Tara Donovan, Certified Genius

We’ve written about Donovan before. Today, she up and won a MacArthur Genius Grant. The Times already has a good piece up. Here’s an interesting bit:

Though Ms. Donovan’s new prints won’t be on view, her glass-shattering talents will be: she intends to recreate “Untitled (Glass),” a process-oriented sculpture that she first made in 2004. It involves stacking sheets of tempered glass into a perfect cube, then working carefully one by one from bottom to top, striking a single corner of each pane with a hammer. As with the print, Ms. Donovan will contain the glass with a wooden frame while she works. Once the mold is removed, the cube “stays in place,” she said. “You can still see the layers, but everything’s really broken into itty-bitty teeny-weeny shards.”

Unlike some of the installations, which are fabricated by Ms. Donovan and her assistants in her studio and reassembled on site, the glass cube must always be built from scratch — and perhaps more than once during a single showing. “If you bump into this and knock a corner off it, it can’t be repaired or remade with the same materials,” said Ms. Donovan, who tends to speak in short staccato bursts. “It has to be made over again.”

And when the show is over, she added, matter of factly, “it gets taken away with a shovel.”