reviews > COVID-19

Claudia Wieser
Claudia Wieser

Among the exhibitions that closed before they ever opened is Claudia Wieser: Generations, at the Bemis Center in Omaha, Nebraska. That is a loss because Wieser’s particular brand of handmade geometric abstraction has a lot to offer our current moment. Not the crisis brought on by COVID-19 but the cultural reckoning with white supremacy that has been such a long time coming. Wieser is by no means an overtly political artist, but in her many-faceted mirrors, her black and rainbow ceramic towers and plinths, and her wallpaper of fractured and solarized Greek statuary and urns, she also is. It takes all kinds—-activist, conceptual, documentarian, satirical-—and that includes the subtle variety of form and image making in which Wieser opens up modernist abstraction and classical idealism to include all colors, a range of shapes, a world of feelings, and the viewers themselves, whoever they are.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-07 3:34 PM