NIHO KOZURU AT HESS GALLERY Niho Kozuru rides the razor’s edge between craft and sculpture in a purposeful and inquisitive way. Best known in Boston’s art circles for her otherworldly cast-rubber sculptures, she also maintains a brisk, Etsypowered business selling beeswax candles re-envisioned from the forms of found wooden architectural elements. Born in Japan to a family of ceramic artists, the Boston-based Kozuru takes her heritage seriously and into the new millennium, casting a gaze backward to the turned and machine-worked forms of earlier centuries, and forward via material experiments with rubber and mixed-media. Kozuru has installed a cross-section of her sculptural and wall-hung work at Pine Manor College’s Hess Gallery, on view through January 28. Located in the atrium of the Annenberg Library, the gallery is festooned with working sketches and examples from Kozuru’s … [Read more...] about Good Vibrations
January/February 2015
Sight, Sound and Tactility
THE SENSES COALESCE AT BEARD AND WEIL Thanks to its cross-cultural and historically deep in-house permanent collection of approximately 6,000 objects in a wide variety of media, as well as a substantial archives department and a superb on-site display area in the form of its Beard and Weil Galleries, Wheaton College is a perfect setting for the training of future art curators. Wheaton’s Museum Studies department — directed by professor Leah Niederstadt in collaboration with an extensive team of colleagues that includes professor Evelyn Straudinger, Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences and co-director of the Wheaton Institute for the Interdisciplinary Humanities — bridges art and the humanities. Straudinger explained that Wheaton’s curriculum is nationally known for its connected courses. Its Exhibition Design, Art History 335 class links the intellectual and academic/research … [Read more...] about Sight, Sound and Tactility
Community: Climate Change in Providence
FRESH CURATORIAL AND ARTISTIC PERSPECTIVES It is noticeable, looking at artwork made in Providence as we enter 2015, that the flavor of the city is changing. Facilitated by a re-branding process that seems to also address anti-intellectual posturing as an impediment to global context, the city is willing, at the moment, to entertain the concept of varied aesthetic languages informing its learning curve with sophistication and surprise. Fresh curatorial perspectives are afoot, both institutionally and independently, that are beginning to shape the art climate in ways that comment upon and reflect this growing dimensionality. The appointment of Dominic Molon as the Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art at RISD Museum is an example of institutional leadership change. Molon is making studio visits and regularly meeting local artists in their element, experiences he then … [Read more...] about Community: Climate Change in Providence
Business: Timing is Everything
PROVIDENCE: ENTREPRENEURIAL VENTURES ARE IN When Rhode Island found itself in the recent recession with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, Providence decided to re-brand itself and make the transition from “Renaissance City” to “Creative Capital.” The hope was that prosperity would follow. The rationale was like Manhattan turning its “Mean Streets,” Ad Men-style, into the charismatically approachable “Big Apple,” and later driving that point home with its “I Love New York” campaign. In the “Creative Capital” embodies word play in the cleverness of amalgamated meanings to interface the pursuit of art with entrepreneurial venture. Tabitha Piseno recalls that in 2011, when she and Sam Keller were running RK Projects, everyone they talked to discouraged them from developing their gallery as a business enterprise. She was told the only way to survive in Providence … [Read more...] about Business: Timing is Everything
Kiss the Ground
FINDING THE “NEW” ARMENIA The question is: What does the “new” Armenia look like? While attempting to understand “Kiss the Ground,” I kept an impression from a quote by famed Armenian-Canadian master photographer Yousuf Karsh in mind: ”Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.” The old Armenian word “Yergurbakootyoon” means to be in “total submission.” In English, the word and concept translates to “kiss the ground,” used here to mean heritage reverence. Contemporary Armenians are removed from the original source and subsequent re-grounding is expressed in “A New Armenia” — a redefined “Kiss the Ground.” “Kiss the Ground” presents a vast five-component, two-venue exhibition project of visual expression, in a variety of artistic modes, applications and styles that dialogue about the Armenian-American cultural experience. At its core, this is a project that defines, … [Read more...] about Kiss the Ground
The Perils of the Possible
WE ARE ALL CURATORS, NOW! Artists and curators often seek attention through impulses as subversive as they are creative. In a recent attempt to gather a range of curatorial concepts that court the limits of the imaginable, New York City’s Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts called for a “Theoretical Show” of the “most audacious, outrageous, or impossible” ideas for an exhibition. From 71 proposals, the jurors chose 15 works to be realized in a late fall exhibition entitled “A Wicked Problem.” Those texts that escaped selection were papered on the gallery’s rear wall. (Disclosure, I was among the latter artists.) I wondered — and still wonder — about the gap between the practicable and the impossible. Is it simply the ease with which some people dwell in protracted creative tension, while others wish to resolve it as soon as possible? Regardless, the Dada-esque results were … [Read more...] about The Perils of the Possible