Review: Unexpected Art, ed. by Jenny Moussa Spring

UNEXPECTED ART, ed. by Jenny Moussa Spring, spotlights installations and site-specific works from around the world. Each piece appears alongside an artist’s or curator’s statement (depending, I assume, on whether or not the artist was comfortable writing in English), while two introductions usher readers into public context of installations in general and these pieces in specific.

Said pieces are by more than fifty artists, some of whom work in teams or collectives where not every member is named on the page. Of those I could identify through Google, thirty-four are men, twenty-seven are women, and one appears to be nonbinary. Forty-two of them live and work outside the United States. Twenty-two of them are people of colour.

So basically, the book is geographically diverse both in terms of the artists represented and the locations where the pieces were exhibited. It zips close to but fails to maintain gender parity, though, and I wish there’d been more POC represented.

Barring that, the book is fabulous. Not only did it push a large quantity of excellent art in front of my eyeballs, but it got me thinking about how much I love installations.

"I love installations" is the year’s biggest understatement, so I fear this ain’t really a review. It’s an excuse for me to waffle on about this most beloved of art forms.