Newest Features
Located on a four hundred acre property in Elbert, Colorado’s Black Forest, JCC Ranch has been a summer home away from home to kids, like Remi Thornton, since 1953. As a ten- to twelve-year-old camper, Thornton developed a personal connection to the forty plus acres of land during his nights wandering the grounds suffering from insomnia. He would frequent the picnic benches (mimicked in the installation itself for seating), outside of the boys cabins with his older counselors, waiting for tiredness to set in. That experience of waiting, as a young boy,…
The main characters of “Congregation,” the centerpiece in an exhibition of still-life paintings by Joseph Ablow at the Boston University Stone Gallery, are tables which resemble planets. Eons away from the dining room or any realm of domestic activity, they appear poised within a sparkling cosmic abyss in a rare moment of cosmic alignment. Oranges emanate from their legs as if from within the prisms of their angular, wooden souls. Lacking faces, they gesture through reverberations of color and expressive distortions of space. Throughout the gallery of iridescent canvases, which the late BU…
This interview is part of the “Boston Common” series that seeks to highlight the people and institutions that shape Boston and New England’s vibrant art community. In this installment, we spoke to Dylan Hurwitz, an artist who serves as director of The Boston LGBTQIA Artist Alliance (BLAA). What is the Boston LGBTQIA Artist Alliance (BLAA)’s mission? How do you serve the city and the surrounding communities? BLAA is an artist-run volunteer organization that is dedicated to elevating the voices of and providing resources to Boston area LGBTQIA-identifying artists. We focus primarily on exhibition…
Realizing durational work such as ‘100 Ways to Consider Time’ is an immense undertaking. As a part of the audience, I was able to stay with Marilyn Arsem’s performance at the Museum of Fine Arts on different days and for various durations in order to observe the work unfold from November through February. A set of challenges were present when I began to search for language to write about what the work evoked on critical, formal, aesthetic, and psychological levels. This writing will explore eight of the last fifty days of the…
In Here to Create, BR&S contributor Courtney Moy speaks to female artists on how they’ve created their own course within the Boston art scene. In this installment, she talks to Vanessa Irzyk, a MassArt graduate who currently has a studio in South Boston’s Distillery building. Irzyk works as an educator and shares with BR&S how she sustains her work. Irzyk’s solo show, FLAT ZEN, is currently on view at the Mingo Gallery in Beverly. Tell us about yourself and the path that lead you to where you are today. What made you…
Sarah Hulsey is a local printmaker and linguist whose work is featured in the two-person show Schemata at the Maud Morgan Arts Center’s Chandler Gallery. The show features Rhonda Smith’s paintings and Hulsey’s print installation “Linguistic Elements,” uniting the artists’ works through the concept of “mapping as metaphor.” For Hulsey, mapping is employed as a means to examine the structure of language through graphic symbols that are arranged to resemble molecular diagrams. Hulsey’s approach is methodical, rooted in her own disciplinary ties. Individual works consist of carved circular woodcuts that are magnetically…
I’m a Boston artist with an ever-growing body of under-documented work, more or less addicted to the process of artmaking. I’ve been lucky enough to get a few invitations to produce work elsewhere, including within artist residencies, and found these experiences very constructive. I regularly pull all-nighters applying for art opportunities, and I’ve made some big sacrifices—such as freelancing rather than having a traditional day-job career—to retain as much flexibility in my life as possible in order to take on new opportunities when they arise. This year I decided to try something…
Born in 1959 in Cuba, María Magdalena Campos-Pons first came to Boston through a MassArt exchange program in 1988. After arriving in Boston, Campos-Pons began bringing a variety of media, including photography, video, and performance, into her painting practice. Campos-Pons’s work, often large-scale and autobiographical, investigates the rich interconnection between Cuba and the United States, of memory and time, and of identity and individuality. Comprised of an intensely tactile installation, composed of sound, video, photographs, drawings, and glass-blown sculptures, Alchemy of the Soul: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, currently on view at the Peabody…