The American-born, Mexico-based sculptor, who also works in wood and bronze, has long been celebrated for his distinct sculptural works that appear in the permanent collections of LACMA and the Palm Springs Art Museum. Psychologically charged, emitting a life force all of their own, they evoke the presence of archaic monuments.

This week, audiences have one last chance to catch Allen’s most recent show, "Alma Allen," at Kasmin's West 27th Street location in New York. While not exactly ancient,

Congratulations on your recent Grammy win! How does it feel to have won for your first nomination?

It means the world to me. Just to be nominated was amazing, and then to win — I honestly still can’t believe it. It’s one of those dreams you have as a kid that seems as impossible as going to the moon or becoming a princess. It’s really, really special, especially since I started putting out music quite recently and I’m still young. Even just to be at the ceremony was incredible — I mean, I got t

Tell me about your latest record, Big Sigh.

I took a small break from songwriting when the pandemic first hit and then found it really hard to get back into writing and being creative. It's like any muscle that you've got to keep flexing it or it's going to get unfit. Big Sigh took ages to write, and it took a long time to record in the studio; every aspect of it felt quite laborious. There wasn't the sense that it was like the easy, fun, kind of speedy records that I've made previously, but it

Nari Ward loves objects. Many people love objects — shoes, books, chairs, mugs with their children’s faces on them, etc. — but Ward thinks about things a little differently. For him, the object is not an artifact of life but life itself: it is something to be held, treated with care, respected. His work, which spans the realms of sculpture, installation, video, and drawing, insists on this care as much as it wrestles with another, separate desire: to burn it all down. These impulses are not entirely different; rather, they represent a deep and enmeshed relationship to the general bric-a-brac and cacophony of stuff that populates our lives. Each and every room, whether real or imagined, is filled to the brim with items that signify empires crumbled and pasts abandoned. For Ward, these items speak, dance, engage in secret affairs of their own. Even the mugs with the faces.

Eun-Me Ahn’s distinct choreographic worlds are explosions of technicolor fantasies made real. Born in Korea in 1963, she studied contemporary dance at Ehwa Womans University before founding her own troupe, Ahn Eun-Me Company, in 1988. In 1991, Ahn moved to New York to study at the Tisch School of the Arts, remaining in the city for ten years. A decade later, she returned to Korea and set forth establishing her own unique choreographic and performance practice. An outpouring of works followed, th

Lydia Abarca was born in New York in 1951. She studied ballet at the Juilliard School and the Harkness School before attending Fordham University, where she was discovered by Arthur Mitchell and was invited to join his Dance Theatre of Harlem as one of its founding members. By nineteen, she was dancing principal roles in the company—her signature part was the central pas de deux in George Balanchine’s Agon—and serving as its unofficial spokeswoman. Her beauty, determination, and outstanding clas

To begin her creative process, the legendary German choreographer Pina Bausch often asked her dancers questions. These questions—and further, the thoughts and deeper rumblings they provoked in the dancers—then formed the basis for many of her pieces. Bausch was typically concerned with the emotional and psychological charge of the bodies she choreographed on, and no piece showcases this more than her 1982 masterwork “Nelken.” Premiered eight years before the reunification of Germany, and haunted by other atrocities of that country’s not-so-distant past, “Nelken” does not escape shades of brutality; still, its primary concern seems to lie in the various ways our closest relationships can provide comfort. How, Bausch seems to ask, can we care for each other despite the horrors?

Another exhibit, “Kolyska,” was held this past June—July at the Kurt Muhlenhaupt Museum in Kreuzberg. Curated by UCC member Sofia Golubeva and featuring the work of Anastasiia and other young Ukrainian artists, it played upon the multiple definitions of the Ukrainian word “Колиска” (“Kolyska”). Meaning a swing, a baby’s crib, or “motherland,” the word served as a metaphor for the artists’ current state of mind. Anastasiia explains her “swinging feeling” and the extremes her life has alternated b

Lily McMenamy is a triple threat: model, actress, and artist. From dancing with Ralph Fiennes as nouveau riche seductress Sylvie in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash (2015) to starring in campaigns for everyone from Versace to Chopova Lowena, Lily is no stranger to the spotlight (her mum, 90s supermodel Kristen McMenamy, allegedly carried her down a Chanel runway when she was just an infant). Still, in recent years, the seasoned model has come to attention in yet another role (or two): that of s

ALONG THE STORIED HALLS of Russian literature, the call of the name Gaito Gazdanov had, for many decades, elicited little more than a faintly alliterated echo. With the publication of Gazdanov’s 1930 debut novel, An Evening with Claire, Pushkin Press and translator Bryan Karetnyk beckon us closer to that resonant echo, the voice of a haunting and haunted author often compared to Nabokov and Proust but really dwelling in a room entirely his own. Who is this Gazdanov?He answers in spades: bargeman