Sculpture Inside Outside

The 17 ``younger artists'' showcased in this interesting survey have little in common except that most of them achieved their mature styles in the 1970s and '80s, and all of them were featured in a sculpture exhibit at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which the album catalogues. Their visions are distinct and idiosyncratic: Jean Highstein's potent granite ovoids hover between prehistory and an unforeseeable future; Meg Webster blends Earth Art and minimalist touches in outdoor craters and cones bedecked with flowers; reinventing classicism, Brower Hatcher sets a steel mesh dome atop stone columns in what looks like a modern seer's astronomical observatory. Also notable are Steve Woodward's giant plywood spirals resembling cyclones in the making, and Jim Soo Kim's vegetative, hallucinatory environments fabricated from cast-off objects. The essays, which are heavy sledding, attempt to link the sculptors to a revolt against minimalism. (Mar.)