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A sprawling exhibition adjacent to the permanent display of European Modernism, The Ceramic Presence in Modern Art: Selections from the Linda Leonard Schlenger Collection and the Yale University Art Gallery has a conceptual nexus as simple as its title. Its goal: to situate the work of artists whose primary medium of production is ceramics alongside canonical modernist painting and sculpture. This exhibition is certainly not the first to display artistic practice rooted in craft alongside high-modernist paintings—the anachronistic mash-ups of Renoir, Pennsylvania Dutch metalwork, and Native American ceramics at the Barnes Foundation spring to…
Boston is a transient city. Each fall, legions of artists enroll in graduate programs throughout the city to nurture their talents and connections, and approximately two years later, many move on. While they are here, some of these artists are presented via exhibition or editorial to the city, and many inform and evolve the Boston art community. So why do so many leave? And how does the city affect their practice? In Elsewhere, we seek to reconnect with some of these former Boston artists, to discuss their reasons for leaving, and to see…
Film is perhaps not the first medium that comes to mind when thinking about mimesis in visual art. Mimesis is something that painting and sculpture, for example, do well. Yet an entire gallery at the List Visual Art Center at MIT is currently full of film-based installations by the Italian artist Rosa Barba, who currently lives and works in Berlin, which deeply explore and illustrate exactly the mimetic potentials of film. Mimesis is not meant to imply an exact copy or one-to-one relationship but rather a series of patterns, made up of…
Boston is a transient city. Each fall, legions of artists enroll in graduate programs throughout the city to nurture their talents and connections, and approximately two years later, many move on. While they are here, some of these artists are presented via exhibition or editorial to the city, and many inform and evolve the Boston art community. So why do so many leave? And how does the city affect their practice? In Elsewhere, we seek to reconnect with some of these former Boston artists, to discuss their reasons for leaving, and to see…
Lisa Yuskavage is one of the very best and most highly acclaimed painters working today. Mainly known for her lavish and sometimes lewd renderings of the female form, Yuskavage’s work has an unforgiving and forthright style that combines elements of high and low culture bound together with a knowing technical virtuosity and an encyclopedic visual memory. A comprehensive survey of her work over the last several decades, titled “The Brood”, is on view at the Rose Museum at Brandeis University until December 13 and then will be traveling to the Contemporary Art Museum…
Ryan Hawk is a visual artist working with performance, video, sculpture and critical theory, who is interested in exploring the corporeal effects of power and knowledge as they relate to art history, sexuality and the politics of desire . After receiving his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2013, he is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Texas, Austin. Ryan Hawk is a recipient of the 2016 Traveling Fellowship, an award granted yearly to alumni of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts,…
Golden Specific, Nicole Cherubini’s exhibition at Samson Projects, is meditative. The gallery’s white box is punctuated with caramel, turquoise, and terre verte glazes, peach spray paint, and a red plastic bucket. Cherubini’s sculptures color the room. The show includes six amphora-like constructions on pedestals. These urns feel important, like reliquaries for the phalanges of some saint. In Way of the White Clouds (White Structure with Blue), a luminous aquamarine pot floats on an earthenware pedestal, while another matte white jug lurks around its base. Way of the White Clouds has narrative but…
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 in a bustling public square, some of the space’s users saw as distasteful or threatening, and deaf to their needs. Public art is often contentious not only because it is placed in common spaces, making its aesthetic and conceptual value subject to the scrutiny of diverse audiences, but also because its cost,…