Installation Artist Picked for Venice 2013

Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat), Sarah Sze's work for the High Line

Sarah Sze, (pronounced ZEE), is a contemporary  installation artist who has been chosen to represent the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Ms. Sze is well known for creating site specific environments using a variety of objects she finds in her environment. Her installations may use toothpicks, tubing, tea bags, ladders, wire, flowers, and anything else she may happen to feel works with the installation. Some of her works are suspended from the ceiling while others are on the floor allowing the viewer a close look at the objects she choose.


A well known work of hers can be viewed on the High Line in New York City. Here she created bird houses covered in fake wood. These aviary houses have parallelogram sides built into grids of shiny metal rods that converge to single points.

Her works are dizzying and immense and force the viewer to look at how objects can be used in ways not ordinarily though of. While incorporating the tossed away and the precious, the viewer can feel disoriented. Sze's work explores the boundaries of art and the object we use in everyday life.


Book on Sarah Sze owned at the Central Library. Click on book cover for more information.

Yayoi Kusama at the Tate Modern

Yayoi Kusama 

February 9 –  June 5 2012

If you aren't aware of Yayoi Kusama You can now see a major exhibition of her work at the Tate Modern. The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama's life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as "Accumulations", to her "Infinity Net" paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessively charged vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.

At the centre of the art world in the 1960s, she came into contact with artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, influencing many along the way. She has traded on her identity as an "outsider" in many contexts - as a female artist in a male-dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world, and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessional symptoms. After achieving fame and notoriety with groundbreaking art happenings and events, she returned to her country of birth and is now Japan's most prominent contemporary artist.