The Brooklyn Rail

A series of clay spheres lay scattered indoors and outdoors at the Harvard Art Museums. Sculpted in various sizes, two of the fourteen handmade works are placed within the galleries, while the rest are installed outside, marking the museums’ first-ever presentation of art on the property’s Broadway Terrace. Upon arrival, viewers may wonder whether these large-scale works have been situated haphazardly—but they’ll soon realize their placement is intentional.

These forms are the creations of Mexico City-based artist Bosco Sodi (b. 1970), who leaves most of his paintings and sculptures untitled, with the aim of focusing on each work’s immediate existence. He prioritizes the crude yet emotive use of raw materials, transcending conceptual barriers to stimulate a spiritual connection via hand-shaped clay. The artist’s output may seem otherworldly, but ultimately, his works are evocative of ancient times. Sodi’s spheres feature cracks and imperfections, discolorations, and clear signs of exposure to the elements, yet they are beautiful, inspired, and individual.

This site-specific installation, Origen, on view since May 2023, will close on June 9, 2024, giving viewers ample opportunity to sit in Sodi’s space of contemplation: a lovely precursor to navigating the museums’ Chinese funerary and Buddhist displays. Audiences will note that Sodi’s practice examines the earth’s most basic shapes and forms, blending traditions like sculpture with contemporary minimalism to promote reflection. The artist leverages longstanding Zapotec techniques from his native Mexico, working with Oaxacan artisans to source and sculpt his clay. Each large-scale sphere is laid to dry for up to eight months, and only then fired in a beachfront kiln just steps from the Pacific Ocean. “The crust of the earth is a vast museum,” wrote Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species (published in 1859), and so too are the forms Sodi creates. Representative of the planets—of the elements, even—the spheres are natural wonders that have emerged like apparitions in modern times.

The terracotta spheres born from Sodi’s process—a methodology that has existed in Oaxaca for centuries—underscore the effects of nature, unveiling the harshness of the sun, the salty sea air, and the heat of fire. Each sphere is delicate yet durable and exposed to extreme conditions such that only the strongest survive. Installed outdoors on the Broadway Terrace, Untitled (2020) features subtle color variations along the side, brown-orange undertones marked with black and gray. The clay sphere measures approximately 30 × 28 × 28 inches; subtly imposing, it closely resembles the earth’s crust. A second work, Untitled (2021), is smaller, standing at roughly 23 × 22 × 22 inches, with significantly deeper cracks than the former, yet the imperfections seem intentional—the indentations coming together in a manner that fuses the clay. These lines run both horizontally and vertically; it’s as though Sodi has, unintentionally, created a map on the surface of the clay, the boundaries meandering yet stark. “One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die,” continued Darwin in On the Origin of Species. The spheres that comprise Origen are among the most powerful of Sodi’s works; they’ve persisted through years of hardening, baking, and transportation, and so they will remain archival despite their mutability.

Not all of the artist’s spheres are terracotta, or at least not entirely. For the first time in a U.S. installation of Sodi’s work, the artist has unveiled three clay spheres glazed in 17-karat gold, a glistening film casting a sheen atop the clay. Placed outside and inside the museums, these reflective spheres offer a seamless transition to the Buddhist figures in Gallery 1610. Audiences inherently follow these spheres into the gallery, organically navigating the sculptures as they experience the museums’ spaces. Measuring approximately 28 × 28 × 28 inches, Untitled (2023) is the largest of the gold-toned works, offering the same signs of wear—cracks and indentations—as its predecessors, all while beckoning to the viewer through a mirror of sorts; here members of the public can examine their reflections.

The exhibition name Origen translates to “source” in Spanish, asking viewers to trace their connections with the world back to their beginnings. These connections may speak to material objects or to the body—to the earth or to the source of the human species. In this same vein, Sodi’s work makes audiences reevaluate their environment; his 14 spheres are so grounded in the museum context that one might conclude they are a part of the property’s original architecture. Reframing the intangible through tangible, earthly materials, Sodi encourages audiences to experience Origen at the very source. The site-specific installation is curated by Mary Schneider Enriquez, the Houghton Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums.