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…
A sprawling exhibition adjacent to the permanent display of European Modernism, The Ceramic Presence in Modern Art: Selections from the Linda Leonard Schlenger Collection and the Yale University Art Gallery has a conceptual nexus as simple as its title. Its goal: to…
Boston is a transient city. Each fall, legions of artists enroll in graduate programs throughout the city to nurture their talents and connections, and approximately two years later, many move on. While they are here, some of these artists are…
Film is perhaps not the first medium that comes to mind when thinking about mimesis in visual art. Mimesis is something that painting and sculpture, for example, do well. Yet an entire gallery at the List Visual Art Center at…
Boston is a transient city. Each fall, legions of artists enroll in graduate programs throughout the city to nurture their talents and connections, and approximately two years later, many move on. While they are here, some of these artists are…
Lisa Yuskavage is one of the very best and most highly acclaimed painters working today. Mainly known for her lavish and sometimes lewd renderings of the female form, Yuskavage’s work has an unforgiving and forthright style that combines elements of…
Ryan Hawk is a visual artist working with performance, video, sculpture and critical theory, who is interested in exploring the corporeal effects of power and knowledge as they relate to art history, sexuality and the politics of desire . After…
Golden Specific, Nicole Cherubini’s exhibition at Samson Projects, is meditative. The gallery’s white box is punctuated with caramel, turquoise, and terre verte glazes, peach spray paint, and a red plastic bucket. Cherubini’s sculptures color the room. The show includes six…
Thirty years ago prominent critics, historians, and artists testified in court on behalf of sculptor Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, a seventy-three ton steel slab made for the Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. What Serra considered an opportunity for aesthetic challenge…
My first introduction to Matt Noonan’s paintings was an eclectic arrangement of oils with dense imagery and rich colors on wood or canvas in the group exhibition Arcadia: Thoughts on the Contemporary Pastoral, curated by Steve Locke and recently on…
“Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface.” Thus begins Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland: A…
Paper is the surface, the substrate, the thing acted upon. It buckles (sometimes literally) under the weight of an artist’s wishes, absorbing paint, water, ink, paste. Though it groans with the occasional curl, crease or tear, paper is usually cooperative,…
“[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…
Welcome to Six Block Rule, a series of conversations considering art openings, panels, exhibitions and more happening in the Boston area. Titled after the idea that viewers should take that distance before making critical comment, Six Block Rule seeks to…
“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…
Pills are talismans. They are tiny, portable and therapeutic, secular-but-sorcerous objects whose enchantments are swiftly and secretly invoked. Psychoanalyst Ernest Becker wrote, “Pills and pellets are forms of fetishes, ways of overcoming anxiety, the terror of the body, 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…
Curiously familiar symbols on aged paper greet the viewer of Rich Cali’s Poor Moon exhibition (on view through Oct. 24) at The Mingo Gallery in Beverly, MA. His work, made while on a cross-country journey from Texas to Massachusetts, plays with…
Out of the darkness they come, like Orpheus blinking into the light, or that mob of dead souls called up by Odysseus to drink from a puddle of blood. The subjects of these photographs are all, or most of them,…
As we rapidly approach tomorrow’s Big Red Shindig, we want to share with you work from some of the great artists we’ll be showcasing. This year we’re excited to partner with Kathleen Smith Redman, Exhibitions Director at the New Art Center…