Installation day for “REMIX” was like a family reunion for the artists of Fountain Street Gallery. “When we dropped off the work for the show, a couple of the artists [brought] a picnic lunch and [ate] outside to see each other for the first time in a long time,” said Fountain Street Gallery owner and director Rebecca Skinner. “REMIX” marks the return of Fountain Street Gallery to a physical space 17 months after the April 2024 closure of its Thayer Street/Harrison Ave. location in Boston’s SoWa District. With a renewed focus on “dynamic pop-up exhibitions,” this show, held at Mass Arts Center’s Morini Gallery though November 23, is the first of many to come. For Skinner, who also curated “REMIX,” Morini Gallery was a clear choice for Fountain Street’s return. “I’m very close with all the folks at the Mass Arts Center so I felt very at home and comfortable there,” she said. “And many … [Read more...] about A CLASS REUNION

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” said Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned prominent American abolitionist from the mid-1800s. What is life without struggle? No one escapes it. We just experience it differently and in varying degrees. Success? Failure? Try again? Hopefully resilience eventually pays off, and we learn the lesson that transformation is born in struggle. The struggle builds character, which helps us to grow and change, and become better people. My pastor was 22 when he was traveling from Colorado back to New England in his Nissan 310 Hatchback — with all the belongings he owned inside. His car blew the engine on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Decades later, he shares that he feels he can endure any harrowing experience if he could survive that. Then there’s my friend Cheryl McGuinness who on September 11, 2001, kissed her husband goodbye as he headed … [Read more...] about THE SHAPE OF RESILIENCE

Unless doctored, a photograph records without bias. Unlike a painting or a novel, the unfavorable cannot be hidden away: what is captured is evident. Whole systems of operation can be gleaned, if one is willing to look honestly. Through January 8, at Brandeis University’s Kniznick Gallery in the Women’s Studies Research Center, a showing of photographs by C. Rose Smith weaves a story of what cannot be hidden. “A Silent Rage” is comprised of 12 photographs, in which Smith — through carefully posed and captured images — charts the transatlantic cotton trade that propped up much of the American economy in its first 100-odd years. “Serving as a conduit for the oppressed, my self-assertion reimagines and reinserts their existence in spaces where they were once unauthorized,” Smith said in their artist statement. In a supple and rich black-and-white, Smith graces the interiors of southern … [Read more...] about THE QUIET THAT BURNS

There is kinetic energy that arises when two artists join in a many-faceted relationship. In the case of William Hays and Nina Rossi of Turners Falls, Massachusetts, it is both cosmic and pedestrian. The artists have been married for five years, and the interchange and self-knowledge attained through a wholistic partnership is almost indulgent; it is a precious balance of domestic collaboration and individual art practice that forges the day forward, rising tides of inspiration from the other and respect for the silence that leads to the artmaking. The two artists’ processes and works could not be more polar. Rossi bullets down a rabbit hole of images, ideas, community participation and differentiated media; her works stem from an almost medusa-like process, always in motion and captured from different sources. Hays’ printmaking is process-oriented, introspective and methodical. He … [Read more...] about Kenetic Energies Etc Etc