2016 exhibition program

Ann Veronica Janssens
January 23–April 17, 2016

Known primarily as a light artist, Ann Veronica Janssens is interested in “situations of dazzlement…the persistence of vision, vertigo, saturation, speed, and exhaustion”—in other words, how the body responds to certain scientific phenomena and conditions put upon it. Her ability to create these sensations in the body is contingent on the way light acts upon and within architecture and the sculptural objects that Janssens makes. In her Nasher exhibition, the first one person museum exhibition in the United States for the Brussels-based artist, Janssens has installed several sculptural works that will allow viewers to encounter shifts in surface, depth, and color, including an outdoor, translucent pavilion filled with fog which challenges perception and destabilizes a sense of sight and space.

Doris Salcedo: Plegaria Muda
February 27–April 17, 2016

In honor of Doris Salcedo’s selection as the inaugural Nasher Prize Laureate, the Nasher Sculpture Center presents an installation of her 2008–10 work Plegaria Muda (in loose translation, “silent prayer”). The piece consists of long, narrow wooden tables that have been covered with a thick layer of earth held in place by a table of the same size and type turned atop it. In places, bright green blades of grass push their way through the overturned tabletop, into the light. Made in response to the murder of some 2,500 young people in Colombia between 2003 and 2009 by the Colombian army, the work highlights Salcedo’s powerful commitment to memorializing victims of violence.

Sightings: Mai-Thu Perret
March 12–July 17, 2016

Swiss-born Mai-Thu Perret has spent the last 16 years making work born from a fictional feminist art commune she created called The Crystal Frontier. Set in New Mexico, the imaginary women of the commune make work that runs the visual gamut, from the painterly to the sculptural, often employing the aesthetic tropes of modernism and aligning the women with utopian art historical movements. Her work at the Nasher will build off of a performance Perret recently staged in Geneva, called Figures, which drew on the ancient Japanese puppetry form bunraku and elaborated a narrative involving a journalist, an Indian mystic, a 19th-century American Shaker, a 1950s computer programmer and an artificial intelligence. In June, Perret will also stage two collaborative performances—Figures, as well as a newly commissioned work—for the SOLUNA International Music and Arts Festival.

Joel Shapiro
May 7–August 21, 2016

One of the most prominent and influential sculptors of the era, Joel Shapiro has long explored geometric form through structural compositions of rectangular elements that visually and physically challenge the possibilities of balance and weight. On view in his Nasher exhibition will be a series of recent, brightly painted, suspended forms that hover in space at different heights and angles, creating “a jungle gym for vision,” as Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel puts it. A series of recent drawings will also be on view, as well as key works by Shapiro from the Nasher’s permanent collection.

Kathryn Andrews: Run for President
September 10, 2016–January 8, 2017

For her exhibition Run for President, during the thick of the 2016 election, Kathryn Andrews situates her sculptures against a conceptual and, at times, pictorial backdrop of presidential elections that functions as a rich allegory. The linear narrative explores candidates, campaigns, sitting in office, and the end of presidency, charting the rise and fall of the president—a metaphorical double for the figure of the artist as well as the viewer. Revealing cultural connections that are both humorous and critical, while questioning the consequences of seeing anything as fixed, Andrews demonstrates how meanings are always contingent and in flux. This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Sightings: Michael Dean
October 22, 2016–February 5, 2017

Michael Dean’s work explores themes of language, the act of writing and the struggle to communicate in a variety of forms, including sculpture, photography, poetry, plays, publications and performance. Dean will create new works in response to the unique environs of the Nasher Sculpture Center, and Sightings: Michael Dean will be the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States.