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, out of which arose the horrors inflicted on their own people by Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-Il. According to all these progressive leaders, history was moving unstoppably toward their workers paradise, and anyone who sought to hinder its arrivalby deed, word, or thoughtwas backward, unenlightened, and, to use a cherished word of Marxist elites, atavistic.

Since the true face of progressivism revealed itself in the French Revolution, a number of brave critics have risen up to expose its destructive pretensions and its false view of man. A short list of these critics includes Burke, Alexis Tocqueville, the authors of the Federalist Papers, Cardinal John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, and Pope John Paul II. The critic, however, who saw and understood the dangers most clearly, partly because he suffered greatly at the hands of progressivism run amok, was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Born one year after the Russian Revolution, Solzhenitsyn was raised as a loyal Soviet and even served as an officer in the armyuntil he was arrested in 1945 for saying something negative about Stalin. He spent eight years in the prison camps of the Gulag.

After being released, he lived in exile in Kazakhstan, where he taught physics. He later returned to Russia and published a novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), which he based on his experiences in the Gulag. Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970, when his literary expos, The Gulag Archipelago, appeared in the 1970s, he was forced to flee the country, eventually moving to the United States in 1976.

Hailed as a hero of democracy and freedom, Solzhenitsyn was invited to give the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978. After sincerely praising American freedom, Solzhenitsyn went on to criticize Western secularism, rationalism, and materialism. His address lost him the support of many in the media and academy, but it stands as a bold witness to the poisonous excesses of the progressivist spirit.

Similarly, when he was awarded the Templeton Prize in England in 1983, his speech, which drew a straight line from godlessness to the Gulag, caused him to be further labeled as old-fashioned, out of touch, reactionary, and, yes, atavistic. Solzhenitsyn, ostracized by the liberal thinkers who had once hailed him as a champion of freedom, lived the life of a recluse in Vermont until, remarkably, he was allowed to return to Russia in 1994, where he lived out the remainder of his long life in peace.

Like Ivan Denisovich, all of Solzhenitsyns major novels incorporate autobiographical elements. The three-volume The Gulag Archipelago critiques and exposes both Leninism-Stalinism and Western secular rationalism. Cancer Ward is a profound meditation on death by an author who almost died of cancer.

The First Circle is a conversation between inmates in a Soviet white-collar prison for educated scientists, with one of the characters based on the authors own younger self as he moved from rationalism to religion. The four-volume The Red Wheel is a re-imagining of the Russian Revolution that blends fiction and non-fiction, historical documents and Solzhenitsyns own incisive analysis of how the fated revolution could have been avoided by different choices on the part of free, volitional individuals.

Thankfully for those who are familiar with Ivan Denisovich and the Harvard Address but have yet to work up the energy to read his long, complex, circuitous novels, a collection of essays has appeared that illuminates the many facets of Solzhenitsyn the man, the writer, and the prophet.

Edited by David P. Deavel, co-director of the Terence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, and Jessica Hooten Wilson, Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West explores Solzhenitsyns links to Russian culture, Orthodoxy, politics, and other Soviet writers, as well as the influence that he and his fellow Russians have had on twentieth-century American writers. Although the collection is wide-ranging in its analysis, its especially valuable for illuminating what Solzhenitsyn can teach us about the dangers of progressivism today.

In the opening essay, The Universal Russian Soul, Nathan Nielson, a graduate of St. Johns College, quotes this passage from Solzhenitsyns 1993 speech The Relentless Cult of Novelty: And in one sweeping gesture of vexation, classical Russian literaturewhich never disdained reality and sought the truthis dismissed as next to worthless. Denigrating the past is deemed to be the key to progress. And so it has once again become fashionable in Russia to ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion toward all human beings, and especially toward those who suffer.

Needless to say, the fear Solzhenitsyn prophetically expresses here has been realized in increasingly shameless attempts by American universities to ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard our Western heritage as a prelude to building an egalitarian, multicultural society, despite the fact that the legacy they want to jettison has provided the sole foundation for liberal democracy and individual freedom. Solzhenitsyn knew that no stable future could be built on hatred of the past, since hatred of the past inevitably leads to hatred of the self, not to mention hatred of ones neighbor and ones society.

The two essays that follow, The New Middle Ages and The Age of Concentration, are not analyses of Solzhenitsyn, but reflections by a modern Russian novelist, Eugene Vodolazkin, who shares Solzhenitsyns spirit and his mistrust of all progressive attempts to build a perfect society.

It is wrong to think of utopias as harmless dreams, he warns. Combined with the idea of progress, utopian thought is a dream that motivates action. It establishes a goal so lofty that it cannot be reached. The more ideal it becomes, the greater the stubbornness with which it is pursued. There comes a time when blood is spilled. Oceans of blood. In one way or another, all of Solzhenitsyns novels work out just that terrifying cause and effect, ripping away the faade of humanitarianism or revolutionary consciousness or classless equality to reveal the beast within.

In that vein, David Walsh, professor of politics at Catholic University, locates in The Red Wheel a central struggle between those who seek to remake Russia in accordance with their own idea of it and those who seek to submit to the idea of Russia as itself the guiding principle of their action. It is the difference between ideology and truth. The protagonists of ideology are driven by the conviction of the superiority of their conception to all that has existed. The servants of truth subordinate themselves to what is required to bring what is already there more fully into existence.

What is at issue here is not only the destructive nature of ends-justifies-the-means thinking, but the anti-humanistic arrogance that invests Marxist ideology (dialectical materialism, economic determinism, identity politics) with a sacred imprimatur for radically remaking society.

In his analysis of The Gulag Archipelago, Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, considers a question that Solzhenitsyn asks himself: Why do Shakespeares greatest villains kill only a few people while Lenin and Stalin killed millions?

The reason, Morson explains, is that Macbeth and Iago had no ideology. Real people do not resemble the evildoers of mass culture, who delight in cruelty and destruction. No, to do mass evil you have to believe it is good, and it is ideology that supplies this conviction. All of us are capable of small, independent evil acts, but progressivism, by allowing governments to submerge their moral qualms beneath a sea of ideology, unleashes that evil on all of society.

Joseph Pearce, who interviewed Solzhenitsyn in Russia in 1998 and wrote an excellent biography, teases out Solzhenitsyns anti-progressivism by contrasting him with Leo Tolstoy. Unlike Tolstoy, Pearce argues, Solzhenitsyn laments the modern belief in eternal, infinite progress which has practically become a religion, adding that such progressivism was a mistake of the eighteenth century, of the Enlightenment era. Technological progress in the service of philosophical materialism was not true progress at all but, on the contrary, was a threat to civilization. In his novels, Solzhenitsyn drives these points home, not by offering philosophical disquisitions, but by incarnating these ideas in the lives of flesh-and-blood characters.

James F. Pontuso, Patterson Professor of Political Science at Hampden-Sydney College, offers an example of this incarnation. In The First Circle, writes Pontuso, Solzhenitsyn captivatingly captures the allure of ideology in the character of Lev Rubin. Despite all evidence to the contrary, including his own undeserved arrest and imprisonment, Rubin is devoted totally and insensibly to the Communist cause. . . . Rubin fails to acknowledge what he experiences; instead he accepts what he chooses to believe. For him every crime committed in the present is justified by the glorious future of peace, prosperity, and universal brotherhood that Marxs principles purport to bring about.

Such is the power of Marxs progressive ideology that Rubin discounts his personal experience. If such self-deception in the name of ideology sounds unbelievable, just think of the American politicians and media people who, during the summer of 2020, watched businesses being looted and burned but could only see peaceful protests in the name of racial justice and economic equity. They are those who not only live and propagate the lie, but who come to believe it themselves.

Perhaps the best summation of what Solzhenitsyn can teach us about the dangers of progressivism is found in a reconsideration of The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn scholar Daniel J. Mahoney. Central to Solzhenitsyns moral and political vision, he explains, is the nonnegotiable distinction between truth and falsehood. Solzhenitsyns target was precisely the ideological Lie that presented evildoing as a historically necessary stage in the fated progress of the human race. He always asserted that the ideological Lie was worse than violence and physical brutality, ultimately more destructive of the integrity of the human soul.

I can think of no better analysis of the true legacy of 2020: Not the Coronavirus itself, but the way it was used to justify the illegal power grabs of bureaucratic, progressivist elites; not the riots themselves, but the lie they were justified by (that America is riddled with systemic racism); not the attacks on Donald Trump per se, but the fact that his enemies in the government, media, and big corporations were willing to tell any lie to take him down.

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn Takes On The Progressives - The Federalist

Ai Weiwei at the Berengo studio in Venice, next to his glass sculpture Blossom Chandelier. Photo by Karolina Sobel.

Sala Longhi, by Fred Wilson (2011). Glass and wood.

Some of the world's leading contemporary artists have been invited to breathe new life into centuries-old glassmaking in Venice maestros of glassblowing from the legendary Berengo Studio residency help artists manifest their visions.

A new exhibition features 34 artists in the glass collaboration, including Ai Weiwei, Fred Wilson, Joyce J. Scott, Jimmie Durham, Ugo Rondinone, Fiona Banner, Vik Muniz, Monica Bonvicini, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Laure Prouvost, Renate Bertlmann, Thomas Schtte, Loris Graud, and Erwin Wurm. Several represented their countries at the Venice Biennale.

There is every reason this year to have a world view, says Irvin Lippman, the Boca Raton Museum of Arts Executive Director, as South Florida ushers in the new year with the national premiere of Glasstress 2021 Boca Raton.

"Three years in the making, with 2020 being such a challenging year to coordinate an international exhibition of this size and scope, the effort serves as an important reassurance that art is an essential and enduring part of humanity."

"This is also a tribute to the resilience of Venices surviving the floods and continuing to make art through the pandemic, adds Irvin Lippman.

Most of these works in glass have never been seen elsewhere, and were handpicked by Kathleen Goncharov, the Boca Raton Museums Senior Curator who traveled to Italy in 2019.

The new exhibition runs January 27 through September 5, 2021 and the museum will feature online initiatives for virtual viewing. Watch the video here featuring interviews with some of the artists in the new exhibition.

The 34 artists in this new, never before seen edition of Glasstress were all invited by Adriano Berengo to work alongside his master glass artisans at the Berengo Studio on the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon.Watch the new video at youtu.be/LSztp-DAODE

With incredible energy, the Studio has brought a new vision on how to stimulate todays leading artists into thinking how the medium of glass can be made into dramatic and provocative works of contemporary art.

Detail of Glass Big Brother, Song Dong (2015). Glass and metal.

Some of the works were created during the pandemic lockdowns, with artists collaborating remotely via Zoom with their glass artisan partners after initial on-site work at the studio in Venice.

Unlike the past and the present, what comes next for our world presents itself as constant possibility, always transforming as we move forward in time, says Adriano Berengo.This concept of transformation has always held an affinity with glass, a medium which as the name Glasstress suggests exists in a state of constant tension. Life needs tension, it needs energy, and a vibrant exchange of ideas.

The exhibition presents 34 new works that explore some of todays pressing subjects, including human rights, climate change, racial justice, gender issues and politics. The Boca Raton Museum of Art has dedicated more than 6,500 square feet of exhibition space to this collection. A fully illustrated catalogue is also available.

The mission of Glasstress is to restore the visibility and reputation of Murano glass, after decades of closures of ancient, centuries-old glass furnaces. Instead of creating decorative objects with glass, these artists are invited to create original works, often on a massive scale.

The artists collaborate with glass masters whose expertise has been developed over generations in Venice. Most of these artists have never worked with glass, so they unite their artistic ideas with the technical expertise of their skilled collaborators.

We have brought Glasstress to countries around the world for ten years, seeking to expand and enliven international awareness of the variety and richness of contemporary artists using glass in their creative practices, adds Adriano Berengo.

In the past, its place in the art world might have seemed uncertain. But now in this latest edition of Glasstress, the first after a global pandemic, one thing we know for certain: glass endures. Life is fragile, just as glass is fragile, yet in this fragility there is also strength.

The results are breathtaking. The first installation visitors to the Museum will encounter is Sala Longhi by Fred Wilson.He created this series at Berengo Studio after the Biennale exhibited his work about Black residents of Venice from the Renaissance to the present.

This installation features an ornate white chandelier with 29 glass panels that mirror 18th-century Venetian artist Pietro Longhis paintings. Instead of canvases, Wilson shows the viewer only the whites of the eyes of his Black subjects through cutouts in black reflective glass.

Ai Weiwei worked at the Berengo studio in Venice on his glass sculpture Blossom Chandelier. The large-scale installation bursts with unexpected shapes emanating from white glass flowers to surprise the eye: menacing handcuffs, twitter birds, security cameras, and the artists hands flashing his middle finger (the latter is his angry response to the Chinese government that imprisoned him).

This show also unveils the museums new acquisition for its collection, created in the Berengo Studio Glass Big Brother, a sculpture by Song Dong, one of contemporary Chinese arts leading figures.

Certainly, this chandelier sculpture by Song Dong with its glass-blown surveillance cameras, is both poetic and poignant, says Irvin Lippman. It was commissioned by the Museum to hang in our new Wolgin Education Center front windows that face pedestrians walking across Mizner Park.The large-scale ceiling installation is 11 feet long and reaches all the way to the floor. Thirty surveillance cameras are ensconced from top to bottom, looking out at all directions around the chandelier.

The installation Rosemaries Divorce, by Renate Bertlmann, unites aspects from Rosemaries Baby (1983), her multi-part installation about the ambivalent relationship between mother and child, and Discordo Ergo Sum, a field of knife-roses she exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2019.The monstrously enlarged glass pacifier is an image she has used since the mid-1970s referencing sexuality and motherhood. It is flanked by two knife-roses made of deep black glass.

The Italian artist Monica Bonvicinis deeply psychological work addresses themes of sexuality, power, and relationships in male-oriented domains.Her visits to sadomasochist nightclubs with Gay male friends are the inspiration for Bonded.She won the prestigious Golden Lion award at the 1999 Venice Biennale.

DNA HAS NO COLOR is a new statement from Nancy Burson that is a powerful work about the illegitimacy of racism. This is a continuation of the project that Zaha Hadid commissioned Burson to develop for the London Millennium Dome. Burson is known for biology-related work, including her use of cutting edge facial morphing technology for art that shows what individuals would look like as a different race.

The Pandemic Oculus, (2020), is by Tim Tate, whose work explores the worlds of loss, memory, recovery, and hope. As an HIV-positive man, he lived through the worst of the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s and 1990s, and now through the current pandemic.In the museums exhibition catalogue, the artist states that Pandemic Oculus also honors the many unsung heroes around the world: nurses, teachers, essential employees, grandparents caring for children so that parents can work, and so many more.

Tate is the co-founder of the Washington Glass Studio in Washington, DC. He is also the co-moderator, along with William Warmus, of the 21st Century Glass group on Facebook, which has shared and discussed over 10,000 images of sculptural glass from around the world.

The Pandemic Oculus, Tim Tate (2020), Glass.

Erwin Wurms wry sense of humor permeates his most famous works and has served him well in creating a poignant cultural commentary throughout his career.Wurm produced this triad in cold hard glass at the Berengo Studio. They are smaller versions of the massive bronze sculpture of a hot water bottle with legs, Big Mutter, that he created for the Venice Biennale in 2020.In the exhibition catalogue, the shows curator Kathleen Goncharov describes these mothers as neither warm nor comforting . . . their stubby little legs imply flight when called upon to be caregivers.

At the Berengo Studio, Jimmie Durham created a series of eight giant cougar heads suspended on metal armatures. Caught in suspension as they gaze at one another, their collective roar remains frozen between them.The cougar is one of the most sacred animals in Cherokee mythology, and the influence of Native-American culture vs. Western rationalism is evident in his work.The artists long trajectory includes his work during the civil rights movement and as a political organizer for the American Indian Movement. In 2019, Durham was the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award at the 58th Venice Biennale.

In the museums exhibition catalogue, curator Kathleen Goncharov describes Prune Nourry as no stranger to illness . . . her work always dealing with science and bioethics from a feminist perspective, a focus that has intensified since her breast cancer diagnosis in 2018.At the Berengo Studio, she created River Woman, a transparent skeletal sculpture based on an anatomical drawing of the human vascular system.While its form may be human, the arteries resemble rivers, streams and trees that suffer in their own way too, from human abuse rather than disease.

Ugo Rondinone represented his home country in the Swiss Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007).In this work, the twelve glass horses cast in beautiful shades of blue all face different directions, creating delicate light games with their reflections and shadows in continuous motion.In the context of this installation, the reappearing motif of a horse (which has a long tradition in the history of art), evokes alienation and a subversive twist emblematic of Rondinones works.

More info: Visit the Boca Raton Museum of Art website.

Excerpt from:

U.S. Premiere of 'Glasstress' Showcases The Work of Leading International Artists in Collaboration With Venetian Glass Masters - ArtfixDaily