By JAMES HULL Print this article Boston has some of the same self-image issues that Atlanta does, the city where I lived until 1996. Both cities think of themselves as conservative and strive to be “World Class Cities”. They overlook…
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By THE NEWS EDITOR By now, almost every art-goer in Boston is eerily familiar with the empty, ornate frames hanging on the walls of the Isabella Stewart Garnder Museum – reminders of a tragic and heartbreaking theft. The armed raid…
By SEAN HORTON Why Big, Red and Shiny? Because it is exactly what Boston needs – something to stand up, big and tall for the art and artists of this fine city. This humble arts journal was started with the…
Two questions immediately arise upon confronting the title “Concerning the Spiritual in Photography”: “What is spiritual?” and “Why photography?” The word “spiritual”, much like the words “soul” and “moral”, carries with it a connotation irrepressibly vague and irresistibly personal. This…
Scenario # 1: a dingy warehouse, somewhere behind the Andrews T station. The space is over-run by performance artists of every shape and size. The floor is covered with maybe half a foot of sand, wall to wall, and every…
By WESLEY PIERCE “Discover cutting-edge work in SMFA alumni show” the museum states in its promotional material – as if the school across the street is nurturing some sort of present day avant-garde phenomenon. In all actuality this year’s exhibition…
By KANARINKA New media artwork, activism and organization is happening in Boston despite lack of funding, lack of alternative and multi-use spaces and lack of city and state support. It’s not just once every two years at the Boston CyberArts…
It’s rare to find a entirely cohesive work—that is to say, one where the medium, the subject, and the work’s presentation all work together for a synergistic product that is resistant to any knit-picking art student. But for a work…
By THE NEWS EDITOR Print this article In case you haven’t heard, the MFA is reported to have loaned twenty-one Monet canvases (over half of its permanent collection) to the Bellagio hotel and casino in Las Vegas in exchange for a…
By SARA SEINBERG Print this article k’vetsh… the all-queer all-gender open mic cabaret mayhem has temporarily relocated from the delightful, but closed, Oni Gallery to the glamorous theater at the YMCA in central square. Each month there are two featured performers…
By THE NEWS EDITOR Print this article In other money…uh-um…I mean museum news, the Museum of Fine Arts has recently announced an exhibition of…you guessed it…cars owned by rich people. In spring [2005], the MFA will fill its second-floor galleries with…
By NATALIE LOVELESS Print this article It is impossible to ignore. Sex decorates the room…many moods of sex, many kinds of sex, many days of sex. Sex is contained into entrancing small and medium scale drawings, mounted to wood and arranged…
By MICAH J. MALONE Print this article In her catalog essay for Work Ethic, Helen Molesworth argues that one unifying principle among the incredible diverse field of post World War II art is a concern with the “problematic of artistic labor.” Indeed,…
By RACHAEL ARAUZ Print this article Yasumasa Morimura’s large, flower-adorned self-portrait as Frida Kahlo immediately confronts viewers to the ICA with the image they perhaps most expected to see in Made in Mexico. Not that anyone is expecting to see a young…
By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND Print this article Balagan, an experimental film and video series curated by local filmmakers Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva, brought to us seven works by one of the most important, though relatively obscure film and video artists of…
What can I say that has not already been said? I have played the role of arts advocate for the city of Boston. Loudly proclaiming that yes you can do it here. Every city has a creative core to it.…
What in the hell is going on in this city? As if the non-profit pulse in Boston wasn’t already barely beating, now we’ve been dealt another blow with the city’s closing of the Oni Gallery in Chinatown. How many more…
By THE EDITOR Several artists with ties to Boston have been included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, which has been deemed as the “Intergenerational Biennial.” Among the group are Taylor Davis, Laylah Ali and Sam Durant. Big Red congratulates these…
Alas, we have a Vermeer in town. With only 35 paintings in existence and most of them in town. With only 35 paintings in existence and most of them concentrated in a few collections around the world, Boston should be…
“The false color in the original source material reveals the constructed notion of romance through marketing. My horizons are a kind of global travel through the absurdity of the marketing of love.” –Penelope Umbrico, 2003 The first thing one encounters…