Victoria Sung

“For Siah Armajani, building was more than an intellectual exercise: it was also a search for home,” writes Victoria Sung in remembrance of the Tehran-born, Minneapolis-based artist who passed away August 27 at age 81. Best known for pioneering public artworks that exist at the intersection of art and architecture, Armajani’s six-decade career saw the artist exploring science, politics, and place, all in service to a deeply personal philosophy of being. 

In his art, Theaster Gates reuses objects that have been abandoned, neglected, or forgotten to call attention to the potential that exists in the material world around us. Victoria Sung introduces the collections that anchor the rooms of Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall: a university archive of art historical glass slides, material from the publisher of Jet and Ebony, a collection of racist memorabilia, and a facsimile of Gates’s clay studio.

“Whether people are believers in the sacred or not, can architecture, design, the arts create a moment where you feel like you’re touching something that is bigger than my humanity or your humanity?” As we prepare to open Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall, we share a discussion on Black Vessel for a Saint, a Walker-commissioned sculptural installation in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, in which Gates discusses the secular-sacred, Black entrepreneurship, and how a traveling statue of St. Laurence finally found a permanent home.

Jack Whitten could tell a story better than anyone else, remembers Victoria Sung, who worked with the abstract painter on his 2015-2016 retrospective. In commemorating his life and his January 20 passing, she writes that she finds herself “drawn to those narratives that punctuated the space in between his canvases.”

Mixing sculpture and found objects with sound, text, and moving images, Laure Prouvost’s immersive installation They Are Waiting for You upends the traditional relationship between artwork and viewer, addressing us directly in ways that might feel unfamiliar, even uncomfortable. The work, writes Victoria Sung, demands our complete focus, and threatens to push us out of the room.

The scale of Spoonbridge and Cherry and its neighbor, Katharina Fritsch’s Hahn/Cock, suggests a special kinship. But as Victoria Sung finds, there’s more than size that matters to the creators of these outsized anti-monuments, including shared attention to the gender politics of public sculpture.