Luana Vitra: Amulets and In Practice: Sam Cottington and Alejandro Villabona Opening

Join us for an opening reception celebrating Luana Vitra: Amulets and In Practice: Sam Cottington and Alejandro Villabona.

Luana Vitra: Amulets
On View May 1 - Jul 28, 2025

SculptureCenter is pleased to present the first institutional exhibition in the United States of artist Luana Vitra. Luana Vitra's practice is deeply intertwined with her home region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The mineral-rich state is known for its historical export of gold through forced labour and for its current prominence in the extractive iron mining industry. Through an abstract language that encompasses drawing, painting, performance, sculpture, and installation, her work is interested in the metallurgical and transformative charge of minerals and their capacity for metamorphosis, often creating a dialogue between the natural and industrial manifestations of materials.

For her SculptureCenter commission, Luana Vitra: Amulets, Vitra temporarily makes visible the threshold between the physical and spiritual presence of minerals through an energetically directed environment, presenting minerals as ritual manifestation. They take shape in a new set of sculptures that include tall iron totems wrapped in white fabric and detailed with amarrações: knots that symbolise the act of sealing the gesture of intention at the moment of invoking a spell, or as a way of enclosing it within. Amulets reinforces Vitra's dedication to an aesthetic rooted in the spiritual. She invites visitors to look beyond sculptures’ material properties of sculpture and its circulation as commodities within a capitalist economy, and to envision another dimension to which they belong. The mineral forms she conjures–often emerging first in dreams–become visual prayers, spiritual manifestation, or incantations.

In Practice: Sam Cottington and Alejandro Villabona
On View May 1 - Jun 9, 2025

Sam Cottington and Alejandro Villabona will develop a new video installation and performance for SculptureCenter. Together their work condenses vocal fragments from an omnipresent cloud of popular media, internet phenomena, and personal communication into new monologues marked by ambivalent relations between speaker and receiver. Skirting context (and often clear content) in favor of sonic texture, their texts capture a particular unsettled subjectivity and expressive range in the language of our time, rapidly driving the tone of address from self-consciously performative, to callous, to menacing and manipulative.