Happening Type: Sculpture

As the country contends with white supremacy embedded in its statuary, the University of Virginia has unveiled a memorial to a violent American history that’s rarely been acknowledged in public monuments. The campus itself was designed by slave owner Thomas Jefferson and thousands of enslaved people worked at the institution. The eyes of one of them—Isabella Gibbons—are engraved by the artist Eto Otitigbe on the sloping exterior wall of two concentric granite rings. Inside the abstract form designed by Höweler + Yoon are carved names when it rains that appear to weep.

The art world has been slow to recognize the dynamic work of Carmen Herrera, who at the age of 101 finally got a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 2016. Now a presentation of the Cuban-American artist's large-scale sculptures, based on the geometric shapes in her paintings and which she designed five decades ago but never realized, has arrived in Houston as part of the five-year anniversary celebration for Buffalo Bayou Park. Standing seven feet in height and twelve feet wide on the Fondren Foundation Meadow, the monumental sculptures feature interconnected abstract forms, contrasting their bold colors with the green space and the skyline.