On view this March at Laconia Gallery is an unassuming yet satisfying two-person show featuring the work of Danielle Kelly and Gary LaPointe, both BFA candidates from the Art Institute of Boston. This show explores the poetics of the fragmented:…
The book is printed on black-and-white heavyweight paper.1 It has a pale-gray, cardstock cover, lightly embossed with a grid of six squares on the front, and with the negative space between them on the back. The font, with a few…
Clifford Landon Pun Opium, No Pun Intended, 2011 Digital print on plinth, 36″ x 54 Image Courtesy Melissa Blackall Photography It sounds like a karaoke bar, a din of voices carrying on private conversations while someone in the back…
The decision to pair Guillermo Srodek-Hart’s Interiors with Lynn Saville’s Vacancy is so compelling that I expected it to have been a curatorial strategy as carefully crafted as military tactics. But longtime gallery director and owner Arlette Kayafas knows the…
In an effort to leave future generations of Americans the lasting legacy and beauty of art, Isabella Stewart Gardner, along with many of her contemporaries including Henry E. Huntington, J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Clay Frick, amounted some of…
Last December, I bought a book at JP Knit and Stitch called ‘Hooked on Crochet.’ I attribute this uncharacteristic move to pick up a craft to a former student of mine, Emma Lanctot, who made a gorgeously red, lacy wrap…
In The Century of Artists’ Books, art historian and artist Johanna Drucker argues that artists’ books are the quintessential 20th century art form par excellence. Drucker points out that artists’ books came of age after 1945 when these gained their…
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 Have Been: Art, Love, & Politics in the 1980s, which…
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, past Hawaii but before Japan, is a collection of landmasses called the Marshall Islands. When the Europeans finally came calling in the early 16th century on their exploration ships there was trepidation,…
There’s no question that Bruce Davidson is a lion of twentieth century photography, and with good reason. His silver gelatin prints are atmospheric, transporting viewers to a rough and tumble 1960s Harlem neighborhood. Like the work of Lewis Hine, Walker…
Company One’s production of You For Me For You, by local playwright Mia Chung, opens at the table of sisters Minjee and Junhee, where conversation revolves around each insisting the other eat the meager meal. “Revolves” is the word: the…
Currently up now at Proof Gallery in South Boston is Boston Does Boston Six— a group exhibition featuring six artists either living or working in the city. The exhibition is organized around artists choosing one another, resulting, according to the…
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 have tried to break out of the frame and off…
The relationship between a mentor and mentee is often complex on all kinds of levels. Within any mentoring relationship there can be disagreements, accomplishments, tough love and the inspiration to constantly keep trying. Unlike a teacher/student relationship where one person…
I wanted to like Ann Hamilton’s ‘the event of a thread’ and I did, but not in the ways I anticipated. Reading about the elements of Hamilton’s installation at the Park Avenue Armory (NYC) I imagined an experience of transcendence…
Art openings in December are difficult to attend and hold for a simple reason, “other obligations.” In the face of the additional responsibilities put on many around this time of year, there are still a few who trudge on, decide…
The 2012 election cycle is mercifully over, and the outcome is probably as good as we could have hoped for, considering options. While some milestones were crossed (a record number of women in the Senate, a few positive strides for…
Irony has long associated with hollowness in contemporary culture. “Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush,” writes F. Scott Fitzgerald of Antony Patch, the doomed protagonist of his 1922 novel, The Beautiful and…
The CMCA, Rockport’s Center for Maine Contemporary Art, is doing something right. Its Biennial, which closes next Wednesday after a 2 month run, showcases the work of 17 artists who live and work, at least part-time, in the State of…
While driving home from my family’s house on Black Friday I was surprised to see an open sign in front of the Boston Cyberarts Gallery. I had missed the opening event for their new show and had been meaning to…