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Modern and Contemporary Art: Topical Abstraction in Contemporary Sculpture
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Modern and Contemporary Art: Topical Abstraction in Contemporary Sculpture

A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752). This special issue belongs to the section "Visual Arts".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 January 2024) | Viewed by 4690

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Elyse Speaks

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Guest Editor
Department of Art, Art History, and Design, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
Interests: modern and contemporary art; contemporary sculpture and installation; gender studies
Dr. Susan Richmond

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of the Arts, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30302, USA
Interests: modern and contemporary art of the U.S. and Europe; feminist and gender theories

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Since at least the 1960s, artists have leveraged abstraction to address topical issues without ceding to the classical framework of sculptural figuration. Examples include Melvin Edwards’ use of materials and symbols to allude to racism and political unrest, Barbara Chase-Riboud’s experimental processes that drew on her personal life experiences and global travels, and Kazuko Miyamoto’s minimalist exploration of the body politics of labor and display. Increasingly, contemporary artists such as Igshaan Adams, Tomás Díaz Cedeño, Kevin Beasley, Jeneen Frei Njootli, and Simone Leigh have pushed the matter all the more, adopting and adapting materials and processes to inventive and experimental ends that compellingly engage with social, historical, environmental, and aesthetic formations. At once allusive and open, such practices draw together disparate frameworks ranging from the vernacular and ethnographic to the phenomenological and commemorative. The overt conceptualizations that ensue cultivate trenchant conversations that foreground the critical terrain that making and materials occupy.

This Special Issue on contemporary sculpture—broadly conceived—seeks scholarship that explores the terms, origins, and outcomes that have emerged globally to engage with political, ecological, and intersectional questions. How might we understand such topical abstractions and the expanded terrain they explore? How do they pressure the limitations of abstraction to take up social or political considerations? In what ways might they invite new audiences, engender new relational positions to the viewer, or establish new possibilities for aesthetics?

Dr. Elyse Speaks
Dr. Susan Richmond
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • contemporary sculpture
  • politics and art
  • abstraction
  • process and materials
  • aesthetics

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 105890 KiB  
Article
Interiority, Metamorphosis, and Simone Leigh’s Hybrid Cowries
by Tiffany Johnson Bidler
Arts 2024, 13(2), 56; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13020056 - 14 Mar 2024
Viewed by 977
Abstract
By way of an analysis of Simone Leigh’s You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been (2017), this essay argues that by hybridizing the cowrie and watermelon, Leigh creates her own natural history of these biological forms that disorders the rigid taxonomic classification [...] Read more.
By way of an analysis of Simone Leigh’s You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been (2017), this essay argues that by hybridizing the cowrie and watermelon, Leigh creates her own natural history of these biological forms that disorders the rigid taxonomic classification on which systems of discrimination rely. The resulting hybrid cowrie not only defies classification, it also forms a folded architecture that facilitates a Deleuzian reading. The hybrid cowries, by way of their capacious construction and narrow slits, evoke an interiority that enables metamorphosis. By way of the analysis of the works of Cupboard (2014) and Cowrie (Pannier) (2015), the essay further investigates architectural forms. It considers the intricate interactions between the hybrid architecture of natural forms, such as cowries and watermelons, and human-fabricated forms, such as teleuks and crinolines. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modern and Contemporary Art: Topical Abstraction in Contemporary Sculpture)
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19 pages, 12397 KiB  
Article
To Touch Time: U.S. Black Feminist Modernist Sculpture in the 1970s and 1980s
by Sarah Louise Cowan
Arts 2024, 13(1), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13010021 - 24 Jan 2024
Viewed by 1177
Abstract
Modernist propositions long have been understood as atemporal—somehow outside of time—or insistently hailing the future. This temporal framework suppresses the contributions of those excluded from modernist canons, particularly Black women. In this article, visual and material analysis of sculptural works produced in the [...] Read more.
Modernist propositions long have been understood as atemporal—somehow outside of time—or insistently hailing the future. This temporal framework suppresses the contributions of those excluded from modernist canons, particularly Black women. In this article, visual and material analysis of sculptural works produced in the 1970s and 1980s by U.S. Black women artists Beverly Buchanan, Senga Nengudi, and Betye Saar reveal how Black feminists have engaged with modernist protocols in order to redress cultural erasures of Black women. These practices exemplify Black feminist modernisms, or creative practices that unsettle the racist and sexist logics of dominant cultural institutions. Each of these artists utilizes haptic surfaces as a method for defying institutional modernism’s obfuscation of the past. The analysis focuses on Buchanan’s defiance of memorial erasures, Nengudi’s reenactment of labor, including in its historical forms, and Saar’s adaptation of generational memory-making processes. Ultimately, these artists’ rejection of a “timeless” modernism demands that viewers understand the present moment in relationship to a still-evolving past. In this way, Buchanan, Nengudi, and Saar position the present as an accumulation, rather than transcendence, of historical occurrences. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modern and Contemporary Art: Topical Abstraction in Contemporary Sculpture)
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16 pages, 1638 KiB  
Article
In Defense of Interiority: Melvin Edwards’ Early Work
by Elise Archias
Arts 2023, 12(6), 247; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12060247 - 07 Dec 2023
Viewed by 1302
Abstract
Melvin Edwards made his first abstract sculptures at the beginning of the contemporary period in the early 1960s, but the ways he held on formally to a modern notion of “interiority” in his Lynch Fragments series provide us with an underexamined aesthetic position [...] Read more.
Melvin Edwards made his first abstract sculptures at the beginning of the contemporary period in the early 1960s, but the ways he held on formally to a modern notion of “interiority” in his Lynch Fragments series provide us with an underexamined aesthetic position in contemporary art. Edwards offered nuanced relationships between interior and exterior at a moment when concepts of “interiority” and “self” were under the most strain in contemporary art practice. If we consider this turn away from interiority—and toward surface, emptiness, system, and dematerialization—to be, in part, a symptom of the pressure exerted by the commodity form on art viewers’ sensibilities after 1955, then the stakes of Edwards’ choice not only to use found metal objects, but to compose them around an active rather than empty center, feel higher. By comparing the sculpture Mojo for 1404 (1964) with the Bichos (1960–1965) of Lygia Clark, the distinctiveness of Edwards’ project emerges even more strongly. Clark responded to the crisis of interiority with shiny metal sculptures whose interiors were constantly being flipped inside-out. By contrast, Edwards’ art was motivated by the struggle for racial justice, and it persistently spoke its desire for grounded, scarred personhood in an aesthetic language that required viewers to recall their own interiority. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modern and Contemporary Art: Topical Abstraction in Contemporary Sculpture)
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