By NATALIE LOVELESS As many reviews on Gerry Bergstein’s current work have noted, there is something new to see here: small story book figures– “witnesses” inserted into Bergstein’s cataclysmic landscapes. I Love Architecture #3 shows a red-shirted man, holding a…
By SAM MCKINNISS In Real Art Ways’ front room gallery, Zak Ove’s group of photographs entitled Blue Devils (from the Transfigura series) greets viewers with a startling view of Trinidad Carnival. Large-scale photographs show men and women in gruesome masquerade…
By MIKE MENNONNO Stacey Alickman’s work comes in two flavors: acrylics – or oil – on canvas, and gouache on paper. Her rich, dark and dense acrylic and oil canvases are sprinkled with bright, fanciful creatures composed of simple shapes,…
By JUDY KERMIS BLOTNICK “Painting broke my heart…. but it also saved my life,” said Gerry Bergstein at his gallery talk on December 5th. A romantic and a realist, an avid fan of contemporary culture and a man whose visual…
By JAMES A. NADEAU It seems fitting that Tobias Putrih and MOS (an architectural collective) have their recent piece Without Out installed at MIT. If for no other reason that it’s aesthetic certainly reflects a couple of buildings not only…
By RICKY TUCKER My Bit in the Grand Illusion: a writer wanders through the American Repertory Theatre’s experiential theater. We’d all arrived to the dream as willing spectators, and from that point forth our perceptions were made to be obstructed;…
By MATTHEW NASH Print this article It’s no secret that our culture is fixated on war. The United States has been in some form of war, cold or hot, since before my parents were born. As I write this, we…
By MICAH J. MALONE Sports and art rarely coincide. Only a handful of contemporary artists come to mind that have utilized sports and athletes as a primary subject. Paul Pfeiffer’s wonderfully jarring videos of basketball star Larry Johnson in perpetual…
By ALAN REID Barb Choit at Rachel Uffner Barb Choit has recently documented the structure and effects of a variety of lamps (and wattage) on a photographic negative; she’s also imaged and archived a collection of broken pottery. Now, in…
By JAMES A. NADEAU In my first three days here in Beijing I have visited the two main gallery districts. The largest and best known area, the 798 District, I managed to cover on Saturday thanks to Megan and KC…
By ALAN REID Rebecca Warren at Matthew Marks There’s something afoot in Rebecca Warren’s current show, a dozen sculptures collected under the potentially snarky title, Feelings. With élan, Warren negotiates an avalanche of references, disrupting the history of art and…
By MATTHEW GAMBER Developed as a series of medical procedures to correct for abnormalities, cosmetic surgery has transformed into an industry to manage what nature has denied. Advanced techniques for plastic surgery were developed after World War I to restore…
By MICAH J. MALONE The fantastic book “Old Masters and Young Geniuses” does something almost unheard of: Author David Galenson formulates the two distinct archetypes of modern art through economic criteria and data. For Galenson, modern artists can be differentiated…
By MEGAN BILLMAN Developments in technology and communication in recent decades, have lead to the evolution of new research methods in many fields. Increasingly, specialists have discovered that when they collaborate, or appropriate the tools of another discipline, they can…
By JAMES A. NADEAU I want to say right off the bat that I am not a theatre person. I am not trained in its analysis nor have I ever participated in a theatrical production (aside for a brief time…
By HANNAH BARRETT Until September 7th, The Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem offers a rare opportunity to see a spectacular collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich,…
By JAMES A. NADEAU “I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.” – John Cage, Lecture on Nothing, 1949 Our relation to music is deep and, one…
By ALISE UPITIS In 1977, Richard Serra proposed that all drawing is the physical trace of doing, famously stating that “drawing is a verb.” Let’s call this our thesis. In 2002, curator Laura Hoptman claimed that, at the turn of…
I’ve been struggling to write a review of “Legibility on Color Backgrounds,” the exhibition of Walead Beshty’s photograms and sculptures currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. I can’t decide if the show is brilliant, too clever…
Yesterday I took a day trip to Providence to check out the new RISD Museum wing and the exhibition of Dale Chihuly’s work in honour of RISD. The show was mildly interesting (I am not a fan of class art)…