Public Installation
Sterling Ruby
Desert X 2019
February 9–April 21, 2019
Coachella Valley, Whitewater, California
www.desertx.org
Sterling Ruby’s fluorescent orange monolith SPECTER (2019), appears as an apparition in the desert as part of Desert X, a contemporary-art biennial in Coachella Valley, California. The artist’s brightly colored geometric sculpture creates a jarring optical illusion, giving the landscape the effect of a Photoshopped composite or collage, as if something has been removed or erased from the terrain.
Share
Sterling Ruby, SPECTER, 2019 © Sterling Ruby
Related News
Public Installation
Sterling Ruby
SPECTERS TOKYO
November 23–December 23, 2023
Sogetsu Kaikan, Tokyo
www.sogetsu.or.jp
In SPECTERS TOKYO, Sterling Ruby’s first public installation in Japan, the artist creates a dialogue with Isamu Noguchi’s indoor stone garden Heaven (1977–78), which is permanently installed in the lobby of the Sogetsu Foundation headquarters. Exploring the interactions between the living and the dead, Ruby’s site-specific work draws influence from kaidan, a genre of Japanese ghost stories. The otherworldly scene includes spectral figures made from heavily worn, tattered textiles and found objects that are suspended from the ceiling like puppets.
Installation view, Sterling Ruby: SPECTERS TOKYO, Sogetsu Kaikan, Tokyo, November 23–December 23, 2023. Artwork © Sterling Ruby. Photo: Kenji Takahashi, courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo
In Conversation
Sterling Ruby
Tim Blanks
Tuesday, March 2, 2021, 12pm est
Sterling Ruby will speak with Tim Blanks, editor of the Business of Fashion, about his artistic process and foray into haute couture, as well as how he has stayed creative during the pandemic. The haute couture collection was created in Ruby’s Los Angeles studio, expanding the idea of the artist’s studio as atelier. Garment construction—from pattern-drafting and 3-D draping to dyeing, washing, and rinsing—occurs under the same roof as metalworking, oil painting, and ceramic firing. To join the online event, register at businessoffashion.zoom.us.
Photo: Melanie Schiff
Artist Talk
Sterling Ruby
(At Home) On Art and the American Psyche
Wednesday, December 2, 2020, 7–8pm est
Sterling Ruby will speak with former Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden chief curator Stéphane Aquin about his multifaceted art practice and his monumental sculpture DOUBLE CANDLE (2018), recently acquired by the museum and installed in their Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. In addition to demonstrating Ruby’s belief in an embedded unification of both formal and political concerns, DOUBLE CANDLE brings together his interest in textiles and “soft sculpture”—the 23-foot-tall bronze sculpture is based on a “soft” version of the work that was recently on view in an exhibition surveying Ruby’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. This virtual event is part of Talking to Our Time, the Hirshhorn’s online series of free talks featuring a diverse group of artists and collectives. To join, register at smithsonian.zoom.us.
Sterling Ruby. Photo: Melanie Schiff
Francesca Woodman
Ahead of the first exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s photographs at Gagosian, director Putri Tan speaks with historian and curator Corey Keller about new insights into the artist’s work. The two unravel themes of the body, space, architecture, and ambiguity.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2024
The Spring 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available with a fresh cover design featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Lead Plate with Hole (1984).
Simon Hantaï: Azzurro
Join curator Anne Baldassari as she discusses the exhibition Simon Hantaï:Azzurro, Gagosian, Rome, and the significance of blue in the artist’s practice. The show forms part of a triptych with Gagosian’s two previous Hantaï exhibitions, LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR at Le Bourget in 2019–20, and Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc in New York, in 2022.
Sofia Coppola: Archive
MACK recently published Sofia Coppola: Archive 1999–2023, the first publication to chronicle Coppola’s entire body of work in cinema. Comprised of the filmmaker’s personal photographs, developmental materials, drafted and annotated scripts, collages, and unseen behind-the-scenes photography from all of her films, the monograph offers readers an intimate look into the process behind these films.
Prosperity’s Long Song #1: At Lights-Out Hour
We present the first installment of a four-part short story by Arinze Ifeakandu. Set at the Marian Boys’ Boarding School in Nigeria, “Prosperity’s Long Song” explores the country’s political upheavals through the lens of ancient mythologies and the mystical power of poetry.
Mount Fuji in Satyajit Ray’s Woodblock Art, Part II
In the first installment of this two-part feature, published in our Winter 2023 edition, novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri traced the global impacts of woodblock printing. Here, in the second installment, he focuses on the films of Satyajit Ray, demonstrating the enduring influence of the woodblock print on the formal composition of these works.
Adaptability
Adam Dalva looks at recent films born from short stories by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and asks, What makes a great adaptation? He considers how the beloved surrealist’s prose particularly lends itself to cinematic interpretation.
Vladimir Kagan’s First Collection: An Interview with Chris Eitel
Chris Eitel, Vladimir Kagan’s protégé and the current director of design and production at Vladimir Kagan Design Group, invited the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to the brand’s studio in New Jersey, where the two discussed the forthcoming release of the First Collection. The series, now available through holly hunt, reintroduces the first chair and table that Kagan ever designed—part of Eitel’s efforts to honor the furniture avant-gardist’s legacy while carrying the company into the future.
Game Changer: Alexey Brodovitch
Gerry Badger reflects on the persistent influence of the graphic designer and photographer Alexey Brodovitch, the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
Goetheanum: Rudolf Steiner and Contemporary Art
Author and artist Ross Simonini reports on a recent trip to the world center of the anthroposophical movement, the Goetheanum in Switzerland, exploring the influence of the movement’s founder and building’s designer Rudolf Steiner on twentieth-century artists.
Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Frida Escobedo
In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the first installment of 2024, we are honored to present the architect Frida Escobedo.
Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955
Dance scholars Mark Franko and Ninotchka Bennahum join the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab in a conversation about the exhibition Border Crossings at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Cocurated by Bennahum and Bruce Robertson, the show reexamines twentieth-century modern dance in the context of war, exile, and injustice. An accompanying catalogue, coedited by Bennahum and Rena Heinrich and published earlier this year, bridges the New York presentation with its West Coast counterpart at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.