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Every two years the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA) selects up to four Boston-area artists to receive the James and Audrey Foster Prize. In addition to a cash award, finalists are given the opportunity to mount a show in the ICA gallery space. Since 1999, this has been a time for the ICA to showcase local talent, ultimately contributing to a larger discourse about the role that arts institutions play in supporting Boston’s creative economy. The 2015 Foster Prize has been awarded to Ricardo De Lima, Vela Phelan, Sandrine Schaefer, and…
Every two years the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA) selects up to four Boston-area artists to receive the James and Audrey Foster Prize. In addition to a cash award, finalists are given the opportunity to mount a show in the ICA gallery space. Since 1999, this has been a time for the ICA to showcase local talent, ultimately contributing to a larger discourse about the role that arts institutions play in supporting Boston’s creative economy. The 2015 Foster Prize has been awarded to Ricardo De Lima, Vela Phelan, Sandrine Schaefer, and…
The remaining brick façade from 1927, facing Harvard Yard, suggests an institution steeped in tradition. From the front, one expects to step inside and see art by dead white men, displayed according to national styles and chronology. The backside, however, explodes the brick structure with a boxy grey addition topped with a pyramid of glass. The dichotomy between order and innovation that plays out in the architecture continues inside the galleries. While the museum has little African, pre-Columbian, or Native American art, and few modern or contemporary pieces from outside the United…
Editor’s Note: This essay was written in reaction to Harvard Art Museum’s re-opening on November 16, 2014. Kayla Hammond Larkin responds to the event of a major museum reopening to the public, the Harvard Art Museums collections, as well as the museum’s place within the community. This is the first of two articles to examine Harvard Art Museums. Six years can feel like a very long time time — even in Harvard Square, where in the expanse of just a few city blocks, you can tread over the site of a…
Twelve narrow speakers are distributed evenly around the perimeter of New York’s Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. A solo violin sustains an E. Another violin comes in with an E-flat. The dissonance is disquieting, but so intense that few visitors can turn away. A ghostly murmur of lower tones interrupts, silenced by an attack of climbing pizzicati. There are traces of a melody but it cannot be made out. The music carries on a bit further then lurches to a stop again. Between the speakers, posters roughly five by six feet show hand-written sheet…
“Information is never innocent. Its toxicity depends on who is consuming—and who is consumed.” from “Material Witness” by David Joselit, Artforum, February 2015 During the October 14th episode of his radio program On Point, Tom Ashbrook, in conversation with Stephanie Stepanek, co-curator of the Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition Goya: Order and Disorder, attempted to correlate the gesture of Goya’s infamous about-to-be-executed figure from El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid (The Third of May 1808) with the current Hands up! protests. The slogan is now being…
A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Lili White is a fixture in the history of avant-garde filmmaking, and throughout her career she has maintained a dedication to work by women artists. As the founder of the Another Experiment by Women film festival and a board member at the Millennium Film Workshop, White has been tirelessly maintaining a forum for female filmmakers. Now, with Another Experiment by Women Online, viewers from across the world can subscribe to watch and support the artistic practices of women working in film. William J.…
After the flood, imagine letters scattered by their floating. This is how the past returns to us, in fragments of single pages pulled free of their bindings, or as newspaper clippings of memory, loosened from an album. As an artist in an archive—drawing from the Alternative Press Collection at the University of Connecticut—Louise Menzies has taken a particular scattered history and out of it, created for this concise, evocative exhibition a collection of paper reliquaries that embed, like insects in amber, traces of a time that did not lack for either conviction…