Multidisciplinary artists Ashley Page and Alejandra Cuadra both say they share a brain. The metaphor rings true in their work: many of the artists’ sculptures and installations look as if they belong in a shared space. Their pieces, vulnerable and bold, often appear to have sprouted from similar lines of inquiry or emerged out of a common desire to reclaim (a place; a concept; a body). And in one show, at least, they have. On view through April 2 at Fountain Street Gallery in Boston, Page and Cuadra’s “Earthly Bound” is a celebration of radical care, deep collaboration and stories yet to be told. Cuadra and Page first met in Portland, Maine, while completing Warren Public Engagement Fellowships at Maine College of Art and Design. The two immediately connected within and beyond the studio, co-curating two exhibitions, organizing several workshops and helping to found “Resilience Week” … [Read more...] about FREEDOM IN COLLABORATION
Features
“A CAST OF THOUSANDS”
At the helm of exhibition programming at URI Feinstein Providence Campus Gallery, Steven Pennell presents art shows about various topics from everyday life. “Coordinator of Urban Arts and Culture,” Pannell delivers art programming brimming with ideas and social issues as gallery experience to enjoy, consider and be challenged by. The floor plan of the gallery runs the full length of a city block in a landmarked Beaux Arts building. Formerly Shepherd’s Department Store, it has many large display windows. The space itself is a very long, wide corridor where lots of art is shown with a nookiness akin to the casbah layout of New York’s Bloomingdale’s on 59th Street. I spoke with Pennell about this spring’s exhibit schedule and when he told me of the number of artists showing in March and April, I jokingly responded, “a cast of thousands?” and he answered, “Exactly.” Pennell is a … [Read more...] about “A CAST OF THOUSANDS”
A COMMITMENT TO CRAFTS
American crafts are among the finest in the world. In 2004, the trustees of the Fuller Craft Museum recognized this fact and wisely decided to re-invent the museum to specialize in American crafts. Five current exhibitions at Fuller demonstrate how broadly the “crafts” concept can be stretched to include more than beautiful utilitarian objects. The exhibiting artists include both highly skilled and novice artisans. The craft materials are as diverse as aluminum sheets and a hydroponic garden. The topics of the exhibits vary widely from food distribution problems to elegant jewelry. Especially important are two exhibitions, one about the social problem of “Food Justice,” and the other, “Riotous Threads,” fiber works by people with disabilities. The exhibits demonstrate Fuller trustees’ and staff’s commitment to the human-need dimension of crafts, adventuring far beyond craft as … [Read more...] about A COMMITMENT TO CRAFTS
A GRAND RE-ENTRANCE
“Abstraction focuses on a private world,” muses Erica H. Adams in “Spirit in the Dark,” an exhibition of 23 small watercolors at the Moakley Federal Courthouse through March 30. For the first five months of the pandemic, following the March 2020 lockdown, Adams stayed at home in Mashpee, on Cape Cod. “Having no new experiences and thus reliving old experiences,” she endured the anxiety, disorientation, loneliness and frustration by painting an ongoing series of small abstract works on paper. A Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Museum School Traveling Scholar, Adams had been a post-Modernist innovator who experimented with combinatory photographic technologies before the days of Photoshop, creating collaged, juxtaposed and superimposed imagery in the service of cultural critique. She exhibited widely in the 1970s, ‘80s and beyond. In addition to teaching at … [Read more...] about A GRAND RE-ENTRANCE
CLEAR AND PRESENT
“There’s all kinds of life-experiences that come to one unasked-for,” said sculptor and painter Marjorie Minkin while showing me her light-filled Lexan relief sculptures one November evening on her Waltham studio wall. We are discussing her approaching exhibition at the John Joseph Moakley Federal Courthouse on Fan Pier in Boston Harbor. Skins of translucent polycarbonate dance on the white wall, their lines, shadows, reflections and rills of color overlapping. Migrating to the curved brick wall of the Courthouse’s Atrium Gallery, they will face a huge, impending tsunami — a four-story, curved glass curtain wall that opens onto a glorious northerly view of Boston’s Inner Harbor. Minkin expects her Lexans will behave quite differently when backed by the rusty textures of New England water-struck brick and illuminated by the vagaries of sun, sky and sea. But what she doesn’t know is … [Read more...] about CLEAR AND PRESENT
CANDID AND UNHEEDING
The camera is ubiquitous. Embedded in our phones, it sits in every pocket and purse; drilled into the walls of businesses and subway stations; fixed to traffic lights and the masonry of buildings. Its lens and spiraling aperture, recording and passive, document moments both absurdly pedestrian and of special importance, unquestionably more the former these days. The glut of photographs — now digital, ephemeral — renders our image of ourselves disposable, making for a curated life that belies reality. None of these missives are unique. Explications on the societal ramifications of the photographic image stretch from Benjamin to Barthes to Sontag and beyond. We pose for photographs as often as we take them, certainly more than we truly think about them. What is relatively unique, however, is encountering photographs wherein the subjects are at total ease, unbothered, quiescent, not … [Read more...] about CANDID AND UNHEEDING