Newest Features
By BIG RED August 1 through August 2, 2009 Candid snaps from this year’s Bumpkin Island Artist Invasion. Bumpkin Island Art Encampment A video of a Bumpkin Island Gamelan performance. Bumpkin Island Gamelan performance at sunset. From the Berwick Research Institute: The Bumpkin Island Art Encampment was curated by Megan Dickerson, Carolyn Lewenberg and Jed Speare. The 2008 Art Encampment was one of two projects supported by the Berwick Research Institute’s Special Projects Incubator program. The 2009 event was co-presented by Studio Soto and the Island Alliance, a non-profit in support of…
By THOMAS MARQUET Print this article #52: In a special two-part episode of “The White Cube”, Geoff the framer faces death and learns the true meaning of life. Or something like that. Thomas Marquet is a cartoonist, sculptor, and critic, based in Brooklyn.
By STEVE AISHMAN August is the cruellest month. The doldrums of the art world where half of the galleries are closed or not showing new work. Most of the artists are at the beach. August is an annual promise of new life that is coming with September openings. A false hope to those who believe that the art world is like a battery that needs the sun soaked summer to recharge. I don’t see solar panels on the roofs of any museums, quietly trickle charging for a fall explosion of human creative…
By MICAH J. MALONE Marcel Duchamp was always part of the market. Indeed, one can argue (and many have before me) that nearly all of Duchamp’s gestures were linked in one way or another to the economic machinery of his time. His readymades (the shovel, the bottle rack, the urinal and the bicycle wheel) were dependent upon the signature of the artist, or the artist’s perceived authorship, to call a utilitarian object into a different kind of being. The strategy to relocate an object from one category to another (durable good into…
By EVE ESSEX The newest object in the Nightingale-Brown House collection was, until recently, their somewhat infamous Goddard “secretary” desk and bookcase. Adorned with ornate brass hardware and a formidable set of carved shells, this nine-and-a-half foot high cabinet–although it was built in 1993–is not exactly contemporary. It is in fact a stand-in, an exact replica of a piece from the 1790s that sat in the hands of the Brown family and the Nightingale house for 175 years. The original was made by a renowned Newport furniture maker and is one of…
I’ve been struggling to write a review of “Legibility on Color Backgrounds,” the exhibition of Walead Beshty’s photograms and sculptures currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. I can’t decide if the show is brilliant, too clever for its own good or just a repeat of ideas that are painfully outdated. It might be all of the above. Since every draft of my review has been mostly questions, I thought it might be more productive to post them here as a discussion topic. For those that haven’t seen the…
Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue has announced the seven awardees for 2009 in Boston. The two awardees at the $15,000 level are Amie Siegel and Joe Zane; the five recipients of the $3,000 awards are: Claire Beckett, Ambreen Butt, Caleb Cole, Raul Gonzalez, and Eric Gottesman. From the Artadia press release: Applications for the Artadia Awards were open to visual artists in all media and at any stage of their career working and living in metro Boston. The application was available online for two months from April 15 – June…
Today, as I wandered around Jamaica Pond, I noticed that Matthew Hincman’s bench sculpture has returned. It even has a new, fancy concrete base so I assume that it is now permanent. Of course, everyone is a critic, and as I took this picture an older gentleman told me he “doesn’t like it” because “you can’t sit on it. What’s it for?” When I asked if he could appreciate it as a work of art, he said “It’s no Monument, that’s for sure.” Presumably he referred to the granite monument to the…