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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 questions “why?” went unanswered. Ten days later the perpetrator returned, this time during the busy afternoon, parked in the bus lane, ran through the crowd to the monument and again threw paint, this time yellow, across the recently cleaned surface. National Park Service Rangers were able to subdue the Boston woman who…
Up at the Danforth Museum\School through May 15, Volcanoes, Riots, Wrecks, and Nudes is a brilliant exhibition that showcases paintings and prints spanning Edward Hagedorn’s brief career. The title was taken from a 1944 quote wherein Hagedorn listed his favorite subjects. Hagedorn’s Expressionism feels familiar in the best way, born of the same esprit de corps that drove his German contemporaries, living in the shadow of two world wars, to create rough, emotive, graphic work. The exhibition’s curators, Stuart and Beverly Denenberg, rediscovered Hagedorn’s work in 1983 quite by accident. This American…
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 conference, or a space, but it need not be a monument. A monument, on the other hand, is always a kind of memorial.” Kate Gilbert, an artist, curator, and the director of Now and There, began Beyond the Bust: Defining Our Public Monuments, with Young’s interpretation of memorials. A panel discussion co-hosted…
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 ___________________________________________________________________________________ Sarah Gottesman, “From Dalí to Rembrandt, 9 Artists Whose Mothers Became Their Muses,” Artsy.net, May 3, 2016 In honor…
“Painting is not merely illustration, but real-time communion with ancestors,” reads a wall text in Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia a show at the Harvard Art Museums up through September 18. Spanning several decades of work in a range of mediums, this show’s stand-outs are the paintings on canvas, paper, and bark that read as abstract but are driven by a narrative urgency all their own. They share a commitment to cultural memory and often a seething critique of the colonial project. In “Emu Dreaming,” a painting by…
Flux Factory—an alternative art space in Queens—hit the road for the Fung Wah Biennial on March 5th. Curator Will Owen spearheaded the mobile art exhibition with the support of Flux board member Sally Szwed and former curator in residence Matthias Hvass Borello. The month-long show consisted of three separate Chinatown bus trips to Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and three off-board activities with partner spaces in each city. Three documentarians recorded these artworks for the later exhibition at Flux Gallery, where artifacts and recordings of the en route interventions highlighted the Biennial’s major…
Recently, I was thinking about the artists I look up to and who play an integral part in my art practice. What immediately popped into my head weren’t the well-renowned high-end gallery artists, but the secret artists. The artists with full-time jobs, drawing on scraps of paper and spending evenings hunched over a small desk cutting out tiny bits of paper. These are people I work alongside within the arts as registrars, art preparators or in administration. As an art preparator myself, I enjoy viewing the artwork in progress. Seeing the ins and outs…
In college, she studied painting. She had wanted to be a writer. Her father was a writer. But in college, she transitioned from drawing fictions on a page to painting pictures onto canvases. She was committed to painting when she took a 3D course. She labored over soapstone sculptures, carving away at the surface. “You’re more of an additive than a subtractive,” her professor said. She is Kate Gilbert, who, after twenty years in Boston, has ricocheted through every facet of the art community here. Currently a curator and director of Now…