Newest Features
By Ileana Selejan & Thomas Willis On the night of Saturday March 12th at Casablanc Boston, artist Thomas Willis conducted a performance posed as a completely operational nightclub, showcasing work created during his 2015 summer residency at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. “Retrofit Painting Boston Release Party featuring DJ Wigzen presented by Casablanc and Bombay Sapphire” was, as the tell-all title hints, a painting exhibition topped with an alcohol sponsor, a live dj, as well as a bouncer, two fog machines, and infinite lasers. Willis invited Ileana Selejan to collaborate on the project,…
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 Vera Ingrid Grant’s curatorial statement describes the works on display as “an unusual selection of artworks not usually posed in conversation with each other.” What connects these works most compellingly is their engagement with the textile tradition–a tradition with strong roots in African art that extend to the contemporary art of the…
When we aren’t seeing new work and writing about it, we’re probably reading. Here’s a selection of some articles that we’ve read in the past couple of weeks and found particularly engaging. Some are recent, while others are older and touch on ideas or issues that we’ve been thinking about as we write and commission new pieces. As always, if you have thoughts or comments, tweet us @bigredandshiny! –The BR&S Editorial Team ___________________________________________________________________________________ Lynnette Miranda, “Going Global: EXP and I’m Making a Boy Band,” Pelican Bomb, May 17, 2016. K-pop + contemporary…
A hole can be a portal, a passageway, a point of penetration, an injury, an orifice, a site of leakage. The holes in Linda Leslie Brown’s latest exhibit take the viewer not to Wonderland but a dumping ground. Unwanted items are reincarnated: a cookie cutter, aquarium greenery, a circuit board, the bottom of a Solo cup, a plastic capsule from a supermarket vending machine. Photographs cannot adequately capture these sculptures. They morph from angle to angle, evading total comprehension. Installed on risers that ascend in height, they appear like contestants in a…
“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 after leaving Walid Raad at the ICA. I felt disorientated; like I had just walked out of a top-level security briefing, overwhelmed by the layers of information presented to me and at me. At the same time, I felt like I had just rummaged through the museum’s storage, learning the detailed and…
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 and the comments and share your own thoughts below if you miss the opportunity to respond to the draft directly. What follows is an elaboration on those comments—my initial reaction after reading the plan and after speaking to a number of artists and members of the community. For a great, succinct overview…
Many years ago, while living in London, I became fascinated with honey bees after reading The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. In the novel, a terrible disaster leaves only a few groups of people living in the world. One of the characters has a strong connection with the honey bees she keeps—perhaps longing for the same perfect community that the bees had established. Atwood has said: ‘‘The communion between humans and bees is an old belief, folklore, that predates the advent of sugarcane and sugar beet…Because before that, bees were the…
In this installment of Here to Create, Courtney Moy talks with local curator and artist Silvi Naci. Naci is an active member of the creative community with an avid spirit for supporting the arts, having worked in a variety of creative fields from printmaking, graphic design, illustration, letterpress, curation, and public art. She talks with BR&S about her love for helping small local businesses, like Render Coffee, building the community up through socially engaged work, as well and her current position as the Assistant Director at Samsøñ Projects. Tell me a bit…