Newest Features
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 potential sales, BR&S wants to provide the artist-in-residence with an outlet to place their practice in a more public realm, offering an expanded look at the creative process and placing emphasis on the time ideas and works take to mature. It is not expected that the artist produces anything finished or specific…
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 and dribble in a palette of creams, olive greens, and bruise-like purples. But “beautiful mess” contains that additional kernel of wry humor buried in the heart of her work. It is also the title of the show’s largest, most recent and noteworthy piece. Beautiful Mess, the artwork, lurks in Kingston’s central gallery.…
“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 and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is considered more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.” — Excerpt from “A Black Feminist…
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. On the other hand, it could be the most natural place as if the supposed blank slate were the only way to look at the history and forms of architectures past would be to negate the architecture currently inhabited. In On the Wall: Assaf Evron at Providence College, Evron takes on the…
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 about contemporary art practices and culture, status in the art world/market, and how they are affected by our current socio-political climate. Silvi Naci: You recently traveled to Israel as part of a curatorial group in efforts to meet with artists, museum directors, and curators in hopes for future collaborations. Can you 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 manipulated truths. Digesting Shelley Reed’s paintings felt a lot like discovering that tick on the back of your leg hours after a jaunt through the woods. With the utmost conviction, the tick quietly clung to its chosen host, fastened itself within the layers of fleshy epidermis, and fed until its swollen body…
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 ceremoniously adorn the entryway. Passing underneath the awning, the mood changes to contemplative as you enter a space lined with stacked couches, tables, fans, and other detritus tightly bound in crisscrossing, soiled firehoses. Actual fire escape stairs, surreally transplanted from a tenement building, hang from the ceiling in the center of the…
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 the viewer. Likewise, Bagenal’s minimal materials and repeated motifs take on emotive strength through association between the mysterious and the known, the abstract and the familiar. Suspended by the entrance of the front gallery and floating above the floor, Summer Palace is the central piece of the show. The exhibition also comprises…