How do you begin to engage with an exhibition of someone whose work you’ve followed for nearly 40 years, a period during which he documented many of your friends and, over time, as a reporter, had the honor of working with? In “Stephen DiRado, Better Together: Four Decades of Photographs,” on view through June 1 at the Fitchburg Art Museum (FAM), everyone seems to have been a friend of the Worcester-based photographer and Clark University professor. It’s one of those rare exhibitions that on any day, you’ll probably find one of the people captured on the walls standing next to you. Many of DiRado’s students were on hand for the show’s opening reception on February 8, searching for themselves in “The Classroom Series” that DiRado started in 2008 and continues today, documenting each new group of students; they weren’t alone. “So many people came to see it from my past, fans from afar … [Read more...] about A MASSIVE REUNION

When the original Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross, formerly in O’Kane Hall, was dedicated in 1983 Rev. John E. Brooks, S.J. president emeritus of Holy Cross declared: “An undergraduate liberal arts college is academically strengthened when its students and staff are exposed to works of art.” The current Cantor Gallery, on the third floor of the Prior Performing Arts Center designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro that opened in 2022, is a glass-enclosed space with a soaring ceiling, a capacious light-filled room where exhibits are installed with encouragement to wander. It is a perfect space for the retrospective of former 25-year faculty member Michael Beatty’s “Fabrications.” Beatty taught Sculpture and 3D Design in the college’s Studio Art Department. Having recently explored the Henry Moore and Georgia O’Keeffe dual exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, … [Read more...] about BEATTY’S MELODIC WOODCRAFT

Clara Wainwright’s new exhibition at the Paul Dietrich Gallery at Cambridge Seven, “GLORY: A Satirical Retrospective of Fabric Collages,” is a kind of hallucinatory storyboard of a trip through Wainwright’s mind as it considers the insane chaos of the current Trumpian political gestalt. Her fabric collages are not exactly quilts, though each has three layers like a quilt, but they are smaller in size compared to traditional quilts which are large. These are basically fabric paintings, varying in size from about 18” x 20” to a bit over 46” x 23”, some ironed on to fiberglass backing. “I love to sew,” she said, working mostly by machine, sometimes hand-embroidering or painting over designs and adding sequins. Though she said that it was Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso who influenced her style originally, she's been involved with so many multicultural and multiracial communities over the … [Read more...] about WAINWRIGHT’S PATCHWORK POLITICS