Concrete

Concrete

With its mirror-encased skyline refracting images of towering highways connecting through suburban theme parks, the concrete prairie of North Texas often feels like an exaggeration of America. This year’s theme, Concrete, is the crucial ingredient of our built environment to translate the mythologies of ambition and progress into physical form. Bridges, basins, fountains, bunkers, and dream homes—the sculptures in this exhibition stand as thumbnails in the folder of a city whose metadata discloses a dissonance of violence and environmental degradation interwoven with aspiration and longing.

A vacant lot seems to ask its own questions about its history and future. The rowdy flora of the park are out of sync with the pulsing and manicured development of West Dallas. Whether we retreat, escape, linger, or dare the threshold, the works in this exhibition carve out spaces caught between time. Exploring themes of survival, identity, and the built environment's impact, the artists encourage us to consider how we construct our realities and live within them, pointing to the gaps between nature and the industrial, the possible and the perilous.

Taking their findings and experience, this cohort of artists has poured their efforts into the program's mold. Vibrating out the bubbles of doubt, they’ve removed the forms to unveil shells of desire. As their concrete cures over time, connections and shared ideas intertwine and solidify, becoming stronger and more stable through their entanglement.

ABOUT SCULPTURE SCHOOL

Sculpture School is an alternative platform for making and thinking as a community of artists. It is a place for peeling back the layers of what it means to put an object outside in a place. In its second iteration, the Sculpture School program turned its attention to the thematic of concrete, that most ubiquitous of substances, layered beneath our feet and spread across the skeleton of the world.

Sculpture School marvels at the strange wilderness of structures in the Monolithic Dome Institute’s research park in Italy, TX.

Adrian Forty, writer of "Concrete and Culture," speaks with the cohort about his long fascination with concrete.

Sculpture School is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts,
Dallas Office of Arts & Culture, TACA, and Nasher Sculpture Center

SCULPTURE SCHOOL ARTISTS

Ariel Wood (Austin, TX)

Ariel Wood is a Texas-based artist by way of California and Wisconsin. They received a BFA in printmaking and drawing from The University of Wisconsin, Madison 2016 and their MFA in Sculpture from The University of Texas at Austin 2022, where they were the recipient of the Lomis Slaughter, Jr. Endowment Scholarship In Sculpture and the Continuing College Fellowship. In 2022, Wood attended Watershed Ceramics’ Summer Residency and in 2023, they were a finalist for the Alice C. Cole Fellowship. Ariel Wood is a sculpture artist interested in the way plumbing and drainage can elicit notions of interconnectedness, liminality, and queerness. Wood picks and parses out those aspects of the larger system that appear strange, silly, or sentimental. They have exhibited their work nationally and internationally in Wisconsin, Illinois, Texas, New York, and Florence, Italy.

Dalila Sanabria (Lakeland, FL)

Dalila Sanabria is an American-Chilean-Colombian artist from central Florida. Working primarily with sculpture and video, her work references domestic sites and sacred architectures, accumulating organic materials as catalysts for exploring displacement, brownness, and belonging. Sanabria has received an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art, a BFA in Art, and a BA in Portuguese Studies from Brigham Young University. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions at Ortega y Gassett Projects in Brooklyn, NYC, Roman Susan Gallery in Chicago, IL, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, QUAID Gallery in Tampa, FL, the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and the Czong Institute of Contemporary Art Museum in South Korea, with upcoming exhibitions the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, UT.

Valentina Jager (Westbury, NY)

Valentina Jager is a visual artist, writer, and translator from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Her artistic practice dwells in the crossings of sculpture, performance, and writing; it is material-oriented, and site-specific. Her current research focuses on the intersection of prison geographies, natural space, and tourism. She holds an MA in Art in Context from the Berlin University of the Arts, focusing on public art and memorial culture, and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing in Spanish from the University of Houston. Since 2012, when she first encountered it, Valentina has become a Butoh practitioner and enthusiast.

Tatiana Sky (Chicago, IL)

Tatiana Sky is a sculptor living in Chicago, Illinois. Primarily working with ceramics, plaster, concrete and cast metal. Their work focuses on our relationship with natural environments and is informed by garden decor, architectural details and folklore. They received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020.

During the Sculpture School intensive, Tamara leads a public concrete workshop in a rubber mold demo to create block tests for custom concrete mixes.

Sculpture School Cohort 1 Artist Brook-Lynne Clark pours her custom concrete mix, which uses biochar and coffee grounds, into a test mold.

SCULPTURE SCHOOL CATALOG

The Concrete Catalog captures the breadth of our 2024 program from start to finish. This 100+ page book features original content, including research, collage illustrations, site studies, documentation, and commissioned essays. It delves into the meanings and materiality of concrete, contextualized within the Metroplex, with contributions from Andrew Campbell, Isaac Dunne, Finn Jubak, Jana La Brasca, Daryl Meador, and J Molina-Garcia. It also highlights the outstanding work of our second Sculpture School Cohort.

Catalog Detail