Sculpture Milwaukee 2018

Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz is one of the most important artists to come out of Poland in the post-World War II period.

She used easily accessible fabrics and soft materials, creating large constructions that could be shields, or shelter.

In BAM (Seated Warrior), 2017, Biggers casts his life-size Warrior by marking and mutilating a small wooden “power” figure, then casting it in bronze, expanding its size to both hide and exaggerate the violence done to the original.

Biggers refers to the history of killings of unarmed civilians in America, the serene pose of Warrior contrasts the violence done to its body; this jarring juxtaposition is at the heart of Bigger’s work.

For Nostalgia, 2013, the artist used his luggage while traveling from Havana to New York. The interior space of his suitcase, as an allegory of a window, is closed with the bricks of Manhattan. It is a piece that embodies, in a poetic manner, the situation of travel for immigrants.

Deacon, who calls himself a “fabricator,” is known for experimenting with a range of traditional and non-traditional fine art materials, from laminated wood, stainless steel, corrugated iron and polycarbonate to marble, clay, vinyl, foam and leather.

Since 2007, Friedman has been creating sculpture and sculptural environments made of aluminum foil, roasting pans and baking tins. The supple yet durable materials are easily shaped and keep their edges and fingerprint divots when cast into the high gloss modern material of stainless steel.

Untitled (Burgher with extended arm), 2014, comes from a series of performances focused on monumental sculptures in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Glynn and her crew cast molds from 19th century French artist Auguste Rodin’s work The Burghers of Calais, 1884-89.

This disjointed figure speaks to the social and technological upheavals of our time, each personal pulled in different directions by our constantly changing social and economic climate.

The scale of Hume’s Bud (bronze) is playful, standing as tall as any adult. The plant is both wondrous, the miracle of life that returns after a long Wisconsin winter, and monstrous, in its size. The piece comes off its pedestal and roots directly to the ground, its natural material appearing unnatural in the landscape.

In her repurposed bus shelter, Jackson Hutchins replaces the functional glass walls with baroque decorative panels, some with phrases and words that recall the advertising function of these public shelters. The artist has replaced the bench with a hammock, taking participants away from the fast pace of downtown’s business environment and giving works a place to rest, and perhaps to dream. Her work embraces issues of public citizenship and personal spirituality.

While the emphatic black and white banding seems decorative for the artist, in fact the striations follow a long tradition of architectural marking that dates back to the Roman era, was used in medieval Italian church architecture and erupts again in the post-modern work of architects such as Mario Botta.

Over the past few years, McCaw and Budsberg have noted the improbable shapes adopted by disused barns scattered across the Wisconsin landscape. These barns started with the well-made lines of functional buildings, but slowly, they sink into the natural forms of the land from whence they came. The buildings slump and shift under the weight of time and weather. Skew brings this unique rural geometry into the 21st century.

Prvački’s provocative appropriation of Michelangeo's 'David' pokes at the long shadow this monument plays in establishing standards public art.

Smith is a second wave feminist artist who used her own body to comment on social issues.

Smith’s body works, sometimes called “abject”, have an unflinching poignancy and veracity that grapples with decay and mortality.

Over the past several years, Sodi has been making stacks of cubes made from the earth. These elemental building blocks, which have built cities around the globe throughout human history, take on new meaning at this scale.

In his totemic Mood Sculpture, Tasset draws from the cheerful smiley faces invented in 1963—the original American emoji—and shows the rainbow range of moods that afflict our days, from the sour grape face at the bottom to the Sunny Delight yellow face on top. His cheery, childlike colors remind us of how radical new ideas of the 1960s have today been packaged into consumer products.

New York-based artist Hank Willis Thomas explores how identity and ideas of race are shaped by the media and popular culture.

Thomas appropriates recognizable imagery to critique how advertisements brand us. He works through popular clichés to expose the ways they shape how we see ourselves and each other.