January 16, 2025
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CLARK ART INSTITUTE ANNOUNCES
GROUND/WORK 2025, AN OUTDOOR EXHIBITION FEATURING NEWLY COMMISSIONED WORKS
BY SIX CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS
Ground/work 2025 presents site-responsive projects created by renowned international artists
Yō Akiyama, Laura Ellen Bacon, Aboubakar Fofana, Hugh Hayden, Milena Naef, and Javier Senosiain
Williamstown, Massachusetts—The Clark Art Institute announces its second outdoor sculpture exhibition, Ground/work 2025, opening in summer 2025. Set throughout the woodland trails and open meadows of the Clark’s distinctive 140-acre campus, the exhibition includes newly commissioned, site-specific installations by six leading contemporary artists.
Curated by independent art historian Glenn Adamson, Ground/work 2025 features a dynamic range of outdoor presentations by international artists, Yō Akiyama, Laura Ellen Bacon, Aboubakar Fofana, Hugh Hayden, Milena Naef, and Javier Senosiain that respond to the Clark’s unique setting while expressing ideas core to each artist’s individual practice. Like the inaugural Ground/work, which opened in summer 2020, the installations will remain on view for over one year allowing visitors to encounter the works day or night and throughout the seasons, experiencing them anew as the landscape and weather conditions change. Ground/work 2025 closes in October 2026.
“When we first considered doing our initial Ground/work exhibition, we always hoped that the public’s response would inspire future iterations of the project,” said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark. “The enthusiastic embrace of this concept was immediate and intense when we opened the exhibition in 2020 and the public’s interest in and enthusiasm for another Ground/work project has been constant. We eagerly await the opportunity to bring this new presentation to life and to experience our grounds through the eyes of this new cohort of artists. Glenn Adamson, our guest curator, has invited artists whose work will be particularly responsive to the natural setting here at the Clark and we are confident that our visitors will be delighted by the works of art that are planned.”
Glenn Adamson is an American curator, author, and art historian whose work focuses on the intersections of contemporary art, design, and craft, which he defines as “skilled making, on a human scale.”
“The monumentality of this project, and its global range of artists, definitely make it a milestone in the institutional presentation of craft,” Adamson says. “At the same time, I love the radical accessibility of it—the fact that it can be seen by anyone, free of charge, at any time of the day. Imagine a group of kids walking through the woods and suddenly coming upon one of these huge sculptures, a strange and beautiful presence in a clearing, and then learning how was made. How magical is that?"
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
A reverence for nature and a desire to further enliven the surrounding trails, pastures, and woods inspired Ground/work—the Clark’s first outdoor exhibition in 2020. Building on a history of collaboration with contemporary artists, the Clark commissioned Kelly Akashi, Nairy Baghramian, Jennie C. Jones, Eva LeWitt, Analia Saban, and Haegue Yang to create new works of art in active dialogue with the Clark’s specific environment.
This second iteration, Ground/work 2025, features specially-commissioned works located throughout the grounds, and the landscape. For the 2025 exhibition, the focus is on global conceptions of craft: the means by which artists transform the world around them.
In Eurocentric art history, it has long been accepted practice to draw a firm line between craft and fine art. In many parts of the world, however, no distinction exists; rather, there is a holistic domain of making and meaning. In surveying craft across cultures and practices, Ground/work 2025 aims to transcend the binary question—"Is it art or is it craft?”—and instead highlight craft as a motor for artistic expression.
The exhibition foregrounds the international diversity in craft, with a range of artists critically reflecting on the traditions that inform their skilled making. The six participating artists represent a diversity of geography, materiality, ethnicity, gender, and generation, and each possesses a craft-intensive practice as well as an informed and dynamic relationship to national or regional traditions, exemplifying the way that artisanal traditions can be reinvented to generate contemporary form and meaning.
Ground/work 2025 is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by independent curator Glenn Adamson.
Ground/work 2025 is made possible by Denise Littlefield Sobel. Major funding is provided by the Edward and Maureen Fennessy Bousa Fund for Contemporary Projects, Karen and Robert Scott, and VIA Art Fund, with additional support from Girlfriend Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts.
GROUND/WORK 2025 ARTIST PROJECTS
Yō Akiyama is among the most respected ceramic artists in Japan. For Ground/work 2025, he will create a major outdoor stoneware sculpture in the form of an inverted cone, approximately thirteen feet in height. After firing, the dark brown clay body is embedded with iron powder, which takes on a rich deep red-rust patina over time. Anchored to the ground and reaching towards the sky, the sculpture is intended to visually interact with nearby trees, which spread their roots as they spread their branches and leaves.
Using a practice that equally evokes basket-making and the nest-building of birds, Laura Ellen Bacon will craft a gigantic sculpture, approximately nine-feet long and five-feet high, that will surround a tree in the Clark’s woodlands along a recreational trail. Using willow sourced from Ohio and creating her work entirely onsite and in public view, Bacon will weave overlapping layers to construct an organic shape growing from the rich composition of the woodland floor. Because her sculpture will be made entirely from natural materials, it will biodegrade following the conclusion of the Ground/work 2025 exhibition.
Aboubakar Fofana explores natural colorants, particularly indigo, as carriers of contemporary abstraction and ancestral knowledge. Fofana will create a “tree of life” for the exhibition. Inspired by his spiritual belief in the divinity of nature, indigo-dyed rolls of African cotton, representing seeds, will be placed within a branching metal structure that will protect these textile elements through the four seasons of the installation. This is Fofana’s first public sculpture.
Hugh Hayden’s practice is materially diverse, but he is perhaps best known for his works in salvaged wood, with protruding natural branches preserved. For Ground/work 2025, Hayden will create a massive upside-down ribcage out of hemlock trees harvested from a forest near the Clark’s campus. The skeletal form suggests a remnant of some giant’s life (its race cannot be identified from the bones). The sculpture will be situated within the Clark’s woodlands, providing it with partial camouflage while touching on ecological themes of extinction and climate change. Following the exhibition’s run, the work will be allowed to decompose, returning to the forest from whence it came.
Born to a lineage of stone carvers, Milena Naef literally inserts herself into her family’s story of craftsmanship, treating solid marble slabs as a means of poetic self-portraiture. For the exhibition, Naef will sculpt two adjoining pieces of marble with negative spaces for a fallen tree in the Clark’s pasture and for her own body—the latter a subtle trace of her fleeting presence. The work will be sited in the Clark’s pasture. The work will be sited in the Clark’s pasture, and the marble for the project is sourced from the valley in Switzerland where Naef’s family has long worked. This is her first exhibition in the United States and a considerable increase in scale from previous projects.
Javier Senosiain, the leading exponent of organic architecture in Mexico, creates animate structures in polychrome glass mosaic, rooted in Mesoamerican mythology but exemplifying the power of pure imagination. Ground/work 2025 is his first commissioned public work in the United States. Senosiain will create a serpentine design approximately forty feet long, fifteen feet wide, and seventeen feet high. Three separate sections will dip in and out of the Clark’s Schow Pond, creating the illusion of a giant water snake, rising from the unseen depths of the water. Visible from the entrance area to the Clark campus, the work offers a striking welcome to the exhibition.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Yō Akiyama (b.1953, Japan) has spent a lifetime exploring the physical properties of clay as a material, creating massive sculptural works that extend the venerated tradition of Japanese ceramics into the language of process-based sculpture, as well as the very geological forces from which clay is formed in the earth. He is professor emeritus and former chairman of the Ceramics Department at the Kyoto City University of the Arts, and his work is held in the permanent collections of numerous museums in Japan and in the West, including the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Honolulu Museum of Art; Faenza International Ceramic Museum, Faenza, Italy; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In 2015, Akiyama won the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award from the Japan Ceramic Society.
Laura Ellen Bacon (b.1976, United Kingdom) creates site-specific sculptures in willow and stone that allude to animal habitats, such as dens or nests. Recent exhibitions and installations include Natural (Re)Sources at Ruthin Craft Centre (2023), Ruthin, Wales; Muscle Mass at The Rural Life Museum within Normanby Hall (2023), Normanby, England; and the Royal Society of Sculptors Summer Exhibition (2023), London. Recent solo exhibitions include Rejuvenation at the Denver Art Museum (2024), Denver, Colorado and Every Fibre of My Being (Chaque Fibre de Mon Être) (2022), Abbaye de Maubuisson, France, Production Conseil départemental du Val-d'Oise. Burrow, Bacon’s first solo exhibition in London in May 2024, was presented by Hignell Gallery at the historic Marquis House in St. James’s. Bacon was a finalist within the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in 2017.
Aboubakar Fofana (b.1967, Mali) has reinvigorated and redefined West African indigo dyeing techniques. His work stems from a profound spiritual belief that nature is divine and that, through respecting this divinity, we can understand the immense and sacred universe. His raw materials come from the natural world, and his working practice revolves around the cycles of nature; the themes of birth, decay and change; and the impermanence of these materials. In conjunction with the local community in Siby, Mali, Fofana farms two types of indigenous West African indigo in what will be the centerpiece for a permaculture model based around local food, medicine, and dye plants. Through this project, he hopes to contribute to the rebirth of fermented indigo dyeing in Mali and beyond, his life’s work. Fofana was featured in Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, Germany (2017).
Hugh Hayden (b.1983, United States of America) worked for a decade as an architect before becoming a full-time sculptor. He has said that his art “asks the viewer to examine their place within the ever-shifting ecosystem that is the American Dream, an environment that is both seductive and threatening.” Recent solo exhibitions include Huff and a Puff at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2023), Lincoln, Massachusetts; Brier Patch at the Madison Square Park Conservancy (2022), New York City; and Boogey Men at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (2021). His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Milena Naef (b.1990, Switzerland) is a visual artist—born into a lineage of stone cutters—who has reinterpreted her family’s tradition in performance-based works using her body as another material. Naef is “fascinated by the thought that our bodies stand in a constant ‘choreography’ with their environment.” Recent solo and group exhibitions include Plots and Pieces at DOCK, Basel, Switzerland (2023); Avoiding the Void at art@work (ti&m), Frankfurt, Germany, Zurich, Bern, Switzerland (2022); MARBLE, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark (2022); JUNGKUNST, Winterthur, Switzerland (2021); and One eye and two takes on vulnerability with Matea Bakula at Lumen Travo Gallery, Amsterdam (2020). Naef is the recipient of the Frans de Wit Prijs (2019), the Sybren Hellinga Art Prize (2016), and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Award in Autonomous Art (2016).
Javier Senosiain (b.1948, Mexico) is a leading exponent of organic architecture, a term first coined by Frank Lloyd Wright. For Senosiain, this means architecture that resembles natural formations more closely than traditional building shapes. His best-known works are Casa Orgánica (Organic House) in Naucalpan, Mexico, built as his family’s residence, and El Nido de Quetzalcóatl (The Nest of Quetzalcóatl), an organic architecture theme park in Naucalpan, still in progress, built with his signature mosaic technique, which often uses polychrome glass tiles. He was recently featured in two group exhibitions: Everything Here is Volcanic at Friedman Benda (2023), New York, and In Praise of Caves: Organic Architecture Projects from Mexico by Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman, and Javier Senosiain at The Noguchi Museum (2022), Queens, New York. Senosiain is a graduate of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he has since served as an architecture professor.
ABOUT THE CLARK
The Clark Art Institute, located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is one of a small number of institutions globally that is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. Opened in 1955, the Clark houses exceptional European and American paintings and sculpture, extensive collections of master prints and drawings, English silver, and early photography. Acting as convener through its Research and Academic Program, the Clark gathers an international community of scholars to participate in a lively program of conferences, colloquia, and workshops on topics of vital importance to the visual arts. The Clark library, consisting of some 300,000 volumes, is one of the nation’s premier art history libraries. The Clark also houses and co-sponsors the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
The Clark, which has a three-star rating in the Michelin Green Guide, is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Its 140-acre campus includes miles of hiking and walking trails through woodlands and meadows, providing an exceptional experience of art in nature. Galleries are open 10 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Sunday, from September through June, and daily in July and August. Admission is free January through March and is $20 from April through December; admission is free year-round for Clark members, all visitors age 21 and under, and students with a valid student ID. Free admission is also available through several programs, including First Sundays Free; a local library pass program; and the EBT Card to Culture. For information on these programs and more, visit clarkart.edu or call 413 458 2303.
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