Newest Features
When I found out that the artist A.K. Burns was one of the Radcliffe fellows at Harvard this year, I was excited to have gotten that memo because things come and go pretty quietly over there. My husband works next to the Radcliffe, so I walk by it often and tend to get nosy. Yet, a lot of it manages to still slip by me. Each year, distinguished artists and scholars from all over the world come to Cambridge for a year-long research residency. The artists often give a public talk and…
Whenever an immersive art experience takes place in Boston, I hear many people say: “This is exactly what Boston needs…we need more of this.” I don’t think it’s the spectacle people need. I think people crave a space where they can be immersed in art and culture, find solitude, and a place that’s outside their daily routine, a way to be part of something larger, creative and inclusive. In KNOW NO at the Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama, Masary Studios (Ryan Edwards, Maria Finkelmeier, and Sam Okerstrom-Lang) activated a historic space…
Observance: As I See You, You See Me (up through April 8 at the Montserrat College of Art Gallery in Beverley, MA) is an exhibition of portrait photography that features multiple viewpoints on identity. Curated by Leonie Bradbury, the variety of portraits creates a provocative exploration of how judgments are made based on a person’s skin color, physical appearance or clothing choices. The exhibition is timely, with identity politics under attack and hate crimes on the rise. In this tense moment, the show implicates the viewer: how do I see you? How…
Doug Weathersby turns the act of cleaning and organizing into his art. For $60 an hour, Environmental Service will perform any task that the customer may need, from house painting and studio cleanup to art installation. He takes the fragments and detritus from each job and records them for his daily logs, a project that documents materials, grocery lists, and the billable hours he worked. He has done this daily since 2009, and by taking objects and photographs he inserts himself and makes these chores into a body of work. A Year…
In One Makes an Instrument of Themselves, and is Estranged Also, collaborators Mimi Cabell and Lindsay Foster probe the “the commercialized self, the marketized private life.” As today’s corporate landscape ostensibly reorients itself toward workers’ happiness, Cabell and Foster remind us that alienated labor is far from a historical fad. Building on work recently shown at Minneapolis’ The Soap Factory, the duo’s installation and videos antagonize the idea of a happy worker. Cabell and Foster hope to “dislodge the viewer slightly,” which they accomplished with a live animal performance at the opening…
Vitreous Bodies: Assembled Visions in Glass centers on the material of glass, but maneuvers past the typical, disposable aftertaste of many material-based exhibits. Located at MassArt’s Stephen D. Paine Gallery, the show gathers over a dozen international artists who use glass either primarily or sporadically. In fact, the longer I lingered in the gallery and observed the variations–from scale to viewer participation to the sheer logistics of how the pieces were installed–the more I felt that glass might be the only link between these artists. Overall this variety leads to an enjoyable…
DRAW/Boston, an exhibition of over 60 artists curated by Tomas Vu, toys with scale, color, style, and sound, wedding the scholarly air of a professional university gallery with the aesthetic resemblances of a working artist’s studio. The arrangement alone warrants questions of intent and reason, and with such a broad interpretation of ‘drawing,’ the diverse spectrum of techniques exhibited requires a premeditated understanding of the creative process. Upon entering the Bakalar & Paine Galleries, a monochromatic, cacophonous crowd of faces and people are illustrated on a plywood canvas stretching from floor to…
“What is radical in 2016-2017?” artist, activist, educator Morehshin Allahyari asked the audience in attendance for her talk “On Activism, Digital Colonialism, and Re-figuring” at UMass Lowell last Wednesday afternoon. Born in Iran and a resident of the US since 2007, Allahyari literally toggles political and literal boundaries as much as her work with new media addresses the nuances of collective memory, national myth, pedagogy, and poetics. Solid State Mythologies at UMass Lowell’s University Gallery presented recent projects addressing techno-capitalism and petroleum products and their correlation to war, violence, censorship, and neo-nationalism.…