Mary Ann Unger: Across the Bering Strait

Berry Campbell Gallery is thrilled to announce its first exhibition of the work of Mary Ann Unger (1945 – 1998). Organized in conjunction with the Mary Ann Unger Estate, the exhibition coincides with a renewal of critical interest in the artist and will include a fully illustrated scholarly exhibition catalogue with essays by Glenn Adamson, Independent Curator and Author, and Jess Wilcox, Independent Curator. On May 1, 2025, the exhibition will feature a panel with Eve Biddle, artist, co-founder of the Wassaic Project, and daughter of Mary Ann Unger, Seph Rodney, PhD, Writer, Editor, and Curator, and Stephanie Sparling Williams, Ph.D., Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. This panel will mark the commencement of a special three-day activation featuring a stylized lighting of Unger’s sprawling, monumental magnum opus, Across the Bering Strait (1992–1994). This exhibition presents the installation in its entirety for the first time in New York City.

Mary Ann Unger was a pioneering sculptor, curator, and unabashed feminist who made space for other female artists and artists of color while working through years of illness. She is remembered for works that evoke the body, bandaging, flesh, and bone, with recurring themes of growth, regeneration, care, and support. Her oeuvre includes large-scale sculpture, small bronzes, works on paper, and public art commissions.  In her New York Times obituary, Roberta Smith wrote that “[Mary Ann Unger’s] works occupied a territory defined by Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. But the pieces combined a sense of mythic power with a sensitivity to shape that was all their own, achieving a subtlety of expression that belied their monumental scale.”  

 

Across the Bering Strait is the artist’s most monumental work and arguably her career masterpiece.  A daring early example of installation art, the work is the culmination of over thirty years of artistic development and experimentation.  Comprised of thirty-four sculptural elements, the heroic scale of the abstracted, interlocking parts fully immerses the viewer in a world entirely of Unger’s making. Across the Bering Strait debuted at Trans Hudson Gallery in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1994 and Vivien Raynor of The New York Times observed that “Any way it is viewed, the installation packs a huge punch” and that the work’s “blend of the erotic and the macabre represents a climax [in Unger’s work] that had been building since the mid-1980s.” The work deploys the signature techniques and unique visual language that have come to define Unger’s practice: expressive, modular forms that deal with structure and armature, and by extension, care and support. The installation is a powerful example of how “Unger’s sculptures [do] not allow consideration of the singular body apart from its interrelationship to other bodies,” notes Carla Harryman. A meditation on human migration in general and the American experiment in particular, Across the Bering Strait is Unger’s reminder that “the heaviness of the body and its suffering is lightened through the redistribution of the burden of the body into a collective and shared world” (Harryman).

 

Also on view, Unger’s early sculptures and works on paper establish themes and reveal interests seen throughout her career: the combination of organic forms with geometric, and a tendency for parts of works to rest against, hold, support, carry, or cradle one another. These load-bearing works are deceptively simple, but their underlying structures were finely engineered. Drawings of repeated modular forms foregrounded on networks of triangular grids from the late-1970s are where Unger, “saw and realized the possibility of using these patterned experiments to move with intention from drawings to three-dimensional forms at heroic scale,” remarked Horace D. Ballard, curator of the landmark 2022 exhibition Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone at the Williams College Museum of Art. Later works from the mid-1980s until her death in 1998, including her patinated and smooth armatures Maine Wishing Stones and Red Tooth/ Red Palm Nut, resemble small objects one comes across in nature, such as stones and seeds. In Unger’s hands, these forms turn inwards and morph into organ or bone. The surface of works such as Seed Pod, Basket Piece, and Ganesha reveal visible strips of cloth coated in a gritty substance and layered with care, in a process not unlike casting broken limbs. As described by Arlene Raven in the Village Voice “Unger’s columns, pillars, monoliths, prehistoric skeletons are imposing. Yet […] they are also endowed with a beautiful elegance.”