The idiom “at sixes and sevens” is one of those old-timey sayings that’s familiar but has fallen out of use. Unrelated to the meme-based viral phenomenon of middle schoolers waving their arms around and yelling “six seven” — but not that far off — it refers to something in a state of confusion or disorder. It’s thought to be derived from the moment of having bet everything on just two numbers in a game of dice — and lost.
It’s a fitting title for the summer show at the Bundy Modern in Waitsfield. Harlow Carpenter, who studied with noted modernists Walter Gropius, Josep Lluis Sert and Marcel Breuer, designed the brick-and-glass cube in 1962, early in his career. Sitting perfectly next to a reflecting pool and within an expansive lawn, the gallery and sculpture park is nonetheless incongruous in Vermont. Such formal architecture in a rural setting reads as a monument to a worldview that shaped society but never quite accounted for the different voices within it.
This year, Wendell and June Anderson, who own and run the Bundy Modern, invited 10 sculptors working in higher education to install at least one indoor and one outdoor work. Many of the artists are emerging on the national stage and fully immersed in current academic theory and practice. June said they each spent from a day to more than two weeks installing the works. “Their commitment to the form is intense,” she said.
Gregory Gómez, the show’s lead curator and organizer, recently retired as chair of sculpture in the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. He asked the artists to respond to modernism, from its core principles to its promises and failures. The resulting works are installed alongside the Bundy’s “legacy” collection of modernist-era outdoor sculptures. The new pieces aren’t altogether irreverent, but rather balance admiration of their artistic forbears with well-considered critiques.
The most basic material literally gains a voice.
David Snyder, another BU faculty member, presents two of the most arresting works. “Clown Tower,” which confronts viewers as they walk into the gallery, rises 16 feet, nearly hitting the gallery lights. The rickety-seeming, scaffold-like structure is covered in little red flags and looks like a concrete roller coaster engineered by beavers on meth. Inside it, black forms reminiscent of grand architecture rest at angles. Circus-like yellow and red paint seen through their windows is symbolic of flames within.
The sculpture reads as a commentary on the possible imminent collapse of our political system and ties it to the wider failures of democratization as a modernist project. Modernists believed that new industrialized materials and technologies would increase access to homes and goods for more people — yet the movement also imposed a top-down vision of progress that alienated many and ushered in an era of displacement, shoddy construction and cheap fixes. Snyder accentuates the sense that the tower’s underlying structure — whether rhetorical, political or architectural — is slapdash at best.
Contrast that with Snyder’s other piece, “Belfry,” a boxy wooden edifice sited at the edge of the Bundy’s field. It’s rough but solid, as no-frills as a New England church. Standing under the structure, one can look up through a square opening in the ceiling and barely see, through a dark void, its underlying careful construction. Though modern architecture borrowed many of its forms from buildings such as New England churches, it abandoned much of the knowledge that made them possible. Here, Snyder offers a quiet space to honor such craft.
A strong material sensibility runs throughout the show. In “Net (Pond),” Paloma Izquierdo, also of BU, combines a steel grid with rocks and traditional Japanese glass fishing floats in the middle of the Bundy’s reflecting pool. The floats transform the steel into something diaphanous; the rocks seem to bubble up from below. Inside the gallery, “Railing (Pond)” is a glass cylinder mounted to the wall like a handrail and filled with pond water. Both create a symbiosis between what’s manufactured and natural, rigid and fluid.
Next to the pond, Anina Major’s (Bennington College) glazed ceramic “Tide Rock” rests atop a stone bench. Its woven texture and its form, a little like a squashed basket, echo Izquierdo’s piece with a gridlike structure that references traditional modes of making. The sculpture’s mottled, mirrorlike glaze seems to reflect the natural world around it, like a humbler, sustainable, feminist take on a skyscraper.
Where modernism often took a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach, a few of these works offer an element of surprise. “Thresholds of Shadow & Light” by Oscar Rene Cornejo, of Cornell University, is a simple, minimal structure of square, dark timbers — except, June said, at 5:45 p.m. That’s when, seen from the gallery entrance, an otherwise nondescript sliver of horizontal glass is illuminated by a moment of sunlight “like an electric, neon explosion of light that is prismatic,” she said. “It has a whole rainbow.”
Constanza Alarcón Tennen, of Tufts University, delivers the unexpected through sound. Inside the gallery, three hanging clay balls, a single hand resting on each, are attached to bellows that the viewer can pump to create eerie tones. Outdoors, spherical ceramic vessels likewise create fleeting notes as the wind blows across them. Here, the most basic material literally gains a voice.
Wellesley College’s Daniela Rivera Clerfeuille gives us three flags. One is of standard weight and manufacture; another, hand-dyed cotton, already wearing thin and likely to disintegrate by the end of the season. The third is oversize, hung low and weighted. It doesn’t get off the ground, but makes a loud crinkling noise in the wind, as though trying to fly. All are emblazoned with the word “Truth.” How we read it, the works seem to say, depends on how the wind blows.
Situated near older, abstract constructions that sought to reflect singular, sweeping ideals, this summer’s installations show up instead with an emphasis on plurality, diversity, humor and consideration for the world around them, with just a dash of chaos. ➆
“At Sixes and Sevens: Sculpture at the Bundy Modern” on view through September 6 at the Bundy Modern in Waitsfield.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Modern Math | Sculpture is “At Sixes and Sevens” at the Bundy Modern in Waitsfield”
This article appears in July 15 • 2026.
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