When Matter & Light director, Ian Corbin, describes his life’s origin, it is almost unbelievable. This, in part, is due to his aesthetic: he’s on the couch in the back of the gallery finishing up an email on his MacBook…
Amy Beecher sat cross-legged and casual on a magenta carpet in a thoroughly pink and red room on a warm Saturday night in May. Speaking in a clear, precise, and uninflected lilt, Beecher read aloud to an audience surrounding her,…
Upon entering the Paris-based Charlotte Moth’s exhibition Seeing While Moving at the MIT List Visual Arts Center I felt an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. While the show has since closed to the public, its sentiment is timely. In a pop culture…
Sun Splashed: Nari Ward, the artist’s largest survey to date, is now on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Mannion Family Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Associate, this show couldn’t have come at a…
In this conversation with dancer and performance artist Jimena Bermejo, we explore the interdependent themes of belonging, immigration, borders, and human relationships in regards to dance and performance art. With a background in dance and theater, Bermejo’s practice centers on…
Every Saturday morning I water plants and draw cartoons. Before that I drink coffee and eat a quick breakfast, usually toast. My watering can was produced by Union Products, Inc. in Leominster, which was a major plastic manufacturing city in…
Earlier this spring, Ann Lewis drove from Detroit to Boston to create a four-story mural. This wasn’t just any mural. Lewis would paint the mural on a building in Boston’s historic South End and would work with residents of the…
Jesse Kaminsky, a Boston-based artist and DJ, makes work that oozes and crystallizes, and his radio show focuses on matters science fiction and the extraterrestrial. In his new exhibition, Scoped, on view at The Distillery Gallery through July 6, his sculptures and medium-scale installation center…
A green, furry fiend lingers in the center of A Brief Case, one of Stuart Diamond’s latest paintings. Behind this Grinch-like ghoul, the scales of justice teeter on an elephant trunk, imperiled. A curtain of flame sizzles in the distance.…
On September 16th, visitors to Cambridge Common Park may do a double take when they encounter a large black Windsor chair in the midst of the numerous war memorials and monuments. Curious passersby may sit with a friend or stranger…
Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) wasn’t the first, nor will she be the last female artist to use her own body, feminine processes, and the stuff of the earth in her art—of her generation, Judy Chicago and Kiki Smith immediately come to…
Inside/Out is Big Red & Shiny’s artist-in-residence series, offering a space for artists to write about their ideas, research, and challenges, and publish their inspirations, obsessions, creative experiences, and insights. Unlike an ‘Open Studio’ format, which is often predicated on…
Sarah Meyers Brent’s current exhibition, Growth and Decay, ought to—by the artist’s own admission—have been called Beautiful Mess. “Growth and decay” is a precise summation of how Brent’s assemblages and paintings, on view at Kingston Gallery through July 1, bulge…
“We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of black women, this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening…
I remember many discussions from my time in art school about the “conventions of the gallery” and it’ white-walled, white-pedestalled attempts at non-architecture. With this consideration, the “white cube,” it is perhaps an odd choice for a show about architecture.…
Carlos Jiménez Cahua is an artist and curator living and working in NY. I have known CJC for a couple of years and have shared some wonderful and insightful conversations together. On May 1, we finally sat down to talk…
Paranoia has a way of creeping up the spine and burrowing into the brain. Like a tick in the woods waiting for the right moment to latch onto its next host, it feeds—gorging itself on suspicions of falsehoods, naivety, and…
Walking into Nari Ward’s retrospective Sun Splashed at the ICA Boston, you are greeted with calypso music piping out of a bright yellow bodega awning that reads HAPPY SMILERS in kitschy font. Hanging bottles of colorful Tropical Fantasy fruit soda…
The ethereal aesthetic of Caroline Bagenal’s Summer Palace—on view at Boston Sculptors Gallery through June 11—awakens one’s emotions. In this exhibition, her sculptures hang from the ceiling rather than stand on plinths. They activate the gallery’s negative space, immediately engaging…
“There is both capricious absurdity and poetic impossibility in the realm of the unconscious lapses of time that constitute dreams.”[1] -Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons While I reflect upon the indeterminacy of global political conditions, I continue to be buoyed by…