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Artscope Magazine | March/April 2021

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PHOTOGRAPHY AS POWER: ART PRC SHOWCASE CONFRONTS VIEWERS’ PERCEPTIONS

// March/April 2020

by Isabel Barbi

There’s no way to distinguish how many years passed make a specific time period history. In “Present Histories Redefined,” history lies within the last two calendar years. The photographs of Feda Eid, Jonathan Mark Jackson and Joanna Tam document the everchanging stories of the present, focusing on marginalized voices. Curated by Jessica Burko, photography as “Power Art” is showcased at Lesley University’s VanDernoot Gallery by the Photographic Research Center. Feda Eid’s photography brings an immediate sense of familiarity, depicting a recognizable setting. Although her artist statement reveals the setting, the captions beside the photographs don’t disclose the location. That familiar place is behind-the-ropes, so to speak, of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. As a luminary of the museum, Eid was granted access to use the museum in an intimate manner for her “Reflected” series. … [Read more...] about PHOTOGRAPHY AS POWER: ART PRC SHOWCASE CONFRONTS VIEWERS’ PERCEPTIONS

INDIGENOUS ART AT YALE: “AN ENTANGLED, OFTEN-VIOLENT, SHARED HISTORY”

// March/April 2020

by Kristin Nord

Indigenous art has long existed under the radar at Yale University, with its thousands of artworks and cultural and sacred items residing in disparate collections scattered throughout the campus. “Objects have been displayed in glass cabinets or tucked away in storage, in wooden drawers and steel cabinets, with catalogue numbers scrawled across their birch bark, river cane and hide,” the curators write in introducing “Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art,” a compelling exhibition that draws upon objects from the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The beautiful and poignant show is in many ways a paean to the 40 Indian nations whose art is finally being given the respect it deserves. Co-curated by three Yale university graduates, Katherine Nova McCleary … [Read more...] about INDIGENOUS ART AT YALE: “AN ENTANGLED, OFTEN-VIOLENT, SHARED HISTORY”

ROOTED/UPROOTED: TREES AND ARTISTS AT ELGA WIMMER PCC GALLERY

// Artscope Online, Current Exhibits, Visual Arts

by Nancy Nesvet

Rooted/UpRooted, curated by Roya Khadjavi and Massoud Nader, which is on view from November 12 through 25 at Elga Wimmer PCC Gallery, New York, New York, connects trees, whose roots are secured deep in the earth with those who come from a place, in this case Iran, whose roots also run deep. Whereas tree roots remain in one place, the Iranian artists whose work is displayed here have been uprooted from their land, but maintain their cultural and historical roots, showing their memories and history in their work. In Omid Mohkami’s “Absence Series, a heart-rending photograph of a curved road with an unoccupied chair in its center and a dress stuck on barbed wire makes us wonder where the road leads and carries those who follow it, as they say in Maine, away. In another of Mohkami’s black and white photographs, a circle of chairs, occupied by no one, looking as if the master and his … [Read more...] about ROOTED/UPROOTED: TREES AND ARTISTS AT ELGA WIMMER PCC GALLERY

STAYING CONTEMPORARY: ARTIST PROGRAM MAINTAINS THE GARDNER’S HERITAGE

// Current Exhibits, Current Issue, Exhibits, Featured, November/December 2019, November/December 2019, Visual Arts

by Elizabeth Michelman

With a gala air, the Gardner Museum prepares its sparkling Renzo Piano wing for “In the Company of Artists: 25 Years of Artists-in- Residence.” Laura Owens’s giant gold-and-magenta banner winks with a smiley face on the museum’s façade: “ShowTime.” In the Hostetter Gallery, photographers complete their shots of newly installed works by the seven returning resident artists. Lee Mingwei, creator of the museum’s Living Room, hovers near its door in a floor-length robe of charcoal silk, protecting the artists being interviewed within. In the distance, Lee’s “Sonic Blossom” singers are practicing Schubert’s Lieder with which to surprise gallery guests. In the garden, the mobile artist Charmaine Wheatley chats with a guard while sketching his portrait. Pieranna Cavalchini, the Gardner’s curator of contemporary art and director of the residency program, glides along the stairways and … [Read more...] about STAYING CONTEMPORARY: ARTIST PROGRAM MAINTAINS THE GARDNER’S HERITAGE

LOVE LETTERS: MILLER WHITE COVERS YOU IN LOVE

// Current Issue, Exhibits, Featured, September/October 2019, Visual Arts

by Lee Roscoe

Susan Danton, owner of Miller White Fine Arts on Cape Cod, said the exhibit “Love Letters,” that she originated and curated, was inspired by an 1846 letter from Gustave Flaubert to his lover, Louise Colet: “I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge you with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die.” If you are wondering if there is a further French connection, no, she isn’t a descendant of the French revolutionary Georges Jacques Danton. Her stockbroker father changed their surname to Danton. Danton has multiple raisons d’êtres for the exhibit, calling it “an evocative inquiry into physical love, from gender to sex to sexual orientation.” Motivated in part by a “sociopolitical agenda,” to wit, the Me Too Movement, “Love Letters” is also an antidote to the hate we are seeing in our nation and “a way to provoke a discussion … [Read more...] about LOVE LETTERS: MILLER WHITE COVERS YOU IN LOVE

Luc-Olivier Merson, illustration for Victor Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris," 1881.

‘Dream in Sculpture, Dream in Rhyme:’ La Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

// Artscope Online, News, Visual Arts

by Rebecca Nesvet

On Monday, April 15, and Tuesday, April 16, the world watched in horror as the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris was transformed into a matchbox filled with fire. "Watching the spire on fire fall in real time is something that, as a medieval art historian, I could barely stomach," Dr. Emily Guerry Sr. Lecturer in Medieval European History at the University of Kent told an American news reporter.¹ We can all share Professor Guerry’s shock and anguish, but Notre Dame isn’t meaningful only for Medievalists. In fact, it is arguably not only a medieval edifice—it’s also a modern one. Built in the 13th century, Notre Dame was updated, renovated, restored, and vandalized throughout the ages that followed. It’s difficult to tell what proved more destructive: the loving modernizations it underwent early in the 18th century or the destruction wreaked upon it by French Revolutionaries during the … [Read more...] about ‘Dream in Sculpture, Dream in Rhyme:’ La Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris