Alexandra Lange
Architecture & design critic

Dream Weaver

When I wrote about the figure of the knitting architect in February, inspired by Maria Semple’s novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette, little did I know that a panoply of knitted, woven and recycled work would soon be on display in New York … all under the rubric of art, but definitely spatial and challenging. El Anatsui’s sinuous works at the Brooklyn Museum, which play with one’s sense of weight and material, Orly Genger’s Red, Yellow and Blue in Madison Square park, walls of crocheted rope that snake through the park, and, most modest in scale, the first New York show in 50 years of the work of midcentury sculptor Ruth Asawa, who wove forests, anemones and orbs out of metal wire. One of Asawa’s largest works, known as Untitled (S.108, hanging, six lobed, multi-layered continuous form within a form), was auctioned by Christie’s, the organizers of the exhibition “Ruth Asawa: Objects & Apparitions”, on May 15 for $1.4 million, four times its low estimate. (I posted a few of my own photos of the exhibit on Tumblr; Christie’s also made a video.)