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By BIG RED PUBLISHER Print this article I just wanted to take a few moments, here at the start of autumn, to open the doors of Big RED to all of you, our loyal Big RED fans. As you know, Big RED is a small online arts journal for Boston. We started the project as a way to bring a voice to arts of Boston, and to treat the Hub as it’s own great city rather than a ‘lesser New York.’ Based on the response we’ve had over the last ten issues,…
By MATTHEW NASH Print this article For the next month, the gallery at The Distillery in South Boston is home to the abstract works of Patrick Maloney and Michael Mullaney. At times bright and colorful, sometimes somber and muted, always energetic, this little gem of a show is worth a look. Michael Mullaney’s “You Might Live In A Dome”, like many of his other pieces, screams from the wall with an energy reminiscent of Anselm Kiefer. In the center of the image, a tower marked with thick black charcoal looms over an…
By MICAH J. MALONE Print this article The brand new gallery GASP, founded by Magda Campos-Pons, has opened in Brookline and should be a venue to watch in the coming year. For the opening debut, Evelyn Rydz has assembled Blurring Landscape where the defining of a landscape seems to be avoided in favor of more productive, open ended questions about nature and man’s relationship to his surroundings. From ecologists to theorists, the very notion of landscape and “nature” is highly contested and often defined by a writer’s ideology. In an attempt to…
By BIG RED Print this article Following up on a previous news story, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has been criticzed by the The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), for having loaned 21 of its 36 Monet paintings to the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Arts, the commercial art venue within the Bellagio Hotel and Casino of Las Vegas. Former AAMD president Peter Morrin said, “AAMD is concerned about potential ethical conflicts arising between art museums and for-profit organizations.” The AAMD guidelines stipulate that “In any decision about a proposed loan…
By BIG RED Print this article Are you an upstart artist just getting going in the beginning of your career, only to find you should be concerned about retirement? Do you lack the investment capital because you’re using it next month for rent? A new company, MutualArts has recently created Artist Pension Trust that might afford you the opportunity. The trust works by inviting artists to submit twenty works over twenty years to a tax free fund. The wager is that some of the individual pieces or bodies of work will appreciate…
By BIG RED Print this article This past July, Dr. Steven Kurtz, member of the performance-based Critical Art Ensemble was arraigned on four counts of mail and wire fraud, and, if convicted, could serve up to 80 years in federal prison. Kurtz, who is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Buffalo, along with Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh has been a major figure in a federal investigation suspecting the experimental biological projects of the CAE as potential bioterrorism. Kurtz’s home was raided last…
By MATTHEW GAMBER Print this article What does it mean to understand the concept of place and how do we define it? Cultural essayist J. B. Jackson described the origin of the idea in our modern lexicon — to define the specificity of place — as a transformation of the Latin expression: genius loci. Referring initially to the supernatural guardian presiding over an area, the term transformed over time to mean a place’s influence, its genius or the sense or feeling of that “place”. We can look at a road atlas to…
By ANNEKA LENSSEN Print this article Here in town this summer, Company One staged their take on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. The play, modified from Burgess’s own stage play, was produced at the Boston Center for the Arts. Company One billed it as an experience that would propel viewers into a “shockingly tantalizing exploration of the meaning of free will and the conflict between good and evil.” Actually, the particulars of the Company One production seemed to me to make for a kind of mid-summer hometown zeitgeist. 1. Boston’s own ornamental…