Since 2013 I’ve been focused—educatively, academically, artistically—on ‘socially-engaged art’ and the idea of learning in public.(1) Over the course of the last ten years, I’ve grown to understand the the site of my own work (as a curator, educator, artist…
Since 1895, cultural institutions from around the world have gathered at the Venice Biennale to present the latest developments in their country’s visual arts, performance, and design. With the Biennale attracting over 500,000 visitors last year, prospective contributors vie to…
Art in Service: a conversation between Leah Triplett Harrington of BR&S, Kate Gilbert of Now + There, and Maggie Cavallo of Alter Projects Last month, the City of Boston launched Boston Creates, its first-ever cultural plan. The ten-year plan aspires…
Since 1895, cultural institutions from around the world have gathered at the Venice Biennale to present the latest developments in their country’s visual arts, performance, and design. With the Biennale attracting over 500,000 visitors last year, prospective contributors vie to…
The Woven Arc, an exhibition at Harvard University’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, demonstrates the important role that textiles have played in the history of art and continue to play in the contemporary art world. Director…
“Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.” – Naomi Wolf For an exhibition centered on information, I certainly didn’t feel informed…
Monday at 5 pm public comments on the Boston Creates Cultural Plan will close. (The full text of the plan draft can be read here along with community comments, including my own). We encourage you to read the Cultural Plan…
One beautiful July morning in 2013 Boston woke to discover green paint had been thrown against the Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial that sits across from the State House in the Boston Public Garden. Outrage followed but…
In his seminal study on the subject, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, James Young distinguishes monuments from memorials as “material objects, sculptures, and installations used to memorialize a person or thing…a memorial may be a day, a…
“Part of what fascinates us when looking at a map is inhabiting the mind of its marker, considering that that particular terrain of imagination overlaid with those unique contour lines of experience.” – Katherine Harmon, You Are Here: Personal Geographies…
This interview is part of the “Boston Common” series that highlights the people and institutions that shape Boston and New England’s culture sector. It features a discussion of Voorhies’s new role as the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director…
Aside from Laurence Weiner’s Dewey Square mural, A TRANSLATION FROM ONE LANGUAGE TO ANOTHER, the best public art I’ve come across in Boston lately is something in the basement of Goodwill in Davis Square, Somerville. There against the back wall…
Thirty years ago prominent critics, historians, and artists testified in court on behalf of sculptor Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, a seventy-three ton steel slab made for the Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. What Serra considered an opportunity for aesthetic challenge…
As we rapidly approach tomorrow’s Big Red Shindig, we want to share with you work from some of the great artists we’ll be showcasing. This year we’re excited to partner with Kathleen Smith Redman, Exhibitions Director at the New Art Center…
“Boston Common” highlights the people and organizations that shape Boston and New England’s cultural sector by going straight to the source to find out who they are, what they are doing, and how and why they do it. We hope…
“Boston Common” highlights the people and organizations that shape Boston and New England’s cultural sector by going straight to the source to find out who they are, what they are doing, and how and why they do it. We hope…
In an effort to provide an in-depth look at single works of art on view across the region in permanent collections, temporary exhibitions, and installations, the staff at Big Red & Shiny will be reviving Art for Breakfast, a series…
In early 2015, the City of Boston began its first cultural plan; an approximately fifteen month process that begins with developing a comprehensive view of Boston’s arts and culture sector, and ends with implementing a custom-made plan to strengthen and…
It’s now an old story—art fairs contribute to globally homogenized tastes in art. Galleries travel around the world and bring their artists with them, so the same aesthetics start appearing in museums and collections everywhere. But what if the art…
In case anyone was wondering what Boston—its artists, its technical whizzes, its city agencies and “urban mechanics” (thank you, Tom Menino), its property owners, its neighborhoods, its private sector—was capable of regarding art in public places and collaboration, the answers…