Newest Features
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 more appropriate socio-political time while our country is being separated. The monumental works presented here investigate social justice, immigration, memory, oppression, and power while engaging in local sites, history, and many different communities. The exhibition, comprised of works spanning across 20 years, has traveled the last three years, first at the Perez…
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 creating intimate relationships with audience members by inviting them to be physically more engaged in her work. Silvi Naçi: Let’s start from the beginning with your childhood. Your mom was a singer, and your dad was an actor. I also want to know more about grandfather’s show in which you performed in.…
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 central Massachusetts. Don Featherstone’s pink flamingos were made there. If you’ve never seen a pink lawn flamingo, go to your nearest suburb now. They’re currently produced by Cado Company, located in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. For two years, I’ve driven past the building nearly everyday. Their specialities are molded plastic novelty items including piggy…
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 McGrath House (a re-entry residence run by Community Resources for Justice for formerly imprisoned females) to create its design. Over two workshops, the women created collages from Lewis’s prompts for them: “Who I Am Now” and “Who I Want To Be In The Future.” From those collages Lewis created See Her, a…
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 around science fiction, dream-based logic, and our world’s existence in different scales and separate dimensions. Naturally, that guiding philosophy raises more questions than it answers. Where did these worlds come from? What dimensions contain them? What does that mean for denizens of this world? Kaminksy’s exclusion of texts and titles further underscores…
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. In the corner rests a pile of bones, guarded by an ox muzzle, teeth bared and hungry for more. Like most of the work in Diamond’s Trunks and Tales—on view at Rhode Island College’s Bannister Gallery through July 14, by appointment—A Brief Case mixes autobiography with cultural lament. The exhibition concerns…
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 on the playful chair that is enlarged to seat two. The work is by artist Allison Smith and part of the Common Exchange public art program curated by Dina Deitsch. The summer-long program seeks to create a sense of shared civic space through performances and temporary works that explore concepts of pathways…
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 mind. But when I viewed Mendieta’s work at the Rose Museum at Brandeis University recently, it wasn’t these artists I thought of, but a novelist. At a time when women were reevaluating their place after the free love movement of the 1960s, Marilyn French’s 1977 novel The Women’s Room became a life…