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Multidisciplinary artist Hew Locke explores individual and collective relationships to power, cultural memory, and migration. Much of his richly detailed work across media has addressed histories of British imperialism and its afterlives. Composed of toy magic wands and tiaras, plastic flowers and butterflies, and dripping plastic beads, Europa is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and highly representative of Locke’s practice, which often deconstructs iconographies of British imperial power through lush compositions. 

The artist spent his formative years in the then newly independent country of Guyana, a former British colony, where images of Queen Elizabeth II were frequently reproduced in schoolbooks. He recalls being scolded by teachers for defacing images of the Queen when caught doodling mustaches or spectacles on her image. This playful spirit of critique endures in his practice through his ongoing series of collaged object portraits, such as Europa. In this raucous and colorful composition that is both celebratory and disquieting, Locke offers a grotesque and captivating portrait of the former Queen as what critic and curator Kris Kuramitsu has described as a “fragmentary postcolonial subject.” Indeed, Locke has emphasized that these object portraits would not have been possible before globalization—the ubiquity and cheapness of the plastic toys and tchotchkes that compose the Queen’s visage, are made possible by the same global flows of capital that European colonialism inaugurated.

John Ahearn is an American artist best known for the public sculpture he produced during the 1980s in the South Bronx, New York. Working in collaboration with Rigoberto Torres, the artist created painted life casts of his neighbors engaged in everyday activities, such as jumping rope or listening to music. Ahearn and Torres worked together with neighborhood volunteers on the casting process, attributing the final work to the artist who paints the cast. 

Smokey is an exemplary, representative work from the community casting workshops Ahearn held in the South Bronx during the early 1980s. This sculpture emerges from an important period in Ahearn’s career, displaying the technique that would define his practice shortly after receiving attention as the co-organizer of The Times Square Show (1980) held in a shuttered commercial space and a model for artist-organized, interdisciplinary exhibitions. Ahearn and Torres’s process emphasizes the singular details of each subject. The artists cover their subjects’ faces with a skin safe molding material, apply a layer of bandages to create a rigid shell mold, and place straws in their subjects’ nostrils to allow them to breathe. Once the mold hardens, the artists fill the molds with plaster to make casts that are carved and painted. This process emphasizes the singular details of each subject, such as Smokey’s toothy smile. The subjects of Ahearn’s earliest portraits were often the result of chance street encounters, but many of his later works focused on specific individuals in the South Bronx with whom the artist had long-standing relationships. Smokey depicts an eccentric local preacher, Reverend Farmer, who was a fixture on Fox Street and also featured in Ahearn’s notable permanent sculptural relief We Are Family (1983). These important early works touch on key themes of childhood, self-representation, race, and community with the artist’s notable commitment to honor everyday people.

John Ahearn is an American artist best known for the public sculpture he produced during the 1980s in the South Bronx, New York. Working in collaboration with Rigoberto Torres, the artist created painted life casts of his neighbors engaged in everyday activities, such as jumping rope or listening to music. Ahearn and Torres worked together with neighborhood volunteers on the casting process, attributing the final work to the artist who paints the cast. 

Elliot is an exemplary, representative work from the community casting workshops Ahearn held in the South Bronx during the early 1980s. This sculpture emerges from an important period in Ahearn’s career, displaying the technique that would define his practice shortly after receiving attention as the co-organizer of The Times Square Show (1980) held in a shuttered commercial space and a model for artist-organized, interdisciplinary exhibitions. Ahearn and Torres’s process emphasizes the singular details of each subject. The artists cover their subjects’ faces with a skin safe molding material, apply a layer of bandages to create a rigid shell mold, and place straws in their subjects’ nostrils to allow them to breathe. Once the mold hardens, the artists fill the molds with plaster to make casts that are carved and painted. This process emphasizes the singular details of each subject, such as Elliot’s bright red polo. The subjects of Ahearn’s earliest portraits were often the result of chance street encounters, but many of his later works focused on specific individuals in the South Bronx with whom the artist had long-standing relationships. Elliot was cast at age seven and lived nearby on Walton Avenue. This important early work touches on key themes of childhood, self-representation, race, and community with the artist’s notable commitment to honor everyday people.

John Ahearn is an American artist best known for the public sculpture he produced during the 1980s in the South Bronx, New York. Working in collaboration with Rigoberto Torres, the artist created painted life casts of his neighbors engaged in everyday activities, such as jumping rope or listening to music. Ahearn and Torres worked together with neighborhood volunteers on the casting process, attributing the final work to the artist who paints the cast. 

Ciba is an exemplary, representative work from the community casting workshops Ahearn held in the South Bronx during the early 1980s. This sculpture emerges from an important period in Ahearn’s career, displaying the technique that would define his practice shortly after receiving attention as the co-organizer of The Times Square Show (1980) held in a shuttered commercial space and a model for artist-organized, interdisciplinary exhibitions. Ahearn and Torres’s process emphasizes the singular details of each subject. The artists cover their subjects’ faces with a skin safe molding material, apply a layer of bandages to create a rigid shell mold, and place straws in their subjects’ nostrils to allow them to breathe. Once the mold hardens, the artists fill the molds with plaster to make casts that are carved and painted. Here, Ciba’s shy, thoughtful gaze is a pure evocation of childhood. The subjects of Ahearn’s earliest portraits were often the result of chance street encounters, but many of his later works focused on specific individuals in the South Bronx with whom the artist had long-standing relationships. Ciba was cast along with a group of friends when Ahearn and Torres were active in their Dawson Street studio (1981–83), a space also known as the Kelly Street Block Association Youth Center. This important early work touches on key themes of childhood, self-representation, race, and community with the artist’s notable commitment to honor everyday people.

Guadalupe Maravilla grounds his sculpture, painting, performance, and large-scale installation in activism and healing, informed by his personal story of migration, illness, and recovery. Through powerful and symbolic objects and images Maravilla collects while retracing his own migration route from El Salvador to the United States, his work mixes Latin American and indigenous crafts, medicinal materials and plants, and readymade goods.

Mariposa Relámpago Retablo recounts the creation of the artist’s largest sculpture to date, Mariposa Relámpago, commissioned by ICA/Boston for the ICA Watershed in 2023 and currently touring the United States. Building on the tradition of retablos—devotional paintings often placed in a church, chapel, or one’s home—Maravilla began his Retablo series in 2019 after a trip to Mexico retracing his own migration route. During the trip, he met traditional retablo painters (retableros) Daniel Alonso Vilchis Hernandez and his father Alfredo Vilchis Roque. Maravilla began an ongoing collaboration with the painters in which he creates a digital sketch and writes the accompanying text, and then Daniel and his father paint them in oil on tin. In Mariposa Relámpago Retablo, he adapts this folk art form to chronicle his own life story and express gratitude for notable events. Maravilla depicts the creation of the monumental work Mariposa Relámpago, which began as a school bus in the United States, had a second life transporting workers in El Salvador and Mexico, and was transformed by Maravilla into a sculpture and musical instrument for vibrational therapy. He depicts details such as the gongs and enormous feather serpent that adorn the bus and significant moments from this process, including sound ceremonies performed by healers in El Salvador. Around the painting, Maravilla constructs a sculptural frame and embeds objects he has collected that relate to broader themes in the artist’s practice, including a copper bird representing freedom and squash-shaped coin purses referencing one of the foods that Maravilla ate following his chemotherapy treatments.

Yu-Wen Wu is a Boston-based, Taiwanese-American artist whose work examines issues of displacement, arrival, and assimilation. At the crossroads of art, science, politics, and social issues, her practice includes drawing, sculpture, site-specific video installations, community engaged practices, and public art. 

The material conversations within Wu’s practice foreground the artist’s interest in navigating her subjectivity as an immigrant to the United States and a member of the Asian diaspora. Tea, gold, and red thread are significant and recurring forms in her work, operating as cultural and personal touchstones. Intentions (III), which is composed of three strands created for Wu’s presentation in the 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize, brings together these materials in the form of wrapped, gilded orbs that approximate Wu’s grandmother’s Buddhist prayer beads. “I remember sitting on her lap as a young child and listening to her hushed voice recite prayers and intentions,” shares the artist, who, to make this work, fashioned knotted strands of 108 (referring to the number of prayers within Buddhism) or 88 (being an auspicious number within Chinese culture) orbs in groupings that refer to other numerical systems of value, such as binary code.

Each orb is made of brewed and dried Taiwanese tea, collected by her mother and aunt, and gilded with painted gold—a material notable both for its associations with preciousness and prosperity as well as a specific reference to the history of Chinese immigration to the United States at the height of the Gold Rush. The red thread recalls ideas of bloodlines, community, and family ties across generations, geographies, and lifetimes. “Unlike circular prayer beads,” explains Wu, here the arrangement of the strands “are suspended in space, resting in a spiral, referring to open possibilities and developing intentions.” 

Kathleen Ryan is a sculptor who is best known for her three-dimensional sculptures of moldy fruit recalling vanitas and their reminder of the impermanence of life. In her practice, Ryan manipulates found and handmade forms with surprising materials—delicate grapes made of concrete, flower seed pods from a repurposed yellow showerhead, and mold using precious gemstones.  

Ryan’s series of larger-than-life, studded Bad Fruits harness the material and visual excess of gems to comment on how and why objects are valued. Fruit has long been a symbol of human consumption and decay in Western art—from Dutch Golden Age still life painting to the beaded fruit craft tradition of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s that influences her work. Playing on a genre of craft objects often given little monetary value and relegated to the shelves of thrift stores, Ryan’s work considers luxury and value.  

In Ryan’s Bad Lemon (Cameo), fake gems adorn the artificial lemon’s healthy yellow rind, while precious pearls and crystals are reserved for the moldy bacterial growths, a playful inversion of what is wanted or valued and what makes the lemon “bad.” The artist’s meticulous translation of a natural phenomenon like decay through the accumulation and arrangement of thousands of stones and beads renders the surfaces of her sculptures mesmerizing. This play between attraction and revulsion and the benefits of close looking are at the heart of Ryan’s singular practice. 

Woody De Othello is best known for playful ceramics, such as those associated with Northern California’s so-called Funk art of the late 1960s and early ’70s. An artist who foregrounds material experimentation and process, Othello features anthropomorphized domestic objects—clocks, phones, television remotes, and air conditioners—imbued with human emotions in his sculptures. According to the artist, the “objects mimic actions that humans perform.”  

Othello’s tomorrow always never is features an assemblage of several objects that recur throughout his sculptural practice, including scaled up versions of a twin bell alarm clock, a push-button telephone, a houseplant, a picture frame, a stack of books, and a handheld mirror. The objects are staged on a bright blue shelving unit that appears to bend precariously under the weight it bears. Modeled in Othello’s signature form of cartoonish figuration, each densely glazed ceramic object is slumped over and losing its shape, as if exhausted or melting. This humorous approach to representation expresses varying emotional and psychological states. At the center of the sculpture there is a drooping orange telephone and an alarm clock with wilting hands—instruments of communication and time that possess a degree of nostalgia, a sense of time slipping away. Othello’s tactile ceramic constructions convey a sense of vulnerability, which is particular to the medium but also to the way that these objects appear to be, as the artist describes them, “affected with the same type of spirit and energy as a figure.” 

In a career spanning over twenty years, Arlene Shechet embraces chance when making sculpture dictated by materials that change from one state to another before solidifying as a finished object. So and So and So and So and On and On is one of Shechet’s most significant works, marking a new direction within her practice. A ceramic sculptural diptych, the work is composed of two round, glazed forms displayed on top of irregular stacks of kiln bricks. The large, fleshy pink heads—whose color references, among other things, the paintings of one of Shechet’s heroes, Philip Guston—function as three-dimensional vessels for the gestural application of color. They are glazed so that the roseate colors layer in zigzagging paths across textured surfaces, with eyelike blue dots interspersed. The glazed and stacked kiln bricks, some white, some outlined thickly in black, are readymade pedestals for the bust-like, handmade ceramic forms. As integral features of Shechet’s sculptures, pedestals dynamically contrast with the elements they support. Here, the columns of kiln bricks reference the process by which the larger forms came into being, gesturing at the presence of the kiln itself as the arbiter of material transformation. Such interplay of forms demonstrates the artist’s dedication to challenging sculptural conventions, grounded, as she says, by “an experience of sculpture as a language for transmitting information, feelings, beliefs, and thoughts.” 

Whether in painting, sculpture, fabric, text, or performance, Jeffrey Gibson’s mixed-media work draws on a wide swath of visual languages, from popular fashion and queer culture, to American modernism inflected through Cherokee and Choctaw aesthetic traditions. Trained as a painter, Gibson describes his approach to the act of painting as akin to beadwork and weaving: “In my head, I [am] applying paint as if I were creating a woven fabric or adorning a textile.” Early in his practice, Gibson expanded on this technique further by incorporating different materials and objects, such as beads, glass, blankets, and metal jingles into works that mixed different aesthetic traditions. Gibson is interested in this hybridity as a way to counter dominant narratives of Native life and community in the Americas, particularly the prevalent misconception that Indigenous art traditions are fixed in the past, rather than within a continuum of adaptation and innovation. “It’s not just that we’ve survived,” Gibson reflects, “there are moments in which we have thrived, we’ve found happiness, we’ve found joy, we’ve found celebration. We’ve always carved out space for ourselves.” The flag, a form of political iconography and a recurring motif in the artist’s practice, is one lens through which Gibson investigates these claims to place, land, and sovereignty to visually critique narratives of settler colonialism. Layering vibrant geometric blocks of color painted on one side of a found wool army blanket, Flag reflects Gibson’s signature visual language and proposal of creative futures for the artistic act through mixed art traditions and their associations.