Newest Features
Blueprint for Counter Education, an exhibition on view at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis through July 8, turns each museum visitor into a “reader-looker-responder.” The term is one used by Maurice Stein and Larry Miller, the 1969 creators of the educational cosmos and “classroom in a box” that was Blueprint for Counter Education. The original edition was printed by Doubleday and went on sale in bookstores in 1970. This object was a genuine effort to map out—and radically redefine—the idea of a classroom environment as an aporia between lineages of great…
This year’s MFA Thesis Exhibition at MassArt, which closes on May 12, packs both floors of Bakalar & Paine Gallery with selected works from eighteen artists. The show is overwhelming in the sheer quantity of pieces on display as well as its overall strength—each of the MFA candidates merits praise for a cohesive and captivating body of work. However, in my viewing daze I was compelled to linger a little bit longer at three of the student’s contributions. I’d like to highlight these standouts in the profiles below: Devvrat Mishra A tiny…
Anna Schuleit Haber’s exhibit Scientific Purposes (In which a murderous hairdresser donates his head to science, with one restriction) creates a space for people to confront their unique stories, especially their tragedies. She deliberately does not say much about her work to steer viewers to summon their ideas. Continuing with the philosophy and art series, this exhibit connects effortlessly with Aristotle’s notion of catharsis with some additional insight from Camus’ thoughts on the absurd. At the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Schuleit Haber displayed seven mixed media works from an ongoing series. Each are…
Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. Intrigued by a book of poems you’ve just discovered at your local bookstore, you decide to get in touch with its young author with an appreciative mail. (You’re about the same age, and you notice in her bio that you share an alma mater, so why not?) Finding her contact information online, you send a short note expressing your admiration for her work and asking, if she has a minute, might she say what inspires it. Here’s what comes back: “My praxis resides at the…
Geometry of Oppression, an exhibition of new work by multidisciplinary artist Sandra Erbacher, is on view at SPACE Gallery in Portland. Through corporate critique and critical reflection on bureaucracy, her approach to artmaking compliments the conceptual nature of the work to articulate ideas. Humans form an understanding of the world through engagement with objects and spaces; knowing is malleable and shifts when new variables are presented. New ways of seeing are possible dependent on the body’s interaction or non-interaction. The content of the Erbacher’s works deals with a discussion of hierarchical structures…
Just as the last embankments of winter snow dissipated into rivulets in the corners of Brown University’s campus, five mural-sized photographs of polar icescapes materialized on its prominent building facades. Installed in conjunction with the more traditional gallery exhibition, 33°, the murals range from the humorous, an image of tourists wandering aimlessly across an aqua blue expanse, to a sobering, a black fissure opening stark and deep in what we are to assume is an arctic ice sheet, to the iconic, a lonely polar bear drifting on a small iceberg. The gallery…
During his performance Don’t Make Me Over at the Tufts University Art Galleries on March 15, artist Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw-Cherokee) deconstructed Dionne Warwick’s 1962 hit song into a strange, cyclical chant, part incantation and part love ballad. The words he sung—”Don’t make me over / Now that you know how I adore you” and “Accept me for what I am / Accept me for the things that I do”—were printed on rainbow-hued, floor-to-ceiling curtains that served as a backdrop against which Gibson performed in a costume that transformed him into what he…
Contemporary Master Drawings at Cade Tompkins Projects continues Tompkins’s mission of exhibiting compelling contemporary art. All of the drawings on view in Providence until April 28th were also presented in New York in Master Drawings New York 2018. Since its founding in September 2009, Cade Tompkins Projects has become the locus of sophisticated exhibitions like this one, where viewers can wander from the transcendence of Nancy Friese’s monumental watercolors, to the frozen, foreboding industrial landscapes of Allison Bianco, to the tersely cerebral edges of Max van Pelt’s drawings (about modernist abstract paintings),…