Cinqué Hicks

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  picks December 07, 2013

  “Fallen Fruit of Atlanta”

  Southerners—like most who live outside the centers of taste-making power—can be sensitive to the way they are portrayed. Artists David Burns and Austin Young are aware of this self-consciousness and are intrepid in addressing it in their latest exhibition, “Fallen Fruit of Atlanta,” which comprises an eclectic array of 274 found objects that the duo, known by the name Fallen Fruit, has collected. Organized into eleven salon-style groupings, or “portals,” the objects reflect stages in the development of human consciousness—from birth to self-awareness to death and the afterlife—and were procured

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  picks May 14, 2013

  Bethany Springer

  Most of the works in Bethany Springer’s solo exhibition “Seismic Reflection” emerged from her month spent at the Full Tilt Creative Centre in McIvers, Newfoundland, attempting to record the movement of icebergs. Instead of creating the intended recordings, however, Springer constructed a site-specific installation, Tidal, 2012, (here represented by documentary photos), using rope purchased from a local hardware store. Among other works on view is a sprawling floor-bound sculpture, Seismic Reflection, 2013, created after the artist’s return to Arkansas, where she works and teaches.

  For Tidal, the

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  picks April 23, 2013

  Diana Al-Hadid

  Diana Al-Hadid’s first major museum survey, at the Weatherspoon Art Museum on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, offers a rare opportunity to witness a dialogue among several works made over a five-year period. The exhibition of nine sculptures and seven drawings references Italian and Flemish Renaissance painting and gothic architecture, often avoiding these traditions’ religious content to focus on their formal qualities. At the Vanishing Point, 2012, realizes Jacopo Pontormo’s painting The Visitation, 1514–16, in three dimensions. Composed of steel, polymer gypsum,

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  picks April 06, 2013

  Odili Donald Odita

  Odili Donald Odita is well known for large-scale, hardedge abstract paintings of syncopated shards of high-volume color. But for two decades, a different, more intimate body of work has woven through this output like a contrapuntal melody. For “Grey,” his first solo show in this relatively new gallery—which is already carving out a niche with its smart program in an unlikely southern city—Odita debuts nineteen small works on paper that have been made over the past ten years.

  Several abstractions here evoke a Minimalist vocabulary that—unlike Odita’s sprawling paintings—mostly cleave to a modernist