Liz Craft Whitney Biennial 2004 - The Spare

Public Art Fund, in collaboration with the Whitney Museum, presents installations by Paul McCarthy, Liz Craft, Olav Westphalen, David Altmejd, assume vivid astro focus, David Muller, and Yayoi Kusama for the 2004 Biennial Exhibition. Building upon the outdoor presentation of Biennial works in 2002, this show includes artists’ site-specific reactions to Central Park as well as several sculptural projects that were conceived independently of location. For the first time, the exhibition includes a weekend event of openings and participatory artists’ projects in the park.

Liz Craft (b. 1970, Los Angeles, CA) often casts everyday objects in fantastical scenarios, resulting in appealing showstoppers that plant themselves at the busy intersection of pop culture and high art. Working in a variety of materials—including polyurethane, fiberglass, bronze, and wood—Craft creates works that are both flamboyant and slightly sinister. Like fellow Los Angeles–based artist Paul McCarthy, California native Craft takes inspiration from the familiar cultural landscape, referencing hippies, Hell’s Angels, psychedelia, and other iconography in her sculptures. Near McCarthy’s MJBH, Craft shows three versions of The Spare, a bronze sculpture of a prickly pear cactus growing from a discarded tire. Craft’s trio of cacti would be a banal sight in any Southwestern landscape, but in New York City they are exotic transplants from a desert junkyard, offering stark counterpoint to Central Park’s lush grounds and playfully challenging our notions of “high” versus “low” art.