56 Highlights East
Southwest
Richard Haas: Circles in Space Hudson River Museum 511 Warburton Avenue, Yonkers, NY 10701
The Architect’s Newspaper
Open through January 9, 2022
2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape/ A Possible Horizon Various sites in San Antonio and Houston
September 1, 2021–January 31, 2022
RICHARD HA AS/COURTESY VAGA AT ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIET Y, NY
The thematic material mined by Circles in Space is vast, spanning patternly abstraction and scholarly color theory to the esoteric geometric structure of the cosmos. Haas, who turns 85 in August, is best known for his larger-than-life realist murals, which make much of classical architectural motifs. But his latest work, small studies amassed in isolation over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, betrays a more elemental impetus. The leitmotif is the circle, which Haas traces to the “hundreds of circular irrigation wells” glimpsed on cross-country flights that “[cause] one to view
Earth as an endless sea of circular patterns as far as the eye can see,” he writes. The exhibit’s organizers draw comparisons to the late work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who prized concentric geometries in his final years and for whom Haas worked as a teenager; Wassily Kandinsky and Robert and Sonia Delaunay also get mentions. Ultimately, it is to the cosmic dimension that the show turns, and not for nothing: it prefigured the reopening of the Hudson River Museum’s beloved planetarium in mid-July, after having been closed to the public for more than a year. Keren Dillard
West
On September 1, Texas nonprofit Big Medium will launch the seventh edition of the Texas Biennial under the curatorial guidance of Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza. But rather than concentrating the exhibition within a single location or even city, the organizers have opted for a more diffuse approach, fanning out the programming across five museums in San Antonio and Houston (including the David Adjaye–designed Ruby City). Boasting the participation of 51 artists,
A New Landscape/A Possible Horizon will showcase an eclectic mix of work, ranging from objects and performance to activism, inspired by Texas’s history and future. The project’s ample, regional scope, Garza and Dennis explained, is partially a response to the experience of the pandemic, which forced them to coordinate the event and its participants “via Zoom, FaceTime, email, phone, and text.” Keren Dillard
West
Tatiana Bilbao Estudio: Architecture from the Outside In SFMOMA 151 3rd Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
TE X AS BIENNIAL
Open through February 21, 2022
Veil Craft Craft Contemporary 5814 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Open through September 12, 2021
K ATHERINE DU TIEL /COURTESY TATIANA BILBAO ESTUDIO
The central peg of Tatiana Bilbao Estudio: Architecture from the Outside In at the San Francisco Museum of Art is a master plan for the city’s Hunters Point neighborhood. The proposal is premised on rehabilitating an erstwhile power station—the last of a complex that closed in 2007, in response to pressure from activists—and incorporating it into the surrounding community. In the whimsical but demonstrative concept drawings, a riotous
mix of housing, gardens, and public spaces for gathering struggle to congeal into a vision of community empowerment. This is the cityas-a-process, a theme that runs throughout the work of Bilbao’s Mexico City–based architecture office. It also informs the titular “outside in” design methodology, whose precise meaning is elusive, but which suggests a reflexive understanding of site, context, and the density of urban life. Keren Dillard
COURTESY FIGURE
Veil Craft, the latest offering from Materials & Applications (M&A), picks up more or less where the Los Angeles gallery left off. After pausing its in-person programming for more than a year, M&A partnered with neighboring institution Craft Contemporary for this breezy summer installation. Nestled within the Craft’s courtyard, Veil Craft repurposes so-called construction textiles—multicolored
tarps and netting used to mark off building works—as a way of marking space (and scrambling perceptions of the architectural object in the process). The result is dynamic and welcoming, offering a shady respite from the hot summer sun where people—Angelenos—might gather “in conversation about Los Angeles’s material culture.” Keren Dillard
