Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Illinois, Apr 20–Aug 11, 2024
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective
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Ai Wei Wei: According to What
Perez Art Museum, Miami, Dec 4 2013 to March 16 2014
Anindita Dutta: Performance Piece
Pen and Brush, New York, May 20, 2026
Anindita Dutta is an Indian-born, US-based sculptor, installation artist, and performance artist whose practice is materially anchored in wet clay and, increasingly, in the collision between clay and repurposed everyday matter (textiles, clothing, domestic remnants). Her work treats the body as a site of pressure: memory, mortality, and impermanence made literal through the thick clay that cracks, slumps, dries, and records her imprint.
Her most legible “signature” is the way she uses clay as both medium and metaphor. Clay lets her keep process visible: surfaces read as worked and worried. In performance-related work, the body and clay often blur into one another. Clay carries its own behavior, and Dutta leans into it rather than hiding it.
A mildly skeptical read, and I think it is fair, is that work like this can tip into seduction by material density. When it’s strongest, the material excess is in service of a specific psychic or bodily proposition, not just “look how much the surface can hold.” The better pieces tend to be the ones where she maintains a clear hierarchy: sensation first, symbolism second, then spectacle.
Robert Indiana: The American Dream
Pace, New York, May 9 to August 15, 2025
Pace Gallery’s Robert Indiana: The American Dream pulls the artist’s signage, numerology, and road-worn Americana together into a single argument: Indiana didn’t just brand LOVE; he built a whole visual grammar for the country that taught him its alphabet on billboards and gasoline pumps. The show gathers early hard-edge paintings, later meditations on highways and coinage, and the sculptural ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers).
If Indiana’s paintings read like dispatches from postwar America, the Cor-Ten numbers slow the message to a rust-blooming hum. Each numeral stands alone and can be re-sequenced to generate fresh alignments of time, memory, and fate. He often described the sequence as a life cycle: 1 as birth, 0 as death, with the intervening digits walking us through youth, prime, and autumn.
Indiana, a self-described “American painter of signs,” doesn’t illustrate the Dream so much as surface its infrastructure: the numerals we assign to ages and exits; the slogans that sell us gasoline and belonging; the hard edges of policy that decide who merges and who waits. Pace’s framing stresses that double register. Personal history braided with public language, make the show as much about how a country talks to itself as about one artist’s lexicon.
Pace includes canonical examples but the show’s real satisfaction is how the numbers re-center Indiana’s project. He builds a ledger for American aspiration, where desire reads as typography and consequence arrives as arithmetic. It is a quiet reminder that how we arrange our symbols is how we arrange our lives