Just as we get pummeled with snow, there's no better time to update our preview of spring exhibitions. Many of these are shows that just opened and we hope to catch, as well as a few upcoming events on our radar.
-- BRS editorial team
Still from Jeffrey Gibson, Like A Hammer
THURSDAY, MARCH 15
Jeffrey Gibson: Performance
6:30 pm
Tufts University Art Galleries
Included in the current exhibition A Decolonial Atlas, Jeffrey Gibson is a multidisciplinary artist who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half Cherokee. Gibson will debut, "Don't Make Me Over," a performance about language, identity, and history.
Courtesy of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR Radio) Archive, Cologne.
TUESDAY, MARCH 20
Performance: Sound Inventur - New Music Festival, 1953
8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Harvard Art Museums
A recreation of a 1953 music festival in Harvard Art Museums’ Menschel Hall. The program will include early compositions from the Studio for Electronic Music at WDR in addition to a series of experimental pieces by French composer Pierre Schaeffer, Cinq études de bruits (Five Studies of Noises), which was referenced in the original broadcast.
Wendy Jacob, Ice Floe, 2011, woods, paint, electronic components, sound
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21
Panel Conversation: Sounds: Wendy Jacob, Michael Palace, and Daniel R. Howard
12:10 –1 pm
University of New Hampshire, Museum of Art
Paul Creative Arts Center, A218
A promising “sounding” interdisciplinary conversation between Wendy Jacob (artist), Michael Palace (ambient sound artist and UNH Research Associate Professor, Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space), and Daniel R. Howard (UNH Assistant Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior).
Be sure to also check out at the museum:
Andrew Witkin, Syndicates
Long Eye group exhibition including Eric Aho, Resa Blatman, Wendy Jacob, Andrea Juan, Anna McKee, Claudia O'Steen and Aly Ogasian
Both on view through March 31
Erin Johnson
still from If it Won’t Hold Water, it Surely Won’t Hold a Goat
video
2014
OPENING MARCH 23
THIS DESIRE: poetics & longing
Able Baker
Portland, ME
On view through May 7
Curated by The Chart's Jenna Crowder, THIS DESIRE explores the nuance of longing and how it informs identity.
Caitlin Keogh, Rampant Vulnerability, 2017, Simon Lee Gallery
TUESDAY, MARCH 27
Talk: Caitlin Keogh
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Boston University
Fuller Building, Room 303, 3rd Floor
In advance of her upcoming exhibition this summer at the ICA Boston, Keogh will discuss her sartorially seductive and sinister paintings at BU.
Yvonne Rainer, from the archive of Jack Mitchell, 1982.
THURSDAY, APRIL 12
Conversation: Yvonne Rainer with Renée Green
6 pm
CCVA
Level 0, Lecture Hall
Experimental dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer in conversation with artist Renée Green on themes in her current exhibition Within Living Memory.
William Kentridge, Refugees (You will find no other seas), 2017
Aquatint etching, 163 x 156 cm, Artist Proof Studio, Johannesburg, SA
THROUGH APRIL 14
William Kentridge: Triumphs & Laments
Emerson Urban Arts: Media Art Gallery
A recent body of work by William Kentridge originally produced as a 550-meter long frieze along the banks of the Tiber River in Rome. This exhibition includes the complete set of aquatint etchings and woodcuts relating to the frieze, two long maquettes that diagram its figural processional, a set of monumental stencils, and a video of the opening performance in Rome.
Sean Fader, 365 Profile Pics (detail), 2016-17
THROUGH APRIL 20
You Never Know How You Look Through Other People’s Eyes
ICA at MECA
Exhibition curated by artist Scott Patrick Wiener. Artists include: Sonia Almeida, Paul S. Briggs, Caleb Charland, Sean Downey, Sean Fader, Sean Glover, Jaclyn Jacunski, AJ Liberto, Lilly McElroy, Eric Petitti, Scott Patrick Wiener.
Ian McMahon, Fugitive, 2016, plaster, steel, hardware, 40 x 13 x 12 feet, Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, Alfred, NY, Image courtesy of the Artist.
OPENING APRIL 20
Sculpting with Air: Ian McMahon and Jong Oh
DeCordova Museum
On view through September 30
Looking forward to seeing how these two sculptors with contrasting styles will tackle the DeCordova spaces in their temporary, site-specific works. McMahon uses sprayed plaster to make voluminous, pillowy forms. Jong Oh uses string, wire, and Plexiglas to focus on transparency and lightness.
Ella Cooper, from the Body Land Identity Photographic Series.
THROUGH APRIL 21
Representing Feminism(s)
Lamont Gallery
Over 30 contemporary artists, working in media including silkscreen, watercolor, fiber arts, and video, explore feminism’s impact and potential, and create an opportunity to represent more diverse and inclusive feminisms.
Nadia Haji Omar, Untitled, 2017, acrylic and dye on panel, 20 x 16 inches. Image courtesy the artist and Kristen Lorello, NYC.
OPENING THURSDAY, APRIL 26 at 6:00 pm
Haji Omar
Providence College Galleries
April 26 - July 28, 2018
Haji Omar’s On the Wall project is an architectural and visual meditation inspired by the hundreds of years worth of handwritten Sinhalese and Tamil poetry found on the “mirror wall” at Sigiriya, an ancient rock fortress in the artist’s native country of Sri Lanka.
Andrew Fish, The Bridge, 2016
THROUGH MAY 3
Constructing Memory: Andrew Fish & Pavel Romaniko
Hynes Convention Center
Curator Caitlin Foley’s excellent pairing of two artists using photography in very different ways to explore how memory may acquire more meaning as it diminishes and degrades. Andrew Fish’s paintings use gesture and color to embellish snapshots of often banal in-between spaces – a bridge or a crosswalk – with an atmospheric sense of light and space. Pavel Romaniko photographs meticulously constructed miniature environments to create desolate scenes drawn from current events in Russia and Soviet history.
Pavel Romaniko, Untitled (Meeting), 2014
Lisa Yuskavage, Blonde Brunette and Redhead (detail), 1995
Oil on linen, 36 x 114 in.
THURSDAY, MAY 3
Talk: Lisa Yuskavage
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Boston University
Fuller Building, Room 303, 3rd Floor
THROUGH MAY 5
ReSignifications
The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art
Harvard
Guest curator, Awam Ampka links contemporary art with classical and popular representations of African bodies in European art.
Dave Cole, The Music Box, 2012, Caterpillar CS-553 Vibratory Roller-Compacter with cherry wood, spring steel and United
States National Anthem (arranged for steamroller), 8 x 19 x 11 feet, Courtesy of the artist
THROUGH JUNE 3
Fantastical Political
Fitchburg Art Museum
Political content infused with decorative and architectural ornament. Includes five New England artists: Dave Cole, Cynthia Consentino, Mohamad Hafez, Dinorá Justice, and Joo Lee Kang.
JENNIFER PACKER, AN EXERCISE IN TENDERNESS, 2017. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND CORVI-MORA, LONDON.
THROUGH JULY 8
New Exhibitions
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis
An exhibition of paintings by Jennifer Packer, a 1960s “classroom in a box” of radical pedagogy that was like a proto-Internet, and Praying for Time, a show that presents contemporary works from the collection from the 1980s through early 2000s.
George Grosz, Lions and tigers nourish their young, ravens feast their brood on carrion… (detail), 1922.
THROUGH JULY 15
The Robbers: German Art in a Time of Crisis
Portland Museum of Art
Highlighting the complete portfolio of George Grosz’s 1922 The Robbers, this exhibition showcases prints executed between the two World Wars. Grosz based his study on Friedrich Schiller's iconic 1781 play of the same name but depicts the vast social discord within 1920s Berlin. In addition to Grosz’s works, the exhibition features provocative pieces by printmakers including Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and Käthe Kollwitz.
Also, be sure to check out:
2018 PMA Biennial
Through June 3
THROUGH JULY 31
Gun Country
Addison Gallery of American Art
Extremely timely in terms of our national conversation. Gun Country will be presented in the Museum Learning Center to look at how firearms are represented in the Addison’s collection.
Natasha Bowdoin, Maneater, Image courtesy of the artist, Installation at MASS MoCA, Photo: David Dashiell
ONGOING
Natasha Bowdoin: MANEATER
MASS MoCA
Opening Reception
Saturday, March 24, 2018, 5:30-7pm
Free for members
$20 for not-yet-members
Artist Natasha Bowdoin’s cut paper and collage installation references Golden Age children’s book illustrations, 19th-century botanical drawings, floral textile patterns, lunar maps, and prints of underwater sea life. The lush and sprawling installation feels like the perfect harbinger of spring.
