A Tug at the Archive: John’s attempt at objectivity
By John Pyper December 31, 2013 To ask an editor to go back through the blur that was the last year? To ask them to renavigate the rough seas of…
Author John Pyper
John Pyper
John is an independent writer and curator. He was the Editor in Chief of Big Red & Shiny from 2012-13 and Journal Editor through June 2014. John has written for Art New England, Art Papers, Artsfuse.org, Artwrit.com, DailyServing.com, the New American Paintings blog, Printeresting.org and others.
The artists of the deCordova Biennial
The deCordova Biennial includes twenty-one artists from all six New England states. In terms of media, it is richly diverse. Generally speaking, the work has a noticeable trend towards…
The Meta-Biennial: the 2013 deCordova Biennial
Over the last few years I’ve developed sympathy for those who organize large, all-encompassing exhibits like biennials. If you hold on too tightly to a curatorial vision, you can create…
Changes
It’s impossible to stop the flow of time. A year ago, BR&S innocently jumped into the various local art ecosystems hoping that our experiment would last longer than a few…
The Foster Prize: Sarah Bapst
Sarah Bapst’s work is compact, unhurried, and subtle. It is the opposite of the work in the joke that named Big Red & Shiny.1 Being the quiet person in…
Odd Spaces at the MFA Boston
Wednesday night the MFA and Big Red & Shiny were proud to present the Odd Spaces panel discussion at the MFA Boston, following the group exhibition of performance art curated…
Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1942-1962
The huge influx of artists and intellectuals from Europe to the United States during the world wars, which created what seemed to be a transfer of power from Paris to…
The Beauty of Running
As a lifelong runner, last week marked not just the terrorization of my town but the terrorization of one of my favorite things to do, other than seeing art. For…
Inside Out: A.J. Liberto
Our Daily Red is pleased to continue our artist-in-residence series titled Inside Out. Every month, a new guest artist will have access to the platform to publish images and…
This Will Have Been and NYC 1993
Two of today’s more compelling shows consider work that was made or displayed for the first time at around the same point. Boston’s ICA of course has This Will…
Singing music from other countries: Song and Dunia Tak Akan Mendengar
I’ve been listening to The Smiths’ The World Won’t Listen on and off for over a month solely because of Phil Collins and Wellesley College. It’s a bit too emo…
The Living Room: Lee Mingwei at the Gardner
Lee Mingwei was born in Taiwan and is based out of New York City. He is currently an artist in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where he has…
Paint Things at the deCordova
The deCordova has just opened their exhibition Paint Things: beyond the stretcher. Curated by Dina Deitsch and Evan Garza, it sets up a thesis about painting, exploring those painters who…
Substrait (Underground Dailies) and The Empirical Effect
It’s funny how seeing art changes you and your interpretations of other work. I’m not sure I would have seen Gordon Matta-Clark’s Substrait (Underground Dailies) or Rosa Barba’s The Empirical…
Who Wore it Best?
Nothing worse than showing up to a holiday party wearing the same festive tie. But currently, both the ICA, Boston and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College are exhibiting Adrian…
December’s Journal Preview
Here’s a preview of December’s Journal done in YouTube videos Full Circle with Heidi Kayser by James Manning https://youtu.be/2OU33aoSSrw Time Body Space Objects 2 by Matthew Kuhlman https://youtu.be/VbWSrhPOc9E The Growing…
Miami- Thursday at PULSE and UNTITLED
It’s hard to separate the experience of looking at individual artists from the fair sometimes. After going to more than one fair though, there are trends that come forward that…
Miami- Wednesday in Basel
So here it is 3:45 in the afternoon on wed, and I’ve already had the ABMB experience in a record four hours. It’s completed; the rest is about finding something…
Tony Smith’s Amaryllis reinstalled in Hartford
Tony Smith was born Sept 23, 1912; this year he would have been 100 years old. Before he became known for making large, abstract geometric sculptures, he had owned a…
Preview: Mark Morrisroe
1980’s Boston was very different from today’s Boston. There was an area called the combat zone, which effectively ran from the common to south station, overlaping Chinatown and the leather…