Two things are surprising about Ethan Hayes-Chute’s project at the List Visual Art Center: it is much funnier than expected, and it is deeply sincere. The show consists of two primary areas: a work bench serving as a backdrop for…
From 1759 to 1763, writer Christopher Smart composed the sprawling poem Jubilate Agno while confined to an asylum. The best-known portion of the text is a 74-line segment in which Smart expounds on the ways that his cat is an…
Corita Kent and the Language of Pop is a tight survey, focused primarily on the work Kent and other pop artists produced in the mid-1960s. This span of time also maps onto Vatican II, the Catholic church’s ecumenical council that…
Mare Liberum is self-described as “a freeform publishing, boatbuilding and waterfront art collective based in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn, New York.” While the group is in residence at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, they continue their ongoing…
Open Engagement is an annual conference on socially engaged art, focused this year on the topic of Place and Revolution. It was an incredibly dense three days of concurrent ninety-minute sessions, shorter fifteen-minute talks, opening and closing keynotes, and events…
Labor in a Single Shot, a collection of documentary videos regarding work, is as straightforward as it sounds. On view this fall at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki began curating…
Last Tuesday, critic Ben Davis delivered the SMFA’s Beckwith Lecture on the subject “Art and Class,” attempting to clarify the professional role of artists and, separate from the experience of an individual, where art stands in the culture. A good…