It was 1971. I was 18. My dad had recently been installed as the new pastor of Wisconsin Avenue Baptist Church in Washington D.C. I’d moved from my home state of South Dakota to be with my family and attend college at the University of Maryland. I’d transferred my job as a telephone operator to a nearby Maryland suburb while establishing residency prior to starting school. I quickly accumulated new friends, many of them black as the D.C. area has, according to the most recent United States Census Bureau report, a 50 percent black population. By contrast, my home state (again according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau report) is only 1.7 percent black. My black friends would often attend church with me. And sometimes we’d hit the beach and boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey. That’s when I first noticed that a casual walk down the boardwalk with my tall, attractive black friend, Tony, … [Read more...] about Gillian Laub: Pioneering Southern Rites at Lamont
Issue Articles
Rearranged Furniture: Interior Effects at Fitchburg
You might think you know what you think about furniture: that it’s utilitarian, it’s background, that any influence it wields is only on other furniture and that only at a glacial pace. The power of 10 original and very crafty contemporary furniture designers, now at the Fitchburg Art Museum, very quickly disabuse one of these easy notions as contemporary furniture furnishes metaphors for our most intimate human concerns, fears and hopes. Liz Shepherd’s “Untitled: Blue” is one of the most naked metaphors to meet the visitor ascending the stairs to the exhibit. A very plain, blue-painted clothes chest splits in two by a stroke so sudden and powerful that each half rests on the jagged ends of its drawers — the broken drawers spilling out, higgledy-piggledy, the flaccid arms of jerseys, sweaters and other coverings for the needy human torso. My first reaction was an unsettled and … [Read more...] about Rearranged Furniture: Interior Effects at Fitchburg
Love is Louder: Open Borders at Artspace Maynard
On first view, “Waste Not,” an exhibition featuring works by Lorraine Sullivan, Anne Plaisance, Stephen Martin and Kim Triedman (the show’s curator), holds many elements of life — or past life — that I’m quite fond of, especially pieces from old storefronts and corner stores and weathered buildings that I attach to feelings of warmth. Old windows are turned into picture frames, store fixtures become statues and a partially disembodied mannequin sits in a pre-prefabrication wooden wheelchair seems to have been positioned to ensure no one visits the exhibition feeling alone (the work is Plaisance’s “No Love Lost.”). And, indeed, in late 2018, a gallery is the one place many artisans don’t feel alone. A closer look, however revealed some works that could — and perhaps should — feel disturbing. Three works by Plaisance, who came to the United States from Paris three years ago, … [Read more...] about Love is Louder: Open Borders at Artspace Maynard
Still the Coolest: Dennis Hopper’s Lost Album Brings Us All Back
That Sunday afternoon in 1970, students and regular patrons in Fort Worth Art Center Museum had turned out for a show that seemed to encapsulate the age: Bellbottomed jeans and maxi-dresses mingled with the suits, minks and diamonds, when the photographer and now-director Dennis Hopper emerged, dressed in a gray pin-striped suit, Indian shirt and black western boots, his long hair flowing. Hopper had chosen more than 400 photographs out of some 10,000 he had captured and printed between 1960 and 1967. They were mounted in a succession of fascinating groupings, each image postcard-sized. Billboards, car with fins and twinkling tail lights competed with romantic motorcycle and bullfighting tableaux; young actors and artists on the cusp of greatness were captured in their element with what appeared to be disarming ease. Hopper had been in the thick of this milieu for more than a decade, … [Read more...] about Still the Coolest: Dennis Hopper’s Lost Album Brings Us All Back
A Modern Spectrum: Fresh Watercolors at the Art Complex
Existential tensions of contemporary life are addressed head-on by many of the watercolor painters in the New England Watercolor Society’s Biennial exhibition. Following in the watercolor traditions of the great masters, Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, many of the paintings deal with the stresses of life. No one has painted a despairing fisherman’s wife looking out to sea for her lost husband or Italian marble quarry workers cutting stone. But the artists do address addiction, loneliness, homelessness and anxiety. In an exhibition dominated by conventional watercolor motifs of fruits and flowers, seaside shacks, birds, boats and beaches, several artists grapple with the problems of modern life. Courageously, they turn their eyes away from the romantic symbols of beaches and boats, often with exceptional technical skill. Carolyn Latanision’s “Ladles and Cranes Ready; … [Read more...] about A Modern Spectrum: Fresh Watercolors at the Art Complex
Trace Matter: Making Connections at Montserrat
The “trace” is a notion that straddles two worlds. It can be a thing in this world, a tiny amount or residue of something; or drawing around an object’s physical boundaries as a template. In the imagination, it can also be a symbolic representation of the ways in which things and people may be both present and absent to our experience. The paintings, sculptures and performance works of the six artists curated by Montserrat College of Art Gallery director Nathan Lewis under the umbrella “Trace Matter” focus on the leaving of a mark in the physical world, yet many more senses and mechanisms of “trace” can be found in them. In different ways, the trace implies and perhaps reassures us that there is a history, a before and an after. Jenna Pirello self-consciously manipulates her paint on small wood panels to reflect and preserve the history of her decisions in the behavior of her … [Read more...] about Trace Matter: Making Connections at Montserrat