Mary Ann Unger’s massive biomorphic artworks, now on view in New York City, are shockingly prescient and powerful now more than ever.
Tuning out the din of fad-hunting throughout Frieze Week, a New York exhibition re-awakens a late feminist sculptor’s embodiments of human migration — both primordial and present. Mary Ann Unger, who died in 1998 at age 53 after a battle with breast cancer, left a crucial legacy of biomorphic sculptures and related drawings, as seen in a solo exhibition at Berry Campbell gallery in Chelsea, on view through May 17.
Widely considered the artist’s magnum opus, an enormous sculpture titled “Across the Bering Strait” (1992–94) takes center stage at the eponymous exhibition. Created from graphite-washed Hydrocal cement hardened over steel and cloth armatures, the work’s hulking, bulbous forms evoke evolution and migration over millennia. The structure resembles many things — fossilized dinosaur bones, fallen branches, mummified bodies, bandage-wrapped appendages, primitive tools, and bundled belongings — all evidence of organic passages across land and time.
In Unger’s original text about the work, she cites the Mongol migration over the Beringia land bridge that once connected Asia to Alaska tens of thousands of years ago as the title’s referent. The work channels her own family’s history of migration, she noted, writing that the sculpture “suggests the continuity between the journeys of our ancestors and the journeys of today.”
— Rhea Nayyar, Hyperallergic
May 9, 2025
