John Grade is a Seattle-based artist who creates monumental installations that significantly alter the viewers’ experience of architecture and nature. Gritty, industrial materials are Grade’s trademark. He likes his work to have weight in an almost precarious sort of way, as if the piece might give and crush the viewer at any second. Inspired by the land art movement of the ’60s and ’70s, Grade’s work echoes the scale and impact of famous Earthworks like Spiral Jetty, though most of his interventions take place inside of museum and gallery environments rather than the land itself.
Nonetheless, Grade forges a connection between the natural and the manmade. His piece Capacitor (pictured above), which first appeared at the Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin in 2013, utilized a mechanism that compared historical weather data with realtime data from sensors on the museum’s roof. The more the current weather data differed from the historical norm, the more the sculpture moved and glowed. Inserting bits of architecture into nature and organic shapes into otherwise structured environments, Grade invites new perspectives on the places we inhabit.
Kara Walker's recent Hyundai Commission is a 45-foot-high fountain at Tate Modern, exploring the historical tether between Africa, America and Europe with inspiration from the Victoria Memorial in London. Water, Tate says, has its own significance in the work, “referring to the transatlantic slave trade and the ambitions, fates and tragedies of people from these three continents.” The title of the work: “Fons Americanus.”
"I love bodies," says artist 
The human body was one of the earliest subjects of sculpture, predating galleries or artistic statements or even recorded history. Even today, the functions range from ritualistic to iconographic, decorative to narrative-driven. Seeing the form through the lens of