Like most of America and the Caribbean, Cuba was brutally colonized by Europeans after Christopher Columbus landed on its shores in 1492. Cuba’s native population was decimated, and survivors melded with the conquering Spanish for the next several hundred years.…
John Ruskin never slept with his wife. So one of the most enduring stories of the man goes. Yes, he authored Modern Painters (1843), a treatise of ardor and appreciation for a new kind of painter, typified in the work…
The deCordova Museum recently announced painter Ann Pibal as the fourteenth winner of the institution’s Rappaport Prize. Previous winners of the $25,000 award include Suara Welitoff (2012), Ursula von Rydingsvard (2008) and John Bisbee (2003). The Prize is awarded…
Last week, BR&S editors Stephanie Cardon and Leah Triplett sat down with Michael Mittelman at his Waltham Street studio in Boston, where, until recently, ASPECT Magazine was published. Mittelman founded ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art in 2003 as…
At first glance, Katarina Burin’s installation in this year’s Foster Prize looks out of place within the ICA’s sterile, white gallery space.Hotel Nord-Sud 1932-34: Design and Correspondence (2013) is centered around Petra Andrejova-Molnár, a female Czechoslovakian architect active during the…
Unable to attend the opening of the Museum School MFA Thesis Exhibition at Tufts University Art Gallery, I saw the show on a rainy evening last week. Alone save for a few other visitors, I was relieved to find…
Adrienne Edwards, Associate Curator of Performa in New York City, began her talk with Adam Pendleton at the Gardner Museum last Thursday night (May 2) by saying that their conversation would mimic the many long talks they have together as…
Just before her lecture last Tuesday night at Harvard Art Museum, Doris Salcedo sat in the last row of a lecture hall in Sackler, starring off into space. She seemed unaware of the burgeoning crowd, lost in thought, present in…
When we talk about ‘occupying’ these days, we might be talking about a number of things—taking up a few seats on a bus, or how long we’ve lived in an apartment—but since Fall 2011, we’ve come to know the verb…
This Will Have Been is noisy. Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style (1983) greets you as you get off the elevator, following you into the second room of the exhibit. There you’re confronted by Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley Family Tyranny (Modeling…
Irony has long associated with hollowness in contemporary culture. “Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush,” writes F. Scott Fitzgerald of Antony Patch, the doomed protagonist of his 1922 novel, The Beautiful and…
The 11th Hour Gallery was cold. It was upstairs at 20 East Street, and in the very early 1980s, it was home to Mike Carroll and Penelope Place. Blocks away from South Station, on the outer edges of what was…
1980’s Boston was very different from today’s Boston. There was an area called the combat zone, which effectively ran from the common to south station, overlaping Chinatown and the leather district. It was the home of 11th hour gallery, run…
By LEAH TRIPLETT In his Brooklyn Rail essay last spring How to Look at Postmodern Painting and Its Criticism, Irving Sandler described his witness to the death of modernism, and emergence of postmodernism. Sandler writes that art criticism has failed…
