A Zeus, a Jesus, a jester… or is it an evil clown? Actually, it’s President Barack Obama (yes, we can still call him that for a few more precious days)—seen through the lens (literally) of artist Carrie Mae Weems. “The…
Since the ascendance of the term “identity politics” into mainstream discourse in the 1980s, the debate, vitriol, and confusion over what it means to acknowledge our unique subject-positions in the world is enough to drive one away from using the…
Pregnancy and parenting can create serious changes to an artist’s process. As installation maestro Sarah Sze elaborated on a 2012 exhibit in London: “The pieces in this show appear to measure space, or time, and now that I have two…
Conceptual art is often too subtle to reach the edges of our preconceptions, or it is so blatant it prevents our own imaginative leaps. Anila Quayyum Agha’s “Intersections” (2012, laser-cut steel, light bulb), recently on view at the Peabody Essex…
The sculptures in VERY’s inaugural show, Sex Not Sex, inhabits the space in much the same way as the patrons at the opening: some sitting, some standing, others propped against the wall. In a gallery that feels more like a…
I am viewing Providence College–Galleries’ inaugural digital exhibition, Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies, curated by Art F City, and on view in its “IRL” physical form through July 2nd at GRIN, from a window seat of an Amtrak train. The railroad, a…
“Painting is not merely illustration, but real-time communion with ancestors,” reads a wall text in Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia a show at the Harvard Art Museums up through September 18. Spanning several decades of work…
Located on a four hundred acre property in Elbert, Colorado’s Black Forest, JCC Ranch has been a summer home away from home to kids, like Remi Thornton, since 1953. As a ten- to twelve-year-old camper, Thornton developed a personal connection…
The main characters of “Congregation,” the centerpiece in an exhibition of still-life paintings by Joseph Ablow at the Boston University Stone Gallery, are tables which resemble planets. Eons away from the dining room or any realm of domestic activity, they appear…
Realizing durational work such as ‘100 Ways to Consider Time’ is an immense undertaking. As a part of the audience, I was able to stay with Marilyn Arsem’s performance at the Museum of Fine Arts on different days and for…
Exploring time in a new way every day within 6-hour durations through the show 100 Ways to Consider Time at the Museum of Fine Arts, Marilyn Arsem challenges audience members to contemplate time as a material. This multifaceted work of performance…
In Diane Simpson’s sculptures currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the regime of technical drawing collides with the pensile contingency of the textile. To make her sculptures, Simpson subjects the sartorial layer to exacting mathematical study. There is…
Drawing Redefined, on view at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum through March 20, 2016, is an entrancing show, with a presentation that is at once spare and sumptuous. All the works on view spring from a drawing practice, although they are also…
“There’s nothing simple about getting back to nature.” Steve Locke, who curated Arcadia: Thoughts on the Contemporary Pastoral at the Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, began his gallery talk with this cautionary statement, and a gift for each…
In its 65th year, Art of the Northeast, on view through July 26th at Silvermine Arts Center, is unplugged. Out of the eighty-five works in the show, none are new media. Forty-two works are paintings, eleven are prints, six are…
The Icelandic singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir inaugurates the world tour for her new album Vulnicura with seven concerts in New York City, beginning in March 2015 in Carnegie Hall and ending in July at the Governors Ball Music Festival. She took…
What happens when interlocking systems of institutional assumptions about aesthetic valence are deployed as an over-mined field of critical data? How does a shopping list of representative art historical tropes morph into a dynamic rhetorical narrative to unpack those very…