Mary Ann Unger (1945–1998) was a New York–based sculptor possessed of formidable technical skill and creative vision. She drew upon her education in biochemistry, her experiences as a mother, and her years-long struggle with illness to create works of such scale and precision that few could believe she’d fabricated them herself. A survey at Berry Campbell assembled twenty-five objects by the artist that spanned the breadth of her career. Working with a range of materials, Unger forged an approach to abstraction informed by the generative systems of the body and the natural world.
The exhibition’s namesake, Across the Bering Strait, 1992–94, is her most ambitious offering. Here, installed in its entirety for only the third time since its completion, the sculpture comprised a procession of thirty-four posts and lintels that appeared to cradle and nestle each other across the floor. The work’s overall shape is organic and its surface roughly textured—a vestige of its making that Unger chose to expose. Each element, varying in scale from two to fourteen feet in length, was made by wrapping Hydrocal-soaked cheesecloth over a gridded steel armature. The weave of the hardened gauze suggests mummified bodies, limbs set in casts, or even single bones carefully preserved as relics. In an accompanying text, Unger described the enigmatic work as “an abstract sculpture about migration,”which, in an optimistic tone familiar from the multicultural dreams of the 1990s, called up the idea of the American melting pot. “It evokes memories of our primeval history,” she said, “and suggests a continuity between the journeys of our ancestors and our personal journey.”
— Katherine Rochester, Artforum
September 2, 2025
