Peter Plagens

The artist’s ceramic works, highly attuned to form and most just a few inches tall, are the focus of a show at the Tang Teaching Museum. Installation view of ‘Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes’ at the Tang Teaching Museum. Shawn LaChapelle Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Small-scale sculpture—or, in this particular case, really tiny sculpture—has its problems.

The German-American painter, a master of form and color who was also a revered and influential teacher, is the subject of a small but compelling exhibition. Updated May 25, 2026 4:58 pm ET ‘The Pond’ (1958). Yale University Art Gallery New Haven, Conn. The German-American abstract painter Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) was revered by his many acolytes for both his works themselves and his teaching about the philosophy of abstraction. My own encounter with him was secondhand.

The American artist, who died this week at age 88, brought an astute sense of form to welded-metal works that explored the struggle for racial justice, including his long-running ‘Lynch Fragments’ series. ‘Once I started to weld steel,” said the sculptor Melvin Edwards, who died on March 30 at age 88, “I realized much of the world I lived in is welded.