Last summer, John Massie dropped into the Center for Arts at the Armory for a spontaneous meeting with director Lea Ruscio. Massie shared his vision for a day of learning in which lines between teacher and student are blurred, and…
You may remember completing our brief readership survey last fall, although that blissfully snowless period seems like eons ago. You might remember, then, giving us a piece of your mind, telling us what you did and didn’t like about the…
Everyone wants to live somewhere else, and, much of the time, we do just that. We edit our perceptions, wreathing a place in nostalgic associations or turning a blind eye to present social injustice. To one extent or another, we…
Düsseldorf, Germany’s K21 Ständehaus is comprised of four wings of continuous arcades that extend up five stories and open onto a large piazza. The interior space is filled with natural lighting emitted from the glazed dome roof that covers the…
Born out of a conversation in 2002 between an SMFA graduate student (Sean Horton) and instructor (Matthew Nash) about the viability of bringing arts coverage in Boston to the web, Big Red & Shiny has since been a labor of…
Born out of a conversation in 2002 between an SMFA graduate student (Sean Horton) and instructor (Matthew Nash) about the viability of bringing arts coverage in Boston to the web, Big Red & Shiny has since been a labor of…
February marks the six-month anniversary of Ampersand, the monthly contemporary music series co-hosted by the MIT List Visual Arts Center and WMBR, MIT’s college radio station. As its namesake suggests, Ampersand was born of a spirit of collaboration in an…
The Providence Preservation Society recently released their annual list of the Most Endangered Properties in Rhode Island’s capital. The list is a tradition around which preservation efforts in the city coalesce, focusing the efforts of advocates for historic properties. Numerous…
Last Wednesday, after dark, two dimly lit galleries in the Museum of Fine Arts resonated with words. To those familiar with Boston’s generally stoic and tight-lipped durational performance art1, Jeffrey Gibson and Patty Chang must have seemed awfully talkative. Onto…
Thanks to the MBTA, I was about ten minutes late to the Public Hearing with Mayor Walsh’s Arts and Culture Transition Team at Boston Public Library’s Robb Auditorium. But when I ran into the Hearing around 9:40am last Saturday, I…
The 2013 Carnegie International is neither humble nor shy. The exhibition, hosted at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, is a sharp and deliberate display of critical perspective featuring 35 artists and collectives from 19 countries. The selection is…
Is there anything more invigorating than writing a response to the response to the response of a boldly political tract of Marxist art criticism? Such discourse is the lifeblood of a belief system that for a generation has little choice…
A friend pointed out that a career takes a lifetime to take its unique shape, which is longer than I can conceive of. It’s defined he said not by who is tipping their hat to you at any given time,…
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 putting together this labor of love? It’s immoral. How does…
I tend to generate stacks of things – papers, books, wooden blocks, foam bits. I like to keep moving, otherwise I can get stuck. Generating a critical mass of something keeps me from making any one thing too important. Developing…
By Stephanie Cardon December 30, 2013 Here’s my tug from the archive, with notes. My picks are pieces I found creative in and of themselves, either because of the way they were written, or because of their author’s approach to…
Ah, the list. The end of the year always means that the reading public is beleaguered with lists, each purporting to tell us the best and worst contribution to culture over the past twelve months. I’m always torn with lists;…
2013’s end is nigh, and we at BR&S can hardly believe it. We’re full of pride over what we’ve been able to accomplish and cover in our first full calendar year since our relaunch. But, much like in our diverse…
Adriana Lara, a conceptual artist working in New York and Mexico City, makes work that seems both demanded by and wonderfully indicative of a new type of epistemology of digital exchange. But this can be stated of many younger artists…
In a recent conversation with Amy Sillman at the opening of Leidy Churchman’s provocative solo show, Lazy River, at the Boston University Art Gallery, I asked Sillman about the state of painting. In 2011, Artforum considered the “The Ab-Ex Effect,”…