The two different natures of contemporary American crafts are beautifully represented at the Fuller Craft Museum. Crafts fashioned as art-objects are exhibited in the museum members’ Biennial Exhibit. Crafts made as utilitarian-objects are displayed in the Museum’s Gift Shop. The concept of non-utilitarian contemporary craft art is relatively new in the art world and I’m sure someone is working on a PhD thesis on the topic as I write. An example of non-utilitarian craft, Mo Kelman’s “On Thin Ice,” uses wood sticks and bamboo to create a rectangular web of great intricacy. The sticks cross each other at right angles and are fastened at one end in two mesh-grids of wire. The object is most interesting when the viewer walks around to see it from different angles. The 3D crisscrossing of sticks at right angles casts an intricate shadow that is an important part of the work. But does it have … [Read more...] about CRAFTMAKING’S NEXT STEP

After his parents gave him a single-lens reflex camera as a college graduation present, Gary Duehr “dove” into taking pictures in Central Illinois, inspired by photographers like Harry Callahan, to the extent that after a year of teaching high school English, he enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts Photography program in Southern Illinois, where he studied with second generation Bauhaus artists. He came to Boston in 1984 after earning an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop. This November, “People, Places, Things,” a retrospective featuring works from Duehr’s two decades of taking photographs in Boston, will take up the front two exhibition spaces at Bromfield Gallery, which he’s managed since 2003. While most photographers tend to have a main beat or an extended subject focus period that follows them throughout their career, Duehr jumps around subject matters like a water bug. “I … [Read more...] about PERMISSION TO SHOOT

“Into the Abstract,” now on view at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, is aptly named because it offers an entrée into minimalist-inspired abstraction. Visitors are invited to explore the parallels and contrasts between the works of Neha Vedpathak — an artist in her 40s, and Paul Gruhler, an artist in his 80s. Their art is installed separately in two galleries of the Center’s Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum, as if the two galleries are in conversation with each other. Gruhler’s clean, crisp, color-saturated works are reminiscent of the iconic zip paintings of Barnett Newman, whose works evoked a spiritual sense of the sublime. The geometry of Josef Albers and the immersive fields of color of Mark Rothko are also echoed in Gruhler’s paintings. He is remarkably sensitive to color tones, experimenting to ensure his color relationships work harmoniously. This expertise is evident in the … [Read more...] about THE GEOMETRY OF STILLNESS