Last June, after a decade, I left my perch as a senior planner with an architecture and planning firm in Boston. During that time—partly because of my training, partly because of my own inclinations and intuition—I became more and more…
I spent much of today wandering around Boston with Pixnit, David Boeri and the production team of Radio Boston talking with people about public art. We talked to a number of interesting people about how they see and understand public…
Every act of creation, by its mere existence, denies the world of master and slave. -Albert Camus, The Rebel We often hear people claim to be slaves to their work, or the system of work, which implies a type of…
Brooklyn-based artist Wangechi Mutu’s installation A Promise To Communicate, now on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, addresses complex issues regarding methodologies of communication, as well as the abstract, often arbitrary systems within which the body exists. Repurposing…
Last week, the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts hosted the most recent of its informal, semi-monthly artist-generated/artist-hosted conversation series, Gertrude’s Artists Salon, which explores ideas that grow out of and into art. This installment, presented in…
Last year, Lucas Spivey parked his vintage Shasta camper on the Boston Center for the Arts Plaza, unfurled the awning, positioned a flamingo lawn ornament, and invited artists of all types inside to discuss business. As the BCA’s public art…
“A book, or a work of art [culture] cannot by itself change the world, but by asking the questions that matter, it might attempt to be an act of articulation against violence, both the brutal and casual kinds. It might…
“The ‘21st-century naturalist,’” curator Ruth Erickson explains in an introductory text to the exhibition Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist currently on view at ICA/Boston, “investigates nature as part of culture and society rather than separate from them—exploring how folk…
It is now almost ten years after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and sixteen since China joined the World Trade Organization. Three decades have elapsed since the Tiananmen Square protests, and half a century since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.…
Anchoring the SoWa district of Boston on Harrison Ave is Samson, a veteran gallery venerated for showing contemporary and meaningful exhibitions over the last 14 years. Their current (and final) show, “Immigrancy” focuses on the concepts of mobility and movement…
Big Red & Shiny is pleased to welcome Chanel Thervil as our next Inside/Out artist in residence. Working in sculpture, painting, installation, and public art works, Thervil balances roles of visual artist, community activist, and arts educator. Her newest body…
The Newport summer is marked by a few large music festivals, events that have drawn the biggest names in jazz and folk to the island since 1954 and 1959, respectively. This year the Newport Art Museum has decided to join…
Earlier this spring, Ann Lewis drove from Detroit to Boston to create a four-story mural. This wasn’t just any mural. Lewis would paint the mural on a building in Boston’s historic South End and would work with residents of the…
Carlos Jiménez Cahua is an artist and curator living and working in NY. I have known CJC for a couple of years and have shared some wonderful and insightful conversations together. On May 1, we finally sat down to talk…
DRAW/Boston, an exhibition of over 60 artists curated by Tomas Vu, toys with scale, color, style, and sound, wedding the scholarly air of a professional university gallery with the aesthetic resemblances of a working artist’s studio. The arrangement alone warrants…
Liao Fei’s exhibition at Yve Yang gallery at first glance seems to be a work in progress: perhaps even a transition between shows. Remarking on surveillance culture, Fei’s quiet exhibition not only gives visitors the uneasy feeling of being watched,…
On September 30th, I, along with a small group of skeptical but cooperative volunteer-participants, an eager and unassuming college marching band, and one very enthusiastic curator with a megaphone, gathered at the entrance of the historic Boston Common. Together we…
“…the problem lies not whether to reach for either larger or more selective audiences, but rather in understanding for ourselves our own definitions of those groups we wish to speak to, and in making conscious steps to reach out to…
The question of documentation is rooted in the history of the avant-garde. Think of Dadaist or Surrealists recording their work via sound or the nascent technology of film. Think of Hans Namuth filming Jackson Pollock as he dripped his paintings…
“The best art speaks for itself,” someone stated at a recent public discussion about Boston Creates. My immediate internal response was yes, but art also prompts, at times even goads, us to speak or write. I concede that art is,…