Liz Collins had her work cut out for her when she conceived the two 16-foot-long tapestries she showed at last year’s Venice Biennale. Both textiles feature mountain ranges whose peaks emit rainbows that twist through a dark sky, and though they were among the largest works in the Biennale, they were crafted with such elegance that they appeared effortless.

In 2022, when she began work on them at the TextielLab in the Dutch city of Tillburg, Collins envisaged the two textiles as one 40-foot weaving. She thought, “I’m just going for the mother lode. I want to make this huge.” Going for the mother lode quickly revealed itself to be no easy task, however.

Collins quickly realized that her ambitions had outstripped what was actually possible, leading her to split her planned mega-tapestry in two. After an initial trial that didn’t look quite as she wanted, she switched to a lighter yarn. She was pleased with the final product, which she brought home to New York in duffel bags, not yet aware that curator Adriano Pedrosa was interested in showing them at his Biennale.

During a recent visit to her Brooklyn studio, Collins was transparent about the difficulty of producing these textiles, titled Rainbow Mountains: Moon and Rainbow Mountains: Weather (both 2023). But despite the arduous process of making the works, she also spoke of the resulting pieces as being transcendent and transporting. She described both as representing “this monumental space of distortion” and said her mountain ranges evinced “a persistent duality for me: the idea of danger, precarity, horror—the bad things—alongside joy, euphoria, the force of life, being alive, love and community and passion and emotion. Awe and wonder are in the mountains, but they’re also in the rainbows.”

The textiles depict “the promised land—this idea of something you’re looking toward that’s always a little out of reach,” as Collins put it.

Since the 1990s, Collins has been creating fiber art that attempts to reach that promised land. She has crafted wearable garments, painting-like weavings, and performance pieces involving collaborators, many of whom have knit large textiles as a collective. She weaves queer themes into her work—rainbows and Pride flags recur throughout—and often creates textiles that have a corporeal quality, with spills of yarn that recall locks of hair or rivulets of blood.

These labor-intensive pieces have been featured at commercial galleries, art fairs, and design expos and will now be surveyed by the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, where Collins did both undergraduate and graduate work and later was a faculty member in the textiles department. The RISD survey, opening on July 19 and running through January 11, 2026, coincides with the Museum of Modern Art’s iteration of “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” which features three works by her.

To create such elegant art requires physical and mental endurance (and sometimes the help of mills in Italy, Peru, and other foreign nations). The RISD exhibition’s catalog features an essay by Zoe Latta, cofounder of the clothing label Eckhaus Latta and student of Collins who participated in one of the artist’s “Knitting Nation” performances, for which Latta and others helped produce a giant red weaving using a loom in the auditorium of the Institute of Contemporary Art. “At some point,” Latta writes, “I remember that my machine was turning red and I realized my hands were bleeding from blisters popping on the handle of the carriage.” (Museum workers bandaged Latta’s wounds, and she returned to the performance thereafter.)

From such burdensome labor spring weavings in shades of deep crimson, gleaming pink, and alluring blue. The fact that Collins is able to spin pain into beauty has not been lost on her collaborators. The artist Nayland Blake, for example, once enlisted Collins to fix a beloved sock monkey torn apart by a dog and filmed Collins’s hands in close-up for a video called Stab (2013).

Kate Irvin, the curator of Collins’s RISD survey, said that for the artist, “the idea of labor leads to this idea of magic, of alchemy—of creating form or structure out of a line of fiber.” Irvin compared Collins to a trickster, saying, “She’s finding a pathway to other places that are generative and creative and safe.”

Collins herself said that the physicality of her process has helped to root her in her body—and that she even welcomes the tedium that accompanies weaving. “Either it’s boring, or you find a way for it to be transformative,” she said. “You can transcend the monotony.”

Collins was born in 1968 in Alexandria, Virginia, and spent her childhood visiting Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. “It was so much a part of my life to experience art,” she said, recalling such formative experiences as attending the National Museum of African Art, where, during one visit, she viewed a video about men who make kente cloth.

She described an early compulsion to make “something with the heaviness of painting.” But she eventually found herself dissuaded from taking up that medium. As part of her required foundational studies as a freshman at RISD, she tried painting, but “there was something about it that felt stressful to me—the rectangle, the rigid rectangle,” she said. She found herself gravitating toward modernists like Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anni Albers, and Sonia Delaunay, all of whom fluidly translated their abstractions across paintings and textiles. Those artists “really helped me know that I could do that too,” Collins said.

When she became a textiles major in her second year, she finally found her purpose. She learned to weave using a warp board and found the experience of running yellow yarn through it “so special and new and perfect for my body,” as she says in the RISD catalog.

Yet even the textile program left something to be desired: She wanted to create clothes, and all her teachers were fiber artists or designers. “I wanted to work with Jean Paul Gaultier, who could take my magical fabric and turn it into a magical garment,” she told me. Despite being unable to find a Gaultier-like mentor on RISD’s faculty, Collins followed her own intuition. When she was assigned to create a “political piece” for one class, she took camouflage-print fake fur and slashed it. She has since continued to produce weavings with gashes in them.

After graduating with an MFA in 1999, Collins launched a knitwear company that briefly made her a fixture within the world of fashion. “I had this meteoric rise to visibility and recognition, because my work was very unusual,” she said. “I was breaking rules. I was hand-making things with knitting machines, not using factories, and making these very unusual constructions that people hadn’t seen.”

Many of those constructions aspired toward liberation. A tight-fitting bustier from 1999 that appears in MoMA’s “Woven Histories,” for example, features red veins that run across the torso and over one shoulder; sheer dresses donned by runway models featured dangling red threads and gaping holes. “I came out as a queer person through my clothing,” Collins said. “It was a raw expression of my emotional landscape, my sexuality, my anxiety, my repression.”

Her clothes entered the mainstream, with the rapper Lil’ Kim wearing a pink silk and wool top designed by Collins in a 2000 music video. Some in the art world gained appreciation for them, too, including the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, a longtime friend who dedicated her 2017 book, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, to Collins. “When I want to feel at my most fierce, protected, and glamorous, that’s when I choose to wear a Liz Collins garment,” said Bryan-Wilson, whose wedding dress was designed by Collins. “They are witchy and eye-catching. They’re statement pieces. People are always, like, ‘Oh, my God, what is that you’re wearing?’”

But Collins began to feel burnt out by the business of fashion. She wasn’t making enough money, and she had grown exhausted by customers who placed specific demands on her, not realizing all that went into the production of her clothes. Collins knew she could not make it on her own anymore, so she applied for work with other designers, including Donna Karan. But when she came across a position in RISD’s textile department, “everything shifted for me,” she explained. She recalled having “slowly segued” out of fashion while continuing to take on projects with designers such as Gary Graham, with whom she crafted the Pride Dress (2003), which was made from a tattered American flag.

Bryan-Wilson herself donned the Pride Dress for Knitting Nation Phase 1: Knitting During Wartime (2005), the first in a series of performances that helped cement Collins’s place within the art world. Staged on Governors Island, Knitting During Wartime involved many collaborators working together to knit an American flag that was then laid on the ground, trod upon, and defaced. Collins intended the piece as a response to Sunny A. Smith’s The Muster, a series of artworks interrogating Civil War reenactments. Smith aspired to answer the question “What are you fighting for?” Knitting During Wartime appeared as many Americans were asking something similar of themselves while the United States continued its conflict in Afghanistan. Bryan-Wilson recalled Knitting During Wartime as a “ruckus” highlighted by the loud noises of knitting machines and said she understood the piece as a “critique of wartime nationalism and the feminized labor of knitting.”

Future “Knitting Nation” performances involved producing Pride flags and heaps of red fabric. Collins said that, with these performances, she was “focused on telling a story about the physical labor of making fabric and laying bare this medium that I thought was like alchemy, taking a spool of yarn and then putting it through this machine.”

Collins staged the last “Knitting Nation” performance in 2016 and has since produced a range of dreamy textiles. In 2017, working on commission for the Little River Cafe in New York, she produced Inheritance, a group of hanging white textiles that dangle over the heads of diners. (These were an allusion to the sails of boats like the one manned by Collins’s father when she was a child.) That same year, for a New Museum show called “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” Collins made Cave of Secrets, an installation bathed in bluish lighting that included two chairs of differing heights yoked together by violet fibers.

These days, Collins said, she is experiencing a “strange color moment” in which her work often features clashing hues. She pointed out a new weaving from a series called “Zagreb Mountains,” which showcases jagged, zigzagging lines in a range of colors, from raucous yellow to soothing cerulean. “Left on my own, I can come up with some wacky shit like this,” she said.

Read more of our Pride Month coverage here.

On Tuesday, around 70 Rhode Island School of Design students staged a demonstration outside the school’s administrative offices, protesting the administration’s decision to relocate a pro-Palestine art exhibition. The Brown Daily Herald first reported news of the protest.

The RISD show, “To Every Orange Tree,” opened March 17 at Carr Haus Cafe, a student-run space on campus. It was a joint effort between the cafe and RISD Students for Justice in Palestine (RSJP) The imagery installed in the cafe was focused on anti-imperialism and Palestinian liberation. (RISD and Brown’s Providence campuses are adjacent.)

On March 25, RISD officials requested the exhibition’s removal, citing threats directed at school leadership, including a demand for the names of student participants and online demands for the school to be reviewed. The school claimed that the request was made because of safety concerns.

RISD offered to relocate the exhibition to a restricted-access space in the Prov-Wash building. RSJP declined, arguing the change would make the show less visible.

RSJP has demanded the exhibition be reinstated in its original location. The group is also calling on the administration to prohibit Immigration and Customs Enforcement from campus and to safeguard community members’ records and legal status. It’s unclear whether RISD president Crystal Williams will meet with students to discuss a rejected proposal that would see the school cut ties with any companies connected to Israel.

Prior to the exhibition’s installation, in an interview with ARTnews, RSJP member Jo Ouyang, an undergraduate student, said that after a group of student activists occupied a building on campus in May, RSJP had refocused on community-oriented programs, putting aside efforts to challenge the divestment decision. A formal procedure for appeals and proposals related to the divestment of the school’s endowment does not exist in RISD’s governance procedures, according to Ouyang.

RISD maintains that even though the show was relocated the exhibition, the school has still upheld standards guiding freedom of expression. The art on view has been removed from its original site and secured off-campus. In its place, protest signage now lines Carr Haus’s walls.

An international student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) recently had their visa revoked, but the institution was not told the reason why, according to a letter from college president Crystal Williams.

“Amid the current landscape of rapidly changing immigration policies, RISD’s Office of International Students and Scholar Affairs (ISSA) routinely reviews the internal and government records of our international students,” Williams wrote in a letter to the RISD community on April 7. “Unfortunately, today we learned of one student whose international status was marked ‘terminated,’ a formal designation that reflects the revocation of a student’s visa status in the U.S.”

Williams’ letter said RISD has not been told why the student’s visa was terminated, but noted school officials are aware “other international students and scholars in the United States are experiencing similar changes to their statuses with no clear specific reason(s) given for the terminations.”

RISD also did not publicly disclose the student’s name in order to protect their privacy, according to Williams.

When ARTnews asked RISD for further comment, a spokesperson pointed to the college’s web page on additional guidance and resources on federal regulations and executive orders, noting that it was currently undergoing additional updates today and tomorrow.

The spokesperson also confirmed that 33 percent of RISD’s current student population is international students, which is on par for many of the country’s top art schools. According to recent statistics, international students make up 50 percent of the student body at School of the Visual Arts, 35 percent at the Parsons School of Design, 30 percent at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), 29 percent at the School at the Art Institute of Chicago, and 29 percent at the Pratt Institute.

For several weeks, the Trump administration has revoked visas to international students attending colleges and universities around the country. Soon after President Donald Trump started his second term, Reuters reported that he asked immigration officials to tighten visa vetting procedures, likely resulting in slower processing times, more documentation, requests for evidence, and longer waiting times for visas, including F-1 and J-1 student visas. An executive order issued by Trump on January 30 also said the federal government would revoke the student visas for anyone who joined pro-Palestine protests.

On March 28, Secretary of State Marco Rubio estimated he had revoked at least 300 visas of students, visitors, and other persons on the basis of their views on foreign policy or criminal activity. He also ordered US diplomats to scour the social media accounts of international applicants for student and other types of visas. There have also been multiple reported cases of students with revoked visas being taken into custody by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

However, a number of schools across the country have said that some of the students with cancelled visas had no known ties to activism. According to the Boston Globe, which first reported on the RISD student’s visa being revoked, some of the visa revocations in New England and around the country appear to involve students with minor legal encounters, such as trespassing arrests or traffic violations.

The US State Department declined to offer details to the Boston Globe on the cases reported in Massachusetts, including the one at RISD, on Monday.

“The United States has zero tolerance for non-citizens who violate US laws,” a State Department spokesperson told the Boston Globe. “Those who break the law, including students, may face visa refusal, visa revocation, and/or deportation.”

On April 8, US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce was asked by a reporter at a press briefing about the criteria used to determine the student visa cancellations, but she wouldn’t go into the specifics on the visa process or individual cases, citing privacy issues.

“What we can tell you is that the department revokes visas every day in order to secure our borders and to keep our community safe, and we’ll continue to do so,” Bruce said. “The criteria, as it is, is applied appropriately.”

The State Department did not respond to ARTnews’s request for further comment.

William’s letter said RISD’s ISSA office contacted the student directly with an offer to “help identify possible legal resources, and to the extent possible, support the student throughout this difficult moment.”

In addition to visa revocations, economists and immigration experts have expressed concerns about the Trump administration’s policies limiting free speech, discouraging international travel, longer visa processing times, as well as far fewer employment prospects for international students and art professionals due to the high cost of sweeping new tariffs.

Update, April 9, 2025: This article has been updated to include a quote from US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce about student visa cancellations from a press briefing on April 8.

When undergraduate students return to the Ringling College of Art and Design this fall, one of the school’s newest offerings will be an AI certificate.

Ringling is just the latest of several top art schools to offer undergraduate students courses that focus on or integrate artificial intelligence tools and techniques.

ARTnews spoke to experts and faculty at Ringling, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and Florida State University about how they construct curriculum; how they teach AI in consideration of its limitations and concerns about ethics and legal issues; as well as why they think it’s important for artists to learn.

“Knowing how these tools work and how they don’t work, and what they can do and what they can’t do is, we think an important step in a successful artist standing out, right?” Ringling’s AI coordinator, Rick Dakan, told ARTnews. “There’s a million different ways you can apply AI that aren’t having it write the story or make the art for you.”

Ringling’s certificate requires the completion of three courses—a required one on the fundamentals of AI as well as two electives: AI Techniques and Processes for Art, Topics in Artificial Intelligence and/or an existing course that has been revised to “have at least 30 percent of its curricular content related to AI.”

On a practical basis, Ringling teaches its students how to use a variety of AI tools to help them stand out from the “sea of AI-generated garbage,” whether it be through helping with writing, storytelling, creating apps, writing code, or even managing the data of a fanbase or social media presence.

Prior to the launch of the certificate, Dakan taught a creative writing course on writing with AI last fall, followed by the creation of an AI task force at the college last summer. He said that the task force worked to assess the implications of AI on Ringling’s curriculum; to see what other institutions were doing; surveyed students, faculty and staff; held workshops and meetings; suggested language for syllabi and proposals for AI policies for different majors; as well as bringing in outside experts.

Many of these revised courses are in Ringling’s technical majors such as virtual reality development, computer animation, motion design, and game art, because the tool sets and industries are more amenable to AI outputs.

“In a lot of these courses, the AI-generated material is not the final output, but rather it’s being used in earlier phases like ideation,” Dakan said. “Rather than focusing on generating an AI output that you put out into the world, figuring out where AI can give you assistance in making your product better, whatever that is.”

By comparison, RISD and CMU have much longer histories of teaching AI in art classes.

When ARTnews asked several professors at CMU’s College of Fine Arts about the use of AI in classes, art professor Golan Levin emailed an extensive reply outlining the difference between early research at the university on AI in the 1980s and ’90s and today’s generative AI systems.

“I would say that there has been a clear interest and demonstrable effort at CMU, in the arts, to engage with new technologies for at least the past 40 years,” Levin wrote, noting AI had been “extensively integrated” into the college’s art courses going back as far as the 1980s.

CMU’s visual arts program has offered students an interdisciplinary concentration in Electronic and Time-Based art (computer art) since the late ’80s, but taught its first full-semester undergraduate course wholly dedicated to art and AI in the spring semester of 2018. Several alumni of Carnegie Mellon’s hybrid bachelor’s degree in computer science and art have also focused specifically on AI-based art, including multidisciplinary artist Joel Simon.

“Personally, I have been teaching computational and interactive new media art at CMU since 2004, and my courses have always included an AI component (though not necessarily a semester-long AI focus),” Levin wrote.

Clement Valla, RISD’s dean of Experimental and Foundation Studies (EFS), said the first studio class at RISD that taught a large language model—the type of machine learning that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google Gemini—was at least seven years ago. The art college, Valla said, takes an integrative approach to teaching students about earlier notions of AI and how it connects to the larger disciplines of art and design in fundamental ways, such as courses on the history of humans “seeing” through machines and the history of generative art.

“The idea of systems generating forms, that are more or less under human control, is actually a very ancient idea,” Valla said, noting that West African fractal patterns on rocks go back approximately 3,000 years.

RISD’s Computation, Technology and Culture (CTC) program, meanwhile, also teaches students about computation as an artistic and design medium rather than focusing on specific AI tools or software.

“What kind of inquiries or what kind of questions happen when artists and designers are thinking of something as their medium, rather than just a tool to implement possibly somebody else’s vision?” Valla said. “We’re trying to make artists and designers who understand computation as a medium in practice. We do a lot of computer programming, but we have a lot of students that maybe just work with systems, or maybe that work at that funny interface between the human and the computer.”

Educators at RISD, Carnegie Mellon and Ringling College told ARTnews it was important to make sure students understand how tools like ChatGPT, Adobe Firefly or Stable Diffusion are trained; the differences between the tools; what went into training them; as well as learning how to discern what they use an AI tool for or why they use it.

“The best place to use AI is earlier in the process,” Keith Roberson, a digital arts associate professor at Florida State University, told ARTnews. “Use these things to explore concepts more so than making things that are going to end up in the finished works. That’s a more useful way, and it’s just a way to put more thought into it.”

At Ringling, art students often use AI text tools to improve their artist statements or to get feedback on their work, explained Dakan, calling AI “a lifter” in areas where students lack certain skills.

Experts acknowledged to ARTnews the multiple sources of tension in teaching AI, including ongoing lawsuits over copyright and intellectual property; the gaps in datasets used for training large language models; as well as the negative effect on commercial and private commissions for a variety of artists.

For legal issues, Ringling explains to students they cannot copyright work that was made with AI, as well as their rights (or lack thereof) for outputs from different tools.

Roberson noted that many of the big complaints about AI are similar to past criticisms about the invention of photography. “We couldn’t trust images before, even with a camera,” he said, noting how cropping could also distort an image. “You can make a camera lie all day long. There’s hardly any new issues with AI that haven’t been there all along.”

CTC faculty at RISD also emphasize to students how these legal and ethical issues aren’t new by drawing attention to cases like Andy Warhol’s images on the Commodore Amiga computer or the history of music scores. “Tracing those through lines—that’s really important to the faculty rather than chasing the new thing, the new legal problem, and having to revise curriculum and syllabus every three years because of a company [like Midjourney or StabilityAI] we have no control over, no say in, decides to change its mind for whatever reason,” Valla said.

Leaving aside the challenges, there are multiple motivations for teaching students AI, according to CMU’s Levin.

“For artists to claim a seat at the table where technological agendas are set; to develop new forms of cultural expression through the use of new technologies; to explore the cultural potential and new aesthetics made possible by these technologies, and to learn the grain of this material; and to serve as a early warning system of the impact of these technologies on society, where others may not be as acutely sensitive or perceptive to these forces,” he said.

Still, Dakan knows this transition period in the art industry, with AI becoming an increasing presence in software and the daily workflows of artists, will be rocky. “I’m not here to say this is all going to be wonderful in the future,” he said. “I think it’s going to be rough for some people, but I think students who are prepared, artists who are prepared and engaged with the tools, will be in a better position to navigate that future than people who aren’t paying attention, right, who don’t know what it’s capable of. That’s our hope.”

This optimism extends to more ethical ways for student to engage with AI tools, like Spawning AI’s Source.Plus project, which uses nearly 40 million public domain images and images under a Creative Commons CC0 license.

Even with the growing enrollment for art classes teaching the fundamentals of AI, and inquiries from potential employers, there will be some students who complete Ringling’s new certificate who won’t integrate AI into all the creative work they’ll do, according to Dakan.

“I think for some of them it’ll give them the knowledge they need to say, ‘No, AI can’t do this for you.’,” he said. “I think the more common thing is most people are going to say, ‘Let me show you what I can do with help from AI.'”

Read more about “Artificial Intelligence and the Art World” here.

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

The Headlines

LEGAL AFFAIRS. On Tuesday, the United States charged the Lebanese art collector and dealer Nazem Ahmad with violating sanctions and laundering money in art and diamond deals, the New York Times reports. Ahmad, whose collection has included works by Pablo Picasso and Jean-Michel Basquiat, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2019 for allegedly providing financing for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which the U.S. regards as a terrorist organization. The dealer’s accountant was just arrested in the United Kingdom, which has also hit Ahmad with sanctions, the Guardian reports. He has not been arrested, and is believed to be outside the U.S. (The last post on his well-followed Instagram was about two weeks ago.) His daughter, Hind Ahmad, who is an art dealer, vigorously denied in an interview with the Times that her father is a Hezbollah financier, and he has rejected the claim in the past.

THE ANTIQUITIES FIELD. After being restored by specialists in the Czech Republic, 20 artifacts damaged by Islamic State militants will be returned to Syria next month, the AFP reports. The items include limestone funerary portraits from Palmyra and a gold-coated pin from around 1600–1200 B.C.E. The freshly repaired objects are currently on view at the National Museum in the capital city of Prague. More than 1,000 miles to the south, Greek police cuffed five people they accuse of operating a smuggling ring on the island of Crete. The officials said that the material recovered during the bust is worth more than €500,000 (about $547,000) and includes ancient coffins.

The Digest

Unionized custodians, groundskeepers, and movers at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence voted to end their two-week strike and approved a new contract that will see the majority of them receive raises of 15 to 20 percent. [The Boston Globe]

Customs officials in Switzerland appear to have withdrawn their claim that museums must pay duties on art that they have imported tax-free but not displayed. Earlier this year, institutions in the German-speaking part of the country received letters with that demand. The museums have maintained that they are shielded from such taxes. [Artnet News]

A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton measuring almost 13 feet tall sold for $6.1 million at auction at Koller in Zurich. The piece, which was actually composed of the bones of three different dinosaurs, was purchased by a private collector, but the sale’s auctioneer said he is certain that it will be shown publicly in the future. [AFP/The Guardian]

The next Lahore Biennale in Pakistan, which is scheduled for February, will be organized by John Tain, who is head of research at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. The previous edition occurred in 2020 with Hoor Al Qasimi, the director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, curating. [ArtReview]

Four finalists have been named for the 2023 Korea Artist Prize, which, for the first time, has been opened to artists of Korean descent working abroad. The quartet—Byungjun Kwon, Gala Porras-Kim, Kang Seung Lee, and Sojung Jun—will present work at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in South Korea. [Press Release/ArtDependence]

Using high-tech gradiometry tools, archaeologists have discovered the remains of an ancient Roman fortlet near Clydebank, Scotland. [BBC News]

The Kicker

A LIFE’S WORK. The legendary painter Frank Auerbach is still going strong at 91, working in his studio every single day, the New York Times reports. However, even after all those years, his lucid artworks never come easily. Making them involves “a lot of swearing, a lot of anger, a lot of moaning,” the artist told journalist Elizabeth Fullerton. “I start always in the hope of picking up my brushes, putting an amazing momentous image on the canvas, and finishing the painting—and it’s never happened yet.” Eventually, of course, he gets it done. Twenty of his portraits are now on view at Frankie Rossi Art Projects in London. [NYT]

Spencer Finch set out in a rowboat on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, last spring, inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s immersive experiment of trying to understand this place of natural beauty in its entirety. In 1846, Thoreau had surveyed the pond, popularly believed at the time to be bottomless, and found its deepest point to be 102 feet. Following in Thoreau’s wake, Finch spent three days on the water performing his own set of measurements.

He rowed while his assistant mapped their coordinates by GPS and used an electronic meter as well as a rope—as Thoreau had done—to take depth measurements. At each sounding point, Finch matched the water’s surface color—an array of yellows, browns, greens, blues, and grays depending on the depth, reflections, weather, hour, and vantage point—with a book of hundreds of watercolor samples.

Finch then created a kind of three-dimensional drawing titled Walden Pond (surface/depth), which he displayed last year in his exhibition “Fathom” at James Cohan Gallery in New York. He snaked the 120-foot measuring rope circuitously across the gallery floor to reflect the boat’s route on Walden Pond. The rope also served as an armature on which to pin 298 paper tags marked with the exact coordinates of each depth reading and a paint dab matching the color of the water at that location. “I was trying to explain the depth of the pond and the color of the pond,” says Finch. “At the same time, I was trying to capture the constant variability and the impossibility of making an objective measurement and finally being able to quantify something which is so beautiful and so elusive.”

Over the past two decades, the 51-year-old, Brooklyn-based artist has used scientific methodology to try to pin down the ineffable qualities of light and color, perception and memory, ultimately to expose how they fall short. “Doing a scientific experiment over and over has an analog in the way artists work, which is seriality,” Finch says. “You try to do something again and again to get closer to the essence. Because the experimenter’s perception is a little off, the subjective comes into it, which is fascinating to me. It’s about the attempt to represent something—and in the attempt is where there’s the humanness or poetry.”

Finch uses places of loaded significance in the collective cultural consciousness as his departure points, traveling to sites such as Sigmund Freud’s office in Vienna, the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, and Scotland’s Loch Ness to collect data—measuring the color and temperature of the light with a colorimeter or the wind with an anemometer, taking documentary photographs or matching colors to Pantone samples. He has done five projects based on trips to Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts—most recently recording the breeze blowing through her bedroom window and precisely re-creating it in intervals of a minute and half programmed on a household fan in the “Fathom” show.

“It’s me looking at the world through how I imagine Emily Dickinson looking at the world,” says Finch, whose demeanor is part mild-mannered professor, part fanciful dreamer. “She took things that the rest of us would ignore—something as simple as this breeze blowing through her window—as a springboard for a meditation on something much bigger.”

Finch is probably best known for his electric-light installations that mimic the quality of natural light. One of these is Eos (Dawn, Troy, 10/27/02), 2002, which attempts to reproduce the “rosy-fingered Dawn” that Achilles observed in Homer’s Iliad. As part of his research, Finch visited the ancient site of Troy (in present-day Turkey) and used his colorimeter to gauge the light at sunrise. “I wanted to measure the light because I was thinking that was the only thing that hadn’t changed since Homer’s time,” he says. Subsequently, on the ceiling of Postmasters Gallery in New York in 2002, the artist installed 79 fluorescent tubes wrapped with a combination of blue, violet, green, and pink filters emitting the same light reading as he had measured in Troy.

While Finch likes the purity in this piece of reducing a landscape to just its light conditions, his installations using electric lights have grown to be more visually elaborate. At James Cohan, where prices for his works range from $15,000 to $150,000, the artist revisited the rosy-fingered dawn in Shield of Achilles (Dawn, Troy, 10/27/02), 2013, adding stripes to his fluorescent tubes with theater gels in seven colors that radiate in a dynamic sunburst pattern on the wall. The work is about both the light it creates and the sculpture itself.

“Spencer touches on poetry and art history and history and science while he’s investigating the mechanics of perception,” says Susan Cross, who organized the 2007–8 survey “Spencer Finch: What Time Is It on the Sun?” at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. “His work is very visceral and people are probably transported subconsciously by the experience of the light or the feeling of the breeze to a place they remember.” Finch always uses matter-of-fact wall labels to note the location and time that each piece represents. The moment of understanding just what he’s attempted to capture—the distance in time and space he’s bridged—can bring both amazement and amusement. “He is attracted to the romance of that quest, but then he knows it’s sort of futile and absurd,” Cross adds.

Finch grew up in the suburbs of New Haven, Connecticut. His father was a chemist, his mother an elementary school teacher, and Finch’s early experiences with museums were in natural history ones, because of his parents’ interests. He studied comparative literature at Hamilton College in Upstate New York and thought he would become a teacher. His first involvement with art came during his junior year in college, when he studied in Japan and worked with a potter. Not long after graduating from Hamilton in 1985, Finch entered the M.F.A. ceramics program at the Rhode Island School of Design.

“At RISD, I was really exposed to art for the first time and understood what all these other ways of making art were,” says Finch, who quickly realized that clay was not his medium and migrated to the sculpture department. He moved to New York after finishing grad school in 1989 and got a job editing social-studies textbooks at McGraw-Hill while trying to make his way as an artist. Information the artist gleaned during his publishing jobs, which lasted until 2004, continues to appear in his work today. A map predicting the jet stream over North America, for instance, which he found while researching a book on weather, was the basis for a recent watercolor in the “Fathom” exhibition.

Finch remembers going to the Museum of Modern Art during his lunch hours and responding to the visual impact of works by Andy Warhol and Ad Reinhardt. “I had been doing work that was dry and conceptual,” he says. “I started really thinking about making things that were visually interesting.” He had his first solo exhibition in 1992 at Tomoko Liguori Gallery, which, Finch notes wryly, went out of business right after his show. In 1994, he began showing at Postmasters, where he was represented for 15 years. Upon being selected for the 2004 Whitney Biennial, he was finally able to quit his day job. After years of a slow-building career, he now has broad international representation at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, Lisson Gallery in London, Galerie Nordenhake in Stockholm and Berlin, and Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris.

One of Finch’s earliest pilgrimages to a location of significance was a trip to Rouen, France. Monet had painted the cathedral there serially to explore the effects of changing light and weather on its appearance. On arrival, Finch was crestfallen to discover that the cathedral’s facade was obscured by scaffolding. He retreated to his hotel room across the street and ended up painting a series of watercolors showing a patchwork of swatches that matched the color of every object in the room, including the pillowcase, the desk, and the bedspread.

The resulting triptych, Interior of Room 4, Hôtel de la Cathédrale, Rouen, May 18–22, 1996, morning effect, noon effect, evening effect (1995), shows how those colors varied at different times of day. “Up close, you could see I wrote in pencil underneath each swatch what it was, but when you pulled back it was this mosaic of color that becomes abstract,” Finch says. He thought of his piece as an inverse of how Monet’s Impressionistic strokes coalesce into the recognizable facade of the cathedral from a distance but melt into abstraction up close.

The next time Finch camped out in a motel room, it was intentional. Interested in the iconic landscape of the American West, he traveled to Monument Valley in Utah in 2007 to record the slowly fading light of a glorious sunset. He took light measurements both outdoors and indoors as the sun went down. But once he saw how the illumination reflected off the white wall in his motel room, he knew he’d found what he was looking for. “It was a very minor drama,” he says. “That’s the best—when you have the time to just watch the light change in your room.”

Back in his studio, he cut up thousands of film stills from John Ford’s 1956 western The Searchers, shot in Monument Valley, and measured the light’s color and intensity in each one. He then stitched together groupings that projected the same hue and brightness of each minute of the sunset he had witnessed in Utah. West (Sunset in My Motel Room, Monument Valley, January 26, 2007, 5:36–6:06 PM), first shown at Postmasters in 2007, is a grid of nine television screens cycling through stills that gradually fade to twilight by the end of half an hour.

Finch followed up his longtime interest in Monet with several visits to Giverny in France, where he felt he gained a new understanding of the artist. “I really had the sense of Monet creating this experimental laboratory for certain optical effects,” he says. “The whole purpose of this incredibly elaborate setup—the pond and flowers and gardens and trees—was to explore the transparency and reflectivity of the water.”

For Following Nature, a large-scale installation in the soaring entry pavilion of the Indianapolis Museum of Art last year, Finch created an abstraction of Monet’s garden. He affixed to the exterior glass wall a patchwork of filters in 37 hues of green, yellow, red, purple, and blue based on colors he had observed at Giverny and in Monet’s paintings. Dangling from the center of the space, a chandelier of nearly 200 glass panes with different percentages of reflectivity—some more transparent, some mirrorlike—moved gently and created a dazzling play of color and reflection and light. “The goal was to be somewhere between the pond and the painting,” says Finch, who did an earlier variation on this theme at RISD two years ago. “It has the artificiality of a painting but the sense of occupying space and constantly changing like the pond and the garden.”

These days, Finch is ever more in demand, with permanent installations recently completed at Washington University in Saint Louis and on the facade of the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, and another in the works for London’s Paddington Station. Through September 21, he has a solo exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate, England, where he is showing new sculptures that register the light of that seaside resort town.

This month, he is activating the atrium of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York with a colorful, reflective glass installation that references the library’s collection of medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts called Books of Hours. And for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, which was scheduled to open last month in Lower Manhattan, Finch created a fragile, fluttering mosaic of individual watercolors painted in 2,973 different shades of blue and attached to a monumental concrete wall. Titled Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning, the piece commemorates each of the victims, and together the watercolors become a picture of that morning’s intensely blue sky based on the artist’s own memory.

In his time away from the studio, Finch has become swept up in gardening at his cottage in Upstate New York. He recently planted an orchard there and dreams of having a berry farm. While he expresses discomfort with what he calls the “cliché” of the artist retreating to the countryside, his pleasure in nurturing color and variety in his garden seems entirely consistent with his image of nature as a studio and a laboratory.

“One of the great things about working with light analytically is I feel on a day-to-day basis I see the world differently,” says Finch. “I’m more sensitive to weather changes and when weird clouds come in—or when the sun is going down and you get these extreme shifts in the color of light. There are certain days when you look at a tree or a flower and it’s just more profound.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 78 under the title “Follow the Light.”

A murky black rectangle glistens and undulates on the screen of Shahzia Sikander’s laptop as the artist shows a visitor to her New York studio a passage from her animation in progress.

Gradually, the field seems to disintegrate into a dense accumulation of irregular black marks that vanish one by one. Viewers familiar with Sikander’s work may recognize that these seemingly abstract black shapes are in fact precise renderings of the stylized hairdo of the Gopi women—worshippers of the Hindu god Krishna, whom Sikander often depicted in her miniature paintings from the 1990s. The hairdos have reappeared, disembodied, in many of the animations that set her repertoire of painted imagery in motion, including SpiNN (2003), in which the hair rises from the women’s disappearing bodies and takes flight in a menacing swarm that invades an imperial Mughal court.

“I found the hair had this wonderful silhouette that, if you turned it around, could look like bats or birds—that was a very exciting moment in animation for me,” says Sikander. She used this silhouette to create the floating, oily ground in the large-scale projection she was preparing for the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates (on view through May 13).

“I’m still going to the same image but trying to find another way to transform it. I’m not trying to hide where they come from,” she says of the hair shapes, “but they need not be associated with their source. I’m interested conceptually in the distance between the translation and the original.”

All of Sikander’s works, from her small drawings to her room-scale painting installations to her giant animated videos, stem from her study of traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting in her native Pakistan in the late 1980s. “It was a very independent choice—of examining a style, school, genre, and developing a relationship, a language, a dialogue with it,” says Sikander, who was attracted to the seductive beauty of the stylized gemlike miniatures and fascinated by the insularity and seeming immunity to translation of the forms.

Since moving to the United States in 1992, Sikander, 44, has been exploring ways to stretch and pull apart the vocabulary of miniature painting in different media and at different scales, creating a hybrid imagery that blurs such polarities as Hindu and Muslim, traditional and contemporary, East and West, representation and abstraction. Fundamental to the work is the fluidity with which Sikander shifts perception and challenges our ways of seeing.

In the 2004 animation Pursuit Curve, for instance, a large flowerlike form starts to agitate and break apart, its fluttering reddish parts evoking insects or feathers. Gradually the shapes settle as turbans on a cluster of bearded men. “It’s an image which is already loaded,” says Sikander of the turbans. “It’s masculine. It’s got race and religion. When it’s flapping around, it’s like butterflies and fragile, and then it fits on and all you see is turban. I like that there are multiple reads and facets to a situation, and that the dissociation can be that stark.”

“Shahzia mixes history, personal feelings and experiences, and very contemporary art making—firing on all cylinders at the same time—in her masterfully crafted works,” says Ian Berry, director of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery in Saratoga Springs, New York, who in 2004 organized a large survey of her work there that traveled to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. “The artwork can respond to people’s desires to think about politics and biography, not just of Shahzia’s but of their own. And then other people can come to it and respond entirely to line, form, color, movement, and perspective, and the creative things Shahzia brings to that.”

The Tang is one of many museums to host solo exhibitions, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., in 1999. Sikander was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2006. Today, she is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York, where her works sell for up to $125,000.

Sikander grew up in Lahore, in a house adjoining those of her grandfather and aunts and uncles. “I have a very supportive and educated family with strong women—writers, academics, human-rights activists,” she says. She always drew as a child and happily did all the diagrams for her cousins’ science homework. (The nuns at her Catholic school kept some of her illuminated notebooks.) Her parents encouraged her to apply to the National College of Arts.

There, in 1988, Sikander attended a lecture on miniature paintings given by a visiting curator from the Victoria and Albert Museum, an experience she describes as life changing. Familiar only with the kitschy creations sold to tourists, she was stunned by the “immense range and visual connections” of the images shown by the lecturer. “I felt potential,” she says.

Her idea was to explore personal imagery within the thematic guise of miniature painting, at a time when young people in Pakistan, under Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime, had to behave very discreetly in public. She made the decision to major in miniature painting, working with only one other student under the strict methodology of the master teacher.

“It was a big thing to say, ‘I’m going to embrace something that’s already saddled with technique and ritual and a kind of copying and a certain language,’” says Sikander, who had to spend an entire year working just in ink before she was allowed to use color.

“I submitted myself to that,” she says. For four years she worked 18-hour days, almost always alone, to master the art of traditional miniature painting, learning how to apply layers of paint to build up luminous surfaces. Her final piece was The Scroll (1991–92), about a foot high and more than five feet long, in which she mapped out the rooms in her family home, using the genre conventions of stacking flattened-out spaces, and embellishing the architecture and the borders of the piece with painstaking pattern and detail. “You had to play by those rules,” Sikander says.

A recurring figure in the scroll is a young woman with long black hair, dressed in white, always painted from behind so that her face is not visible. She passes almost like an apparition through rooms filled with activity. At the end, she is seen at an easel painting herself. “She is an observer, who is not necessarily comfortable in that space,” says Sikander. “I left soon after.”

In 1992, after graduating, Sikander was invited to install her paintings for one day at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, D.C. She flew on a standby ticket, carrying her miniature paintings in her suitcase, and decided to stay. Paintings in tow, she toured graduate schools all over the country, and in 1993, she enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

At RISD, Sikander explored a new kind of freedom and simplification in her work. “I felt the work should be more about drawing,” she says. She experimented with quick gestures in ink on tissue paper and followed the suggestions that arose from the marks. Out of that process she developed a vocabulary of images, including a silhouette of a female body without head or arms, with tendrils flowing from her legs.

“It was about a form afloat and uprooted,” says Sikander, who felt a kinship with Ana Mendieta’s bodyworks. Her signature nomadic silhouette has reappeared in many finished works, sometimes like a specter feminizing the head of a Mughal courtier, sometimes joined with the multi-armed Hindu goddess brandishing an array of weapons and wearing a veil, like a cross-cultural female superhero.

After graduating from RISD in 1995, Sikander spent two years in the Core Residency Program at the Glassell School of Art in Houston. There she began to play with radical shifts of scale. “It was breaking out of the preciousness around my process and testing the viability of a form,” she says of enlarging an image from ten inches to ten feet, and “seeing whether it gains more momentum or maybe becomes more confrontational.”

Sikander’s breakout came in 1997, when she moved to New York and her paintings were shown at the Drawing Center and in the Whitney Biennial. “It was a really interesting time in the U.S. for me, before September 11, when things were looking outward more,” she says.

During the next few years she received a flurry of invitations to do site-specific work around the country. At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, she worked alongside Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen on her own huge ephemeral mural, which absorbed some of those artists’ street-art practices. At various places, including the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis in 1998 and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art in 2001, she moved her wall installations into three dimensions by hanging layers of translucent tissue paper embellished with images, sometimes several feet deep, in front of the mural, thus veiling or blurring its appearance as viewers moved through the space.

“I hate the word, but there was a prevailing ‘multiculturalism’ going on in the 1990s,” she says. “That timing was personally wonderful because there was such a focus on exploring identity.” That focus helped bring attention to her paintings early on, but it eventually became a limitation, particularly in the post–September 11 climate, when her work was seen primarily through the lens of her identity as a Pakistani and a Muslim woman.

“I strive for the open-ended,” Sikander says. She has an acute understanding of the complex relationship between her homeland and her adopted country, where she has settled with her husband, who is a chemist, and their young son. While Sikander’s work isn’t overtly political, the instability and flux of her imagery, which often incorporates various kinds of weaponry and martial music, in some way reflects the cultural tensions and misrepresentations between East and West, as well as the potential for transformation.

Sikander made her first animation, a natural extension of her interest in layering, during a 2001 residency at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas. She was working on a miniature painting and decided to scan in Photoshop each change she made to document the metamorphosis of the work. She hung the painting facing its looped animated version, which would perfectly mirror the painting for a fleeting second, in an installation called Intimacy.

“The foundation of my animations and all my work is drawing,” says Sikander, who continues to generate her projections from scans of drawn imagery. “The computer is storing and allowing me to move the layers around with amazing freedom and flexibility. The digital space really lets me push the movement.”

These days, she is caught up in the possibilities of projection as an immersive theater of light and shadow and sound. Currently, her giant projection that evokes the paradox of Shangri La is on view in “Doris Duke’s Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape, and Islamic Art” at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach (through July 14). Last November, her animated video The Last Post (2010) filled the courtyard between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The piece deals with the British involvement in the opium trade with China.

“I was interested in the colonial lens, and the opium-based trade to China was happening by using India,” says Sikander, who collaborated with the Shanghai-born composer Du Yun on the dissonant score melding haunting voices with the sounds of static and explosions. Personally, Sikander has a soft spot for older Pakistani music and cheesy Bollywood songs. In her 2009 video Bending the Barrels, a Pakistani military marching band plays those songs interspersed with martial music.

Last November, Sikander was one of five artists (the others were Carrie Mae Weems, Cai Guo-Qiang, Kiki Smith, and Jeff Koons) to receive the inaugural Medal of Arts from the State Department through its Art in Embassies program. “For me, what they were recognizing was perhaps opening up the perception of the U.S.,” says Sikander. She is currently working with the program on a permanent piece for a new embassy under construction in Islamabad.

“The U.S. Embassy in Pakistan is going to be much more of a fortress than in some other countries,” the artist says, noting that embassy exhibitions are typically accessible only to the people who can enter the building. “For me, it’s a big deal to really push this boundary and make work that is going to be accessible to the outside space and be participatory as well as transparent.”

Sikander understands that she will face strong anti-American sentiment when she returns to Pakistan next year to install the piece. “They don’t understand why you are choosing to live here,” she says. “It can get very personal.”

Even as she is constantly expanding the directions taken with her world of imagery, she always returns to the intimate space of the miniature. “To me, the tenacity and simplicity of drawing is really the anchor,” she says. “It goes forward and back, sideways and back. I’m very cyclical.”

Hilarie M. Sheets is a contributing editor of ARTnews.

The vast museum is empty and silent, save the slow tinkling of piano keys and the sound of water gurgling in an unseen fountain. Every now and then mechanical jellyfish-like creatures billow by with a gentle wheeze. They are pods, and disoriented visitors might do well to latch on to one for a ride, toward the open museum atrium that looks like nothing so much as giant dendrites.

That ride, like the entire visit and the pods themselves, is virtual. Travelers make their way there by computers typing www.adobemuseum.com into their browsers, from anywhere in the world.

But the new Adobe Museum of Digital Media does have a real architect, Italian designer Filippo Innocenti. He conceived the open ovoid shapes of the virtual base, as well as three 50-story-high palm frond—like white towers to archive exhibitions yet to happen. A disembodied female voice on the website informs us the structure would be roughly 620,000 square feet, if realized. But the building will, of course, never be constructed: it is a place-holder for the mental space a museum might occupy.

Adobe, the 28-year-old American software company, decided to open an online museum at the suggestion of its advertising agency, San Francisco—based Goodby Silverstein & Partners. Agency founding partner Rich Silverstein is the “museum director.” It might all seem like a marketing stunt, except for the fact that Adobe has enlisted some art-world heavyweights to help lend the project legitimacy. Adobe does not have an official collection in its real-world office, nor will it disclose costs for its online museum. (The company’s total revenues for 2009 were nearly $3 billion.) Through March 2011, since its opening the previous October, 291,000 unique visitors had clicked through the museum, which had more than 12,600 members.

The debut exhibition is Tony Oursler’s “Valley.” Oursler worked closely on the commission with the Adobe Museum’s curator, Tom Eccles, the executive director of Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and the former director of the Public Art Fund. Eccles does double duty as the “guide” character within Oursler’s piece for the site.

“Valley” takes shape as a lonely red icon in a virtual gallery near the atrium, accompanied by one of Oursler’s familiar bulbous bloodshot animatronic eyes. Here, of course, the eye is not animatronic but purely digital. It takes the traveler first inside a bright red mouth, and then into a dark screen with aqua-green illustrations and handwritten titles for different virtual zones, including “Uncanny Valley,” “Fantasy,” “Experimental,” and “Dark Side.”

A traveler clicks on one of the sketches and confronts moving images of a beautiful woman and a schlumpy man, a hand writing inside a diamond, a magnifying glass, or a writhing placental sac, for example. The guide, a face in a bubble you can click on again and again—actually Eccles in facepaint— utters cryptic phrases such as “Rotten, take it apart” or “Slow it down, reverse it.”

Oursler’s piece effectively conveys the “rabbit hole” feeling of a bad web trip, where a single search leads to one diabolical and confusing place after another. The different zones “came out of a conversation about how we use the Internet, how the computer and digital world is somehow a reflection of ourselves,” says Eccles. “The mouse is in a way a prosthetic.” In its limited interactivity, “Valley” also feels, perhaps deliberately, a bit old-fashioned.

“Valley” was recently joined by a more direct lecture, on life and crafts, by artist-designer and Rhode Island School of Design president John Maeda, in the vein of a multimedia TED talk (the free online series of lectures). Next up will be a project by Japanese artist Mariko Mori.

“We’re essentially inventing a new kind of art experience,” Adobe’s senior vice president of global marketing, Ann Lewnes, wrote in an e-mail. “This means confronting challenges about how museum visitors will experience the virtual space. We had to think about giving visitors reference points so they don’t get lost.” The pods were one solution.

The Adobe Museum is hardly the first effort by an institution to maximize the potential of art online. The Whitney and Guggenheim museums, as well as the Dia Art Foundation and rhizome.org, initiated web commissions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, building substantial online infrastructure. Their efforts then slowed down or stopped altogether, but some, such as the Whitney and Dia, have restarted their commissioning of artists’ web projects over the past two years.

Still, the museum is one of the more recent and prominent endeavors to rethink how artists can create affecting esthetic experiences for people sitting at their computers. With tapping fingers and eyes as wide and potentially bloodshot as Oursler’s image, armchair travelers can find themselves inside an artist’s vision in a way that can be more absorptive than the din of a gallery. Currently, the experience is without a social component, although online talks and performances are planned. It’s as if it may take the power of modern technology to restore to us the contemplative pleasures of art, namely, slowness, silence, and solitude.

Carly Berwick is a contributing editor of ARTnews.

In Huma Bhabha’s sculpture My Skull Is Too Small (2009), featured in this spring’s Whitney Biennial, two figures are poised at either end of a narrow wooden pedestal. One is masklike, with three sets of apertures that seem to stare from a crumbling clay face; the other is more like a totem, with a hand sprouting from the top of a charred blocky form. Although they look like archeological relics, these constructions are assembled from modern materials such as Styrofoam, aluminum, and chicken wire.

“I think of it as a boat, with these two figures going to the other side,” says Bhabha, 48, the diminutive Pakistani-born artist. She is sitting in her Poughkeepsie, New York, studio, near a sculpture of a giant finger on a pedestal and piles of wood scraps. “It has a relationship to the Raft of the Medusa in idea, and even physically,” she says, referring to Théodore Géricault’s painting memorializing shipwrecked passengers and crew struggling between death and survival. Her wooden “boat,” smooth as a Donald Judd box yet marked up with graffiti, could also suggest a packing crate, a coffin, or a plinth for a monument. Like all of her fragmented figurative sculptures, which come out of the tradition of assemblage, this one evokes the wounded and war torn. Bhabha has erected a decidedly antiheroic monument to human frailty.

“It’s a piece about aging to a certain degree,” says Gary Carrion-Murayari, cocurator of the biennial with Francesco Bonami. “There’s this sense of the body under duress, and there’s the hand that emerges, which you can read as either anguish or hopefulness. It’s the ambiguity that’s really interesting. She calls forth a lot of evocative images in her sculptures, but it’s not heavy handed.”

Independent curator Bob Nickas knew Bhabha’s work from group shows in the ’90s, but he saw it in a new light after her first New York solo show, at ATM Gallery in 2004. “Certain work is only going to really resonate in a certain moment, and in a time of war you feel all those cracks and fissures and the pathos of Huma’s work,” says Nickas. “She’s lived here a long time, but she’s from a place that’s in increasing turmoil. It’s not just Pakistan; it’s a certain part of the world, a certain reality. That’s always been reflected in her work. She’s really on the cusp of this political-poetical object.”

As a curator of the 2005 edition of “Greater New York,” Nickas chose Bhabha for the show, and in 2006 he brought Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry and Salon 94 owner Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, among others, to see her second exhibition at ATM. Salon 94 now corepresents Bhabha, whose sculptures sell for between $20,000 and $65,000. In November, she will present her new sculpture at Salon 94, with a concurrent exhibition of large-scale photogravures at Peter Blum Gallery in New York. She is also one of several artists mining the lineage of figurative sculpture included in the show “Statuesque,” organized by the Public Art Fund, at City Hall Park in New York through December 3. Her bronze seated figure there, The Orientalist (2007), is described as “an Egyptian pharaoh meets Mad Max” by director Nicholas Baume.

Bhabha, who was born and raised in Karachi, never studied sculpture. She did, however, paint and draw as a child, encouraged by her mother, a talented amateur artist who always had art books in the house. Intent on going to art school but with few options close to home, Bhabha moved to the United States when she was 19 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design. It turned out to be a good fit. She studied printmaking and painting there, graduating in 1985. After returning to Karachi and getting a visa, Bhabha came back to the United States to earn her master’s degree in art at Columbia University. There, she met her husband, the artist Jason Fox, and graduated in 1989. She’s been based in New York ever since, although she returns regularly to Pakistan.

While at Columbia, Bhabha says, she was influenced by Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray; she began adding collage to canvas and pieces of wood, creating relief-like constructions. After graduating, she rented a small studio downtown, abandoned painting, and started experimenting with found and bought objects, including feathers and Styrofoam, which she affixed to fabric. “I was watching a lot of horror and science fiction,” says Bhabha, who was particularly influenced by David Cronenberg’s early films. “I liked the creatures and raw look of the special effects. The idea of puppets and the element of mutation became very much a part of my work.” Over the next decade, she showed her figurative forms, often covered with fabric and painted over with enamel, in several group shows at Feature in New York, among other venues, and had one solo show at Kim Light Gallery in Los Angeles in 1993. Yet she felt her work was largely under the radar.

The year 2002 was a turning point for Bhabha. She and Fox moved from Manhattan to a renovated building in downtown Poughkeepsie, an hour and a half outside the city, so they could have more room to work. (She still uses junk that she salvaged from the landlord as he was fixing up other apartments in the building.) With the luxury of space, she began making larger, human-size works. “Maybe as a result of working for so long in a really modest, intimate scale,” says Nickas, “when she scaled up, she ended up having a very good eye for detail.”

Bhabha also figured out how to build solid armatures so her figures could stand, after a decade of making sculpture that was largely reclining. That came in part from her day job working for a taxidermist in the nearby town of Rhinebeck, where big-game hunters would bring animals such as buffalos, baboons, and antelopes to be preserved as trophies. “I learned a lot about how to attach things and how to make them strong,” says Bhabha, who worked on finishing the animals after they had been stuffed and also made elaborate dioramas. “My own work got a little bolder.”

That same year, she took a formative trip to Mexico, where she was introduced to clay. Bhabha didn’t know how to work with the material and didn’t want to have to fire it, so she decided to experiment with making a figure out of air-dry clay. She completed two large hands first, but was struggling with the bulk of the body, which she covered each night with a black plastic garbage bag to keep it moist. At some point she realized this large mass wrapped in black with two hands emerging from it was already a figure, and she decided to keep it in this raw form. “It looked like someone kneeling down in a praying position,” says Bhabha. “It also functioned as a body bag. That was when the war had started and a lot of people were, and are still, dying in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Bhabha liked the way it looked just lying on a table, and she exhibited it that way at Momenta Art in Brooklyn in 2002. She reworked the piece at a larger scale on a white plinth, with a trail of rubble coming out the back, and presented it in the “Greater New York” show, after which she was commissioned by the Saatchi Gallery in London to create another. “The piece is a monument to all victims—the men, women, and children who die every day,” she says.

Clay continues to play a prominent role in her sculptures, pressed into chicken wire to form a kind of skin or modeled into body parts to animate stacked pieces of wood and Styrofoam. “As soon as you put the clay on, this thing is just alive. It’s constantly looking at you,” says Bhabha, who cites Rodin and Giacometti as important influences. The stylized, archaic posture of her standing figures calls to mind the Greek kouroi as well as Indian and Egyptian sculptures, and their primitive expressions nod to African art and Picasso. “I think it all looks beautiful together,” says Bhabha, who also likes to incorporate futuristic elements. She is a huge fan of science fiction and watches a lot of movies and television in the relative isolation of Poughkeepsie, and she listens to rock and reggae on the radio. “Art should be entertaining on a certain level, which has a lot to do with the grotesque and funny faces.” Indeed, beneath the raw brutalism of her work is a gritty humor. In her 2008 piece Bumps in the Road, for instance, a giant decapitated head sits on a platform next to two disembodied wooden legs that look like an old mismatched couple.

Bhabha likes to summon the idea of the sarcophagus. “A lot of sculpture is made for religious or funerary reasons, and I’m drawn to these kinds of objects,” she says. Her first version of a sarcophagus was Cargo Tomb (2005), a small horizontal figure with clasped hands lying on a plank. A spill of shiny white enamel over its clay face emphasizes its classic Egyptian profile. Yet viewed from behind, it reveals itself to be two-faced, like so many of Bhabha’s works, with the wrinkly-looking gray clay morphing into an elephant head with a horn jutting out. “I like one thing leading into another,” says Bhabha. “It starts to look like cargo and also like what would be in a tomb.”

The cinematic quality in her work is more pronounced in her photogravures, which she began making several years ago at the invitation of Peter Blum, who showed her first series in 2007. She began by taking photographs in and near Karachi, a flat landscape at the edge of the Arabian Sea. “There is a lot of construction in Karachi that is never completed and is covered in dust and sand,” says Bhabha, who focused on the foundations of unfinished houses as well as the desert landscape at the beach. She blew up the plates and, using dark atmospheric washes of black ink, inserted imaginary monuments on those plinths and stretches of scrappy terrain.

Bhabha has photographed her own sculptures as well—including her praying figure and her two cracked clay feet—set within the desert landscape like actors on location. Shot from a low vantage point, the feet assume a monumental scale even though they are only life-size in reality. Other people pointed out to Bhabha the relationship between that photo and Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” whose line “two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert” refers to what remains of a king of a fallen empire. Bhabha hadn’t known the poem when making the piece, but she happily accepted it as part of the meaning. “I don’t start out trying to tell a story about something specific,” she says. “A lot of it is an intuitive response to the materials, what works, what doesn’t work. But if certain things begin to look like something or allude to political things, I let it be. When that happens, it’s good.”

Hilarie M. Sheets is a contributing editor of ARTnews.