Tara Donovan

MacArthur “genius” grant recipient Tara Donovan’s otherworldly sculptures have transfixed audiences for over a decade. Taking mundane materials and through clever craftsmanship, ingenuity, and repeated manipulation, the artist builds large-scale works made of rubber bands, plastic tubing, and paper plates into objects that evoke the natural world or other organic material. This volume–which accompanies a major exhibition at MCA Denver–features an expansive selection of her most significant works to date, including sculpture, drawings, works on paper, and site-responsive installations. This exhibition will be the first time that Donovan’s wall-based and freestanding objects will be installed together, in order to understand fully how the artist conceptualizes her complex work.

Curator Nora Burnett Abrams, along with two other leading scholars of contemporary art Jenni Sorkin and Guiliana Bruno, consider critical issues around her work: ideas related to labor, scale, process and formalism, among other key themes. The book looks at several major bodies of work realized in different formats and different settings, affording the reader a glimpse into the important themes and visual languages the artist continuously explores.

About the Contributors

For the last 20 years, Tara Donovan has created large-scale installations, sculptures and drawings that utilize everyday objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. Donovan’s many accolades include the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award (2008); and the first annual Calder Prize (2005), among others. For over a decade, numerous museums have mounted solo exhibitions of Donovan’s work, including the the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007–08), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2008), the Indianapolis Museum of Art (2010), the Milwaukee Art Museum (2012), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark (2013), the Parrish Museum, Watermill, NY (2015) and Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, Scotland (2015), and MCA Denver (2018). Her work is included in the collections of major institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among many others. Nora Burnett Abrams is the Ellen Bruss Curator and Director of Planning at MCA Denver. Giuliana Bruno is Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Jenni Sorkin is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at University of California, Santa Barbara.