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My life is worn out. Well, let’s pretend, let’s do nothing! oh, pitiful! And we will exist, and amuse ourselves, dreaming of monstrous loves and fantastic worlds, complaining and quarreling with the appearances of the world, acrobat, beggar, artist, bandit, – priest! –Arthur Rimbaud, “A Season In Hell,” 1873 Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte has remixed Arthur Rimbaud’s nineteenth-century raison d’être to new depths in his sprawling solo show, Free Roses, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The ten-year survey’s opening gallery shares its title with a particularly wicked chapter from…
In a 1968 interview, Anni Albers described her initial relationship with textiles as a tepid one, at best. When she first arrived at the Bauhaus in 1922, each new student was required to take an introductory hands-on workshop. The classes, however, were either already at capacity or didn’t appeal to the 23-year-old Albers. “The only thing that was open to me was the weaving workshop,” recalled the artist. “And I thought that was rather sissy.” [1] In time, however, Albers grew to appreciate what she initially perceived to be the confining limitations of…
In 1984, ten years before her death, Anni Albers published Connections—a culmination, or perhaps a synthesis, of her aesthetic worldview as captured in nine silkscreens. A recent acquisition of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the silkscreen portfolio, reflecting nearly six decades of artistic exploration, inspired the exhibition “Anni Albers: Connections” now on view at the Davis (through Dec. 18). Located in the lower level Marjorie and Gerald Bronfman Gallery, a modest rectangular space, the exhibition is at once spare, logical and layered. Pivotal periods in Albers’s career are represented in “Connections,”…
On September 30th, I, along with a small group of skeptical but cooperative volunteer-participants, an eager and unassuming college marching band, and one very enthusiastic curator with a megaphone, gathered at the entrance of the historic Boston Common. Together we engaged in an hour-long performance centered on UK-based artist Bill Balaskas’s 80-foot-long banner installation entitled The Market Will Save Us.[i] True to the astutely presumptuous title of the loaned artwork and its equally spectacular size, Lanfranco Aceti’s curated performance of the piece consisted of a dramatic public procession of the enormous banner…
Since the ascendance of the term “identity politics” into mainstream discourse in the 1980s, the debate, vitriol, and confusion over what it means to acknowledge our unique subject-positions in the world is enough to drive one away from using the term at all. But the moment we stop trying to acknowledge the politics of our identities we risk reducing our natural variation to a single level, an operation that has historically never ended well. As a cis man, I have been slow to seek out the vocabulary for understanding nonbinary gender and…
“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”-Zora Neale Hurston As a byproduct of a conversation with my dear friend and fellow artist Chanel Thervil, this essay grapples with issues of power presented within Carrie Mae Weems’ exhibition “I once knew a girl…” at the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University. Entering the exhibition, it feels like you are walking through halls of Nefertiti’s tomb, with offerings and images for an afterlife and sounds that guide us through history. Throughout her work, Weems queries how power is propagated…
Pregnancy and parenting can create serious changes to an artist’s process. As installation maestro Sarah Sze elaborated on a 2012 exhibit in London: “The pieces in this show appear to measure space, or time, and now that I have two children, time is more significant. It has more weight.” Those exact themes of time, space, weight, measurement, and parenthood also appear in Anna Shapiro’s Kerfuffle, her latest body of works both flat and sculptural, on view at AS220 Project Space. Since giving birth to her daughter two and a half years ago,…
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 to BR&S in…