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Mark di Suvero “Nova Albion”
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, May 1-July 31 2010
The exhibition presents Nova Albion, 1964-1965, a monumental 24-feet high sculpture made of steel and redwood logs. Nova Albion is named after the white cliffs of northern California that were seen by Captain Francis Drake on June 17, 1579. The California beaches Drake explored are the same ones where di Suvero built this piece using found drift wood logs. In the title, Nova refers to a star that suddenly becomes a thousand times brighter and then gradually fades to its original intensity, and Albion refers to the earliest known name for England.
-Paula Cooper Gallery
Raymond Pettibon: Th Explosiyv Shoyrt T
David Zwirner: New York. April 29—June 24, 2017
Kara Walker: Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
SF MoMA, San Francisco, July 1 2024 – June 7 2026
Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler.
Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners
Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious
by
Kara E-Walker
Kara Walker’s Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) is an intricate, imposing sculptural installation that confronts the viewer with the brutal machinery of empire, myth, and memory. In her signature fusion of historical allegory and visual spectacle, Walker constructs a haunting tableau.
The work centers on Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck and fate, reimagined through the lens of colonial violence. Mechanical elements suggest both the churn of progress and the dehumanizing gears of oppression — evoking the plantation, the empire, the factory, and the museum all at once. Figures emerge in silhouette or sculptural form, echoing Walker’s earlier cut-paper work but rendered here in three-dimensional space. It is monumental and inescapable.
Fortuna and the Immortality Garden is not a place of peace, but of decay masked as beauty. The “garden” is littered with the wreckage of history, and the “machine” is a self-perpetuating myth engine. It grinds trauma into iconography.
As with much of Walker’s work, the piece invites viewers into complicity: to witness, to feel, and to reckon with the myths they’ve inherited.
Tomás Saraceno: Radio Alchemist
Tanya Bonakdar, New York. April 14 to June 9 2018
I just walked out of the Bonakdar space and I feel like I need to recalibrate my inner ear. Walking into a Saraceno show is less like visiting a gallery and more like stepping into a high-tech observatory run by spiders.
The “Hybrid Webs”
The downstairs gallery is dark, dominated by these haunting, backlit vitrines. Inside them aren’t sculptures in the traditional sense, but “Hybrid Webs.” The result is this ghostly, architectural lace that looks like a 3D map of the early universe. It’s fragile, terrifying, and beautiful. There’s something deeply humbling about realizing that a tiny invertebrate has a better grasp of structural engineering than most humans.
2026 Retrospective Note:
Looking back at this entry eight years later, Saraceno feels even more prophetic. In 2018, his talk of “interspecies collaboration” felt like a poetic metaphor. Today, as we navigate the complexities of ecological collapse and AI-driven systems, his idea that we need to listen to the “vibrations” of other forms of life feels less like art and more like a survival manual.