A gray dance floor is stationed in the middle of the Museum of Fine Art’s exhibit The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris. Its pale color complements the light blue and white hues of Harris’s paintings, which boldly…
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After hiatus, Big Red & Shiny is pleased to continue Inside/Out, our artist-in-residence series. Inside/Out last ran during 2012 through 2013, and offered a space in which artists could discuss their studio practice and work. In this new iteration, a…
Realizing durational work such as ‘100 Ways to Consider Time’ is an immense undertaking. As a part of the audience, I was able to stay with Marilyn Arsem’s performance at the Museum of Fine Arts on different days and for…
Sarah Hulsey is a local printmaker and linguist whose work is featured in the two-person show Schemata at the Maud Morgan Arts Center’s Chandler Gallery. The show features Rhonda Smith’s paintings and Hulsey’s print installation “Linguistic Elements,” uniting the artists’…
I’m a Boston artist with an ever-growing body of under-documented work, more or less addicted to the process of artmaking. I’ve been lucky enough to get a few invitations to produce work elsewhere, including within artist residencies, and found these…
“Part of what fascinates us when looking at a map is inhabiting the mind of its marker, considering that that particular terrain of imagination overlaid with those unique contour lines of experience.” – Katherine Harmon, You Are Here: Personal Geographies…
Why would one want to shift from a life dedicated to the production of art to one invested in resolving educational problems? The question sounds more interesting than it actually is. It presumes that both activities are distinctly different, demanding…
A collection of performance art photography spanning decades, the book ‘this moment: missives from another world’ provides a unique insight into the history of performance art in Boston, Massachusetts and beyond through the perceptive lens of artist Bob Raymond. Performance…
This is the first installment of a new series focusing on arts pedagogy, incorporating course syllabi and first-hand experience to open dialogues. Here, Cathy McLaurin, an interdisciplinary artist who is currently Visiting Faculty in Performance and Senior Thesis Program at The…
Aside from Laurence Weiner’s Dewey Square mural, A TRANSLATION FROM ONE LANGUAGE TO ANOTHER, the best public art I’ve come across in Boston lately is something in the basement of Goodwill in Davis Square, Somerville. There against the back wall…
“[Women] are sex objects, spoils in the war between white males and black males over which group will dominate the planet.”[1] Much of Persuasions 1990—2015, the mid-career survey of Rhode Island-based visual and performance artist James Montford (recently on view at…
“Horror films don’t create fear. They release it.” -Wes Craven Wes Craven, who died on August 30th at 76, was a gentle, avuncular, and piercingly intelligent individual who created films horrific in their violence, sadism, and brutality. Raised in a…
American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood, recently on view at the Peabody Essex Museum (now travelling across the country through fall 2016), was a stunning, densely-mounted and sharply focused show that brought to light the cosmopolitan side of a…
This piece has been updated, click here to view it. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has found itself mired in controversy over an in-gallery program responding to Claude Monet’s La Japonaise, a portrait of the artist’s wife Camille clad…
The artist known as Katsushika Hokusai (he was to use thirty-one different names during his ninety years) is probably the most widely celebrated Japanese artist of the Ukiyo-e period of Japanese art. By 1760, Edo (now Tokyo) was probably the…
In an effort to provide an in-depth look at single works of art on view across the region in permanent collections, temporary exhibitions, and installations, the staff at Big Red & Shiny will be reviving Art for Breakfast, a series…
In early 2015, the City of Boston began its first cultural plan; an approximately fifteen month process that begins with developing a comprehensive view of Boston’s arts and culture sector, and ends with implementing a custom-made plan to strengthen and…
Open Engagement is an annual conference on socially engaged art, focused this year on the topic of Place and Revolution. It was an incredibly dense three days of concurrent ninety-minute sessions, shorter fifteen-minute talks, opening and closing keynotes, and events…
It’s now an old story—art fairs contribute to globally homogenized tastes in art. Galleries travel around the world and bring their artists with them, so the same aesthetics start appearing in museums and collections everywhere. But what if the art…
In Boston, as well as in the UK, religion has been declining. That is, the idea of “The Church” as an organized body or religious power has been challenged, particularly within younger generations. In 2012 Boston was ranked in the…