Drawing on the museum’s Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, the current exhibition at the Zimmerli Art Museum proposes a selection of works from the 1960s through the early 1990s that navigates the porous boundaries between “official” and “unofficial” art.

 

Far from the image of the conceptual artist (who, after WWII, called his works Concetto Spaziale), swiftly slashing the canvas while keeping his hands clean, the exhibition of Lucio Fontana’s sculpture at Hauser & Wirth shows how the Italo-Argentinian artist handled space throughout his forty-year career, from the late 1920s to his death in 1968.

The exhibition currently on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see a gathering of 25 pictures by Albert Pinkham Ryder and related works by modern and contemporary artists.

A major figure in African-American art, Melvin Edwards (b. 1937) started as a sculptor in the early 1960s in Los Angeles before moving to New York in 1967. Known for the welded steel “Lynch Fragments,” an ongoing series that he started in 1963, Edwards’s work addresses his personal or historical experiences.

When artists speak of their peers, they reveal something about their own practices and aspirations: the longing for a kindred spirit or for what they are not and maybe wish to be.