Newest Features
From Above and Below is Sharon Harper’s first monograph, published earlier this year by Radius Books. With its lush 11×14″ reproductions, where images from seven distinct projects dating 2001 to 2012 are married and juxtaposed, it skirts the world of artists’ books, standing as a creative project in its own right. Harper is an artist and an Associate Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge. Her photographs demonstrate a strong understanding of the medium and its early history in particular but, in a work such as Landshift (2012), wholly…
Editor’s Note: On Thursday, February 28 the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, in conjunction with Associate Professor of Art History David Areford’s course “Art 210: Queer Visual Culture,” welcomed the artist Avram Finkelstein for an hour-long lecture and Q&A on his past work in art and activism. Avram has exhibited his work in prestigious venues across the United States and abroad, including the Venice Biennale in 1990. His work has been collected by a number of museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum in New…
Brutalist buildings are the great unloved structures of our time. No other style of architecture can get a rise out of the public faster than an all-concrete behemoth in the center of town, usually surrounded by an abandoned, windblown plaza. The name itself (based on the French term beton brut, referring to raw or unfinished concrete) warns the visitor of what is to come, with words like “hulking,” “inhuman,” and “ugly” as the descriptors most likely to cross one’s lips. But, what happens when a historic Brutalist design is celebrated rather than…
“Poïesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιέω, which means “to make”. This word, the root of our modern “poetry”, was first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world. Neither technical production nor creation in the romantic sense, poietic work reconciles thought with matter and time, and man with the world.” (Wikipedia) This is a regular series of poems on the topic of art. Kurt Eidsvig’s column, Poïesis, which appeared in Volume 1 of Big Red & Shiny, brings a poetic twist to our conversation on…
Clifford Landon Pun Opium, No Pun Intended, 2011 Digital print on plinth, 36″ x 54 Image Courtesy Melissa Blackall Photography It sounds like a karaoke bar, a din of voices carrying on private conversations while someone in the back sings one bad rendition of some poppy 80s hit song after another. The acoustics, audible from the doorway of the Boston Center for the Arts, transform the gallery into an all too appropriate venue for the show on view. It’s Me Love You Long Time, a group exhibition of over 50 Southeast…
Cadmium beauty. There is something luscious about red. This one in particular. It is so pure and vibrant that the addition would only diffuse its impact. Dumas slathers her composition in it. That bright cadmium jumps forward so aggressively that it is hard to convince yourself that this is not the painting’s best feature. Is this supposed to be the background? It is monotoned and boring and it does not deserve the spotlight but it hogs it from the woman’s eyes and lips, which draw our eyes but fall flat, holes…
Returning to the “Pumpkin House,” a burnt orange triple-decker in Jamaica Plain’s Hyde Square, was as surreal and potent in many respects as attending the opening event. This most recent exhibit by the local group, Fresh Collective, entitled Not All Gone, packed the walls from floor to ceiling with the work of over thirty artists—among them students from MassArt and SMFA, art school graduates, and artists without any traditional art school training. A self-described salon des refusés, the exhibition clearly wields the democratic language of the refusés in the midst of several…
AFTER: My First Haircut, on the side of Lawson’s Brothers Hairstyling Salon, Egleston Square, Jamaica Plain. Photo: Courtesy of Anulfo Baez A little over a year ago, I wrote a short essay for the Boston Society of Architects titled “Documenting Boston Murals: What they say and how they say it.” In it, I write about my quest to photograph and document Boston’s rich mural tradition which goes as far back as the 1960s and the Black Arts Movement. I also briefly discuss the collective nature of murals and what that means…