Newest Features
Adam Pendleton’s forearms resting on Yvonne Rainer’s hands is a hopeful image. Not kumbaya, we’re all brothers and sisters no matter our race, gender, sexuality, or age kind of superficial hopeful. Instead, it’s a hopefulness born out of the possibility for exchange, of taking the time to learn something from one another face-to-face and to bear each other’s weight. To film this video portrait, Pendleton met Rainer at her favorite New York City diner, which she calls her “office” away from home. Pendleton boils down the three-hour meeting to thirteen minutes of…
Marca X is a cross-institutional endeavor created by the Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA), the Boston LGBTQIA Artist Alliance (BLAA), the Harvard Ed Portal, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. This collaboration presents art that is focused on listening, seeing, and empathizing. I say “empathizing” because the artists gathered at the Villa Victoria Center for the Arts and Harvard Ed Portal Crossings Gallery do not want or need sympathy. Instead, they ask that the audience acknowledge their vulnerability, their agency, and…
Big Red & Shiny is pleased to welcome Boston-based artist Ria Brodell to our residency series, Inside/Out. Brodell’s painstakingly rendered gouache paintings depict pre-twentieth-century historical figures who strayed outside their assigned gender and sought alternative ways of living. “Butch Heroes” memorializes their stories—sometimes tragic, other times surprisingly hopeful. Fueled by extensive research and modeled after the Catholic Holy Card, Brodell’s paintings honor their subjects in a way they likely were not in their lifetimes. Each jewel-toned painting acts as a window to the past, shedding light on the history of gender fluidity. In their…
She’s Not Here, on view through January 26th at VERY, features work by New York-based artists Heather Rowe and Meredyth Sparks. Although the artists work independently, in this installation their collective works propose an eerie narrative rooted in domestic nostalgia and question our sense of reality. Through sculpture and a video projection, Rowe recreates the story of a supernatural haunting of a woman in the 1970’s—which also became the basis for the 1983 horror movie The Entity. Sparks employs reconstructed sculpture and cut and sewn digital paintings that fracture our perception of…
With its walls hung with Graham McDougal’s dizzying prints, and pedestals scattered across the floor with Bayne Peterson’s undulating sculptures perched atop them, Providence College’s Hunt-Cavanaugh Gallery takes on the feeling of a television set between channels, a physical manifestation of the vibrating static and whirring buzz. With the exception of a pair of large knot-shaped sculptures and a print depicting a monochrome gallery space, the works in A Dialogue on Distortion, curated by Jamilee Lacy, are all abstract. The linear compositions of McDougal’s prints are mirrored in the plywood from which…
Shantell Martin January 9 – March 12 Northeastern University Gallery 360 Martin’s stream-of-consciousness drawings are on full display, roaming across 14 color-washed canvases—a marked departure from her typical monochromatic linework and performative drawing. What Can I Say? January 10 – March 3 Montserrat College of Art 301 Gallery Coming on the heels of a year that shook our notion of truth and facts, in which statements could be spoken and later denied, and words became malleable, slippery things, the nine artists featured in this exhibition employ language in their work to re-examine…
Joe Bradley’s mid-career retrospective at the Rose Art Museum, on view through January 28, opens with a wall of drawings that may convince you that the survey stretches back to adolescence. A cartoon dog’s head floats on a largely empty page like an abandoned doodle from a teenager’s notebook. Geometric patterns are colored in on cheap, shriveled graph paper and memo pads. They look like ideas torn out of a sketchbook without any fuss over archival materials or awareness of future value. The drawings are surprisingly recent creations though, and valuable works…
I have only lived in the Boston area for a little over a year now, and I feel like I have only scratched the surface of the many museums just outside the city. Looking back at my photos in the new year, I happily rediscovered some gems from the past year of art viewing. Unfortunately, these shows have closed, but here are a few exhibitions that were worth the trip and just a podcast drive’s away. — Josh Fischer Samantha Fields Mistress, Miss, Mrs or Ms, Madam? Gordon College October 28–December 12,…