Scott Hadfield: New Paintings April 27th- June 1st Barbara Krakow Gallery Boston, MA

Scott Hadfield, Installation View, Courtesy Barbara Krakow Gallery

There is an unnerving level of grace present in this focused sampling (just six paintings) of recent work by Scott Hadfield at the Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston. The feeling is almost unsettling. Hadfield’s quiet, meditative exploration of nearly identical forms, and the ruggedness of the painted and scraped terrain that accompany them yield profoundly precise constructions.

That precision, however, is something of a ploy. Hadfield, who greatly admires Jasper Johns, subtly shifts the armature of shaped lines that these works share, creating the illusion of movement passing through time. The lines here are stock-still, yet the painted surfaces around them abound with gestures and edited...

Image: Hexbeam courtesy of the artist

Maggie Cavallo is an experimental curator and educator based in Boston, MA. Committed to celebrating and contextualizing contemporary art in Boston and beyond, Cavallo specializes in live and experiential aesthetic experiences. Recent projects include ☢ SPACE CASE: ZILLABOSTON ONLINE RESIDENCY, NEAR DEATH performance art experience curated by Vela Phelan, NOTHING & NO THING curated by Robert Yoder and INSTANT MESSAGING co-curated with Anthony Greaney. Cavallo is also Curator of Education at Montserrat College of Art, where she programs over fifty visiting artists into the curriculum each semester. Her latest project is A New Cosmic Mix: now in 5D! at the Museum of Science’s Charles Hayden Planetarium May 12th at both...

By Monroe Denton, New York

Artist and Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed American Folk Art Museum January 24-May 26, 2013

A special exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum introduced the wide-ranging career of a New England painter, born in Bath, Maine in 1806.  It opened almost exactly 140 years after his death in Boston.  The Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, which is the primary repository for Prior’s works, had organized the show of almost forty Prior portraits (and two other works) plus a handful of works by his relatives, housepainters who turned their hands to images under his influence.  The lessons of history and contemporary art which the exhibition offered left at least this viewer excited beyond anticipation.

“There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in,” Leonard Cohen sings over and over in my imagination.  I wonder:  is art the way that the light gets in?  It isn’t the quality...

Pain(t)ed Justice: The Curious, Troubling Case of Portrait of Wally

by Ethan Gilsdorf    

Egon Schiele’s “Portrait of Wally” (1912) Courtesy of The Leopold Museum

The trials and tribulations surrounding Portrait of Wally are by now largely known in the art world. A famous Egon Schiele painting, stolen by the Nazis and "misplaced" in a famous museum's collection, gets unearthed and justice is restored. A new documentary, which bears the same name as Schiele’s coveted 1912 painting, is the first effort fully to connect the controversy's many sub-plots and dead ends. Andrew Shea's Portrait details the controversy, and subterfuge, surrounding the painting that, as the film's tagline hyperbolically claims, was the "The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits." Well, not a thousand. But several. To recap the backstory: Female nudes were Austrian painter...

Among From With Andrew Witkin: Platform 11 deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum through April 2, 2013

Installed in the hallway and two galleries at the top of the deCordova Museum is Andrew Witkin’s Among From With. The installation is attentive to the borders that exist in a museum and attempts to break these down.

In the hallway are several minimalist plywood chairs aligned and spaced along the wall with black felt-like banners hung on the wall. The chairs occupy both the space of sculpture and the function of a space for waiting. The banners contain long lists of names and fragments of thoughts. The names are mostly art names with musicians and baseball, etc. The thoughts are about art and being. This hallway smells good, all that fresh wood. The lists accumulate as a love letter: to those who have influenced and sustained both in thought and presence. The love letter is to the world of art and thought. I am reminded how small a world it is since many of the names...

Sheffield van Buren & Katherine Porter: Paintings April 4 – May 31, 2013 Thursdays through Sundays, 1 – 6 pm 100 Holton St. Allston, MA (behind warehouse at 184 Everett) 

 

[Photo] View of Installation at 100 Holton St.

Down a nondescript alley, just past Jump on in Parties and the Boston Auto Body Shop, you will notice the hand-painted sign with the words GALLERY. Follow the arrow and you will be amazed to find an art exhibition to rival a museum—with soaring ceilings and a beautiful installation of thirty oil paintings by two established artists. What is the source of this unusual gallery?

Artist Sheffield van Buren searched for several years for an alternative exhibition space before locating an “industrial box” in a warehouse section in Allston. The building is one of many vacant or underutilized buildings in the area owned by Harvard...

by Henry McMahon

Some of the most striking works in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s “Great and Mighty Things”: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, are the sculptures of William Edmondson, who was born in 1874 to former slaves and held various manual labor jobs until his mid-50s, when a series of divine visitations—and the commandment to take up stone carving—prompted two decades of remarkably accomplished sculpting. Immediately recognizable as the subjects they depict, each of Edmondson’s carved limestone sculptures (Woman, Angel, Horse with Short Tail, Horse with Long Tail, Three Birds, and Sheep) takes form by a subtle interplay of simple planes. They are solid and believable without being overly descriptive (rough chisel marks denote the sheep’s fleece, the horses’ coats, the woman’s hair and the angel’s wings), deriving their power from a restrained economy of means.

Boffo. William Hawkins, American, 1895-1990....

By Martha Buskirk 

Book reviews of Ming Tiampo’s Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Judith Rodenbeck’s Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (MIT Press, 2011)

How is it that certain examples come to stand as shorthand markers for an artist’s work, or even an entire movement? The first gambit in any such reassessment is likely to involve proffering an alternate slate on which to build the analysis. For event-based work there is the further challenge of sifting through the traces, documents, and residue relating to manifestations that remain tantalizingly beyond any opportunity for direct experience.

      Left: Judith Rodenbeck’s Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention...

Through April 21, 2013 deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Lincoln, MA

Like many intersections, the intersection of painting and sculpture can be approached via many avenues, recast in deliberate contemporary terms as an edgy departure from the canvas or perhaps more sensibly in an historical sense as an ongoing process of exploration. This, of course, ignores the broader human impulse simply to decorate and alter the shit out of anything they can get their hands on (not, we are reminded, a uniquely artistic urge). One needs only to recall (perhaps imprecisely) the original jarring colors of ancient Greek temples, or the elegant simplicity of the pyramids at Giza draped in white paint to remember the strength of this impulse. More formally, it would be easy enough to look back to the combines of Rauschenberg as a beginning of sorts. And just as quickly, in this path, an astute art historian would point you further back again in time.

By Bansie Vasvani

Eikokoma, Caravan, courtesy MoMA, New York

For a first-time viewer, Eiko and Koma’s slow moving yet highly sculpted performance piece entitled the Caravan Project, at the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby at MoMA, New York, was a treat. Staged beneath Tony Smith’s canvas, Untitled (1962), and in front of Rodin’s Monument to Balzac (1898), this free flowing “museum by delivery” installation carved out and held a distinct place amidst its distinguished company.

The Caravan Project is performed in and around a specifically modified trailer fitted for the setting. At MoMA, the internally lighted trailer resembled the warm interior of a bird’s nest. Leaves, potato stems, and other organic detritus hung from the walls and lined the inner surface of the caravan that was open on all four sides for easy viewing. Then two somnambulant...

By Robert Moeller

Sandrine Schaefer is a Boston-based artist, educator, and independent curator. Her ephemeral artwork examines the shared experience of understanding the body in space, corporally and conceptually. Using a site-sensitive approach, she exercises durational endurance to explore the parameters of real time and investigate invisible space.

She is the recipient of several awards, grants, residencies, and exhibits internationally and is co-Founder of The Present Tense, an art initiative that produces and archives live art events, festivals, exhibitions and exchanges. We spoke recently.

 

RM: I was struck by how neatly you wove these disparate elements together for the show, Insider/Outsider that you recently curated at Lincoln Arts Project. The work sometimes was just traces of things, fragments. How did the internal organization initially cohere?

SS: My concept...

By Craig Stockwell

Bernd has a studio in Marblehead, MA, located on the third floor of an aged building in the scenic old town with a view through to the harbor. I had met Bernd in Provincetown and was interested in his painting and have enjoyed his enigmatic Facebook postings entitled, “Now.”

Bernd is an accomplished painter raised and trained in Germany and his commitment to the rigors of private studio practice were immediately apparent as was his general disapproval of the slightness of much of contemporary art. What’s interesting is that he is in the midst of a changing practice wherein he is moving on to new projects that reflect on the nature of painting, and the idea of what an artist, is in a way that is opening possibilities fundamentally different from those of where he’s begun.

Darwin’s Coral

Haussmann has been involved in a variety of current...

By Anya Ventura When, in 2008, artist Kyla Coburn first purchased a 19th-century mill in Central Falls, Rhode Island, she and her partner Andy Trench carted away dumpsters full of garbage. The accumulated layer of trash on the ground was so thick that it formed a kind of artificial sediment. The mill was without basic heat or plumbing, long abandoned to the urban wilderness, but the couple saw the raw potential. Today the mill has a garden, a hot tub, and a scenic view overlooking the Blackstone River that cuts through the city; it is a Central Falls success story writ small.

     

While...

By Stephen Vincent Kobasa

Is there any sculptor so resistant to domestication as Sir Anthony Caro? The reality of this fact is, perhaps unintentionally, made clear in a concise retrospective currently at the Yale Center for British Art.

Anthony Caro, Catalan Scrawl, 1987–88, steel, rusted and fixed, 41 x 40 x 13". Private collection, London.

The Yale installation reads like a roadside menagerie with an assemblage of too small cages in which animals pace frantically back and forth on the way to madness. More benignly, it appears like a latter day natural history cabinet with its species-specific groupings of objects presented as coffee table artifacts. The radical edge balancing of these works, resentful of their pedestals, suggests an advertisement for executives’ office toys. They are gizmos deployed with a preference for their illusory...

Gallery NAGA, Boston, MA www.gallerynaga.com Through December 15, 2012

By Mary Bucci McCoy

The late Western Massachusetts painter Gregory Gillespie came of age as a painter in the 1960s. Rejecting the dominant paradigms of that era, and choosing to live in western Massachusetts rather than New York, he pursued a deeply personal, introspective path through idiosyncratic and eclectic realism often pushed in magical and surreal directions. Yet he was hardly an outsider artist, and by the time he died by his own hand in 2000 at the age of sixty-four, he had long had a very successful career, with gallery representation in New York (including a stipend) and Boston, work in significant collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and numerous exhibitions including a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC.

Gillespie’s estate is now represented in Boston by Gallery NAGA, which is showing a broad...

On the last day of the fair I ventured over to the Miami Art Museum to hear a talk. The museum, on West Flagler St, is housed in a somewhat run-down building designed by Philip Johnson and set in a area of the city that, on a Sunday morning at least, feels abandoned. The abandonment seems to extend to the people camped out on benches and wandering the cultural plaza beside the museum. Next year the museum is moving into fancy new quarters down on Key Biscayne Bay, right on the water. The new setting, I presume, more in line with art's growing intersection with the luxury trade and entertainment business. As one art-world insider said to me, "We are all just extras here...", and indeed that was the case. Traveling in air-conditioned comfort via taxis and shuttle buses you passed across the city fooled into thinking you were part of some pampered elite, even if just for a moment.

Party...

Perhaps because it was curated, "Untitled" stood out as the most cohesive of the fairs. Gone was the clutter and noise on display everywhere else. Set right out on the beach, the work here seemed more a conversation between friends than the shouting match that ensued elsewhere as dealers and their artists vied for attention.

Work by Franklin Evans

And Jim Richard

Plus...

Oscar Murrillo spent the summer at the Rubell Family Collection using one of the large galleries as a studio.

Work by Secundino Hernandez

The most expensive car in the world?

Courtyard Sculpture

Budweiser Installation

Robert...

The streets surrounding the Rubell Family Collection, which is housed in a former DEA warehouse.

Robert Moeller is the website coordinator for ANE

...

No doubt our readers are familiar with the work of the Boston-based artist Sonia Almeida.

Her work is a must-see if you visit NADA. See examples below.

           ...

Short skirts, glamorous hotels, and shimmering pools the size of small lakes, this combined with stone-aged like internet speeds, a dizzying array of art to see, and a cocktail being handed to you every time you turn around is all part of the allure of Art Basel Miami. It is a cabana-based reality show set in a city where reality itself is swathed in gaudy pastels and accompanied by a thumping bass beat. The Convention Center where Basel is based, is an enormous, airplane hanger-like structure filled with dealer kiosks and it all feels money-serious. Hands are clasped, quiet smiles exchanged, and deals are done. Hard off a long, late night I stumbled into a hotel coffee shop this morning. 17 dollars later I had in hand two coffees, two medium, rather unremarkable coffees. Juxtaposed into an art world setting, my transaction was rather tame. Like I said, every thing here is money-serious. 

NADA,...

Last night was deCordova's reception at the Fontainebleau, and in the true Miami tradition we followed that with a 10pm dinner, followed by more cocktails!

The sunshine seems a bit much this morning. Despite the, ummm, over-revelry, it was a great party, thanks to Art New England and Freeman's Auctions, who underwrote it. The event was packed- I'm guessing 130 cycled in and out, with a solid 100+ there throughout. The deC staff here (thanks Nora, Lexi, and Lydia who was here under her own power!) were kept busy!

Name check... a small sampling of those who came to celebrate deCordova: Sharon Corwin (Director, Colby College Museum), artist Rachel Perry Welty, artist Orly Genger, Debbie Landau (Director of Madison Square Art) and her board president David Berliner, deC Board Chair Faith Parker...

 

I spent the afternoon and early evening yesterday scanning the main fair and saying hello to a lot of familiar faces.

Along the way I chatted with Josee Bienvenu, who represents Julianne Swartz (her lovely show is currently up at deCordova) while Josee was looking at art in the main fair (her booth is at Pulse). I had an entertaining run-in with Michael Conforti from the Clark in Williamstown... Michael is like a full-time performance artist. Others air-kissed include Abigail Ross-Goodman (working hard as always), Mary Sabbatino (Director of Galerie Lelong), Susan Edwards (Director of Nashville's Frist-they have a really thoughtful family education center. If you haven't seen it check it out), deCordova Overseer and collector Beth Marcus and husband...

Enroute: Miami

Yes, it's that time again: ArtBasel Miami Beach, the annual artworld rite of air kisses, mojitos and age-inappropriate attire.

DeCordova is hosting our 4th-annual ArtBasel | Boston reception this year. We're expecting around 100 people tomorrow night for poolside cocktails and fun. Hope to see many of you there- including all the great New England gallerists and artists who are down, as well as our friends at Art New England and Freeman's Auctioneers, who have generously underwritten the reception.

Leaving rainy Boston and landing in sunny Miami is always uplifting. Unlike prior years, though, my AA flight this morning was not packed with the usual suspects—Boston collectors, gallerists, curators, and the like. Where is everyone?

Pic of the always...

Art New England is off to Miami—visiting the venerable, blue-chip Miami Art Basel and the newest fairs—from which reports will be posted with some frequency on our blog. Once the fairs (and the parties!) are underway, we will have images of various exciting encounters via blog postings by Dennis Kois, the director of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and Robert Moeller, our website coordinator and writer. We hope we will see some of our many readers at the deCordova reception held at the Fontainebleau Hotel, or at Art Cetera to take place at the Ritz Carlton, and Aqua12 happening at the Aqua Hotel, on top of numerous other art-related events on Collins Avenue and elsewhere.

Art New England asks readers who are unable to make it to Miami to watch the blog for updates on activities of predictable and unpredictable sorts happening at the fairs.

...

By Rebecca Uchill

During the closing week of dOCUMENTA (13), visitors found the following announcements posted throughout streets and transit stations: Documenta: An Art Exhibition in Kassel, Germany—as if any reminder were necessary in the context of an exhibition that had taken over the city center. Beneath that header, the posters went on to advertise less immediately evident engagements of the 2012 Documenta franchise further afield: And in Kabul. And in Cairo. And in Banff.

Joan Jonas, Reanimation, 2010–12. Photo: Nils Klinger.

dOCUMENTA (13) was widely distributed on many fronts. As advertised, the exhibition was simply expansive in its sheer geographic reach: for example, an associating series of seminars and an exhibition in Kabul ran through spring and summer of 2012, and an August retreat at Canada’s Banff Center invited...

By Robert Moeller

In a lot of ways, New York settles down to business in the fall. Yes, the city is still full of tourists but generally speaking they cluster, cameras held high in the air, at the construction site where the World Trade Center once stood or in the midst of the blinking and gussied-up insanity of Times Square. Fall’s cooler temperatures revitalize, daredevils on delivery bikes whip through the streets, and taxis and pedestrians take turns filling the intersections, enjoying a brief truce enforced by the traffic lights.

Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2010

The art world, reenergized by the prospect of a new season also comes to life. Both museums and galleries, like dueling banjos, try to one-up each other with chords either dauntingly new or classically proven. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, boisterous as a crowded subway car, spills over with an antic...

A Consideration of Eric Aho’s Transcending Nature recently at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire

By Arlene Distler

Back in April of 2012 I was wandering around the Armory show in New York, an event that has become a huge and important showcase for contemporary art from all over the world. I passed a large abstract painting on the outside wall of DC Moore Gallery of New York. It caught my attention. Among all the hundreds, maybe thousands, of art works placed in their pop-up gallery cubicles—heightened realism in the drawing of a frying pan, brightly striped canvases or shiny chrome objects that seek to mirror the razzamataz of our glitzy, LCD-lit world, often seeming self-conscious searches for something new and fresh—here was someone who simply loved paint and painting. Now that was fresh! The painting, Daybreak (2011), at 92 x 80 inches, also made a big impression. Amid...

By Stephen Vincent Kobasa

Rachel Beach, Stretch, Switch, Hatch, 2012. Painted Aluminum, Reclaimed Beams

Only some sculptures are site specific, but no sculpture is site neutral. Anywhere a work is placed transforms it, and is transformed by it. This is both the promise and the danger of a varied geography such as the one at Chesterwood that extends over several available acres of both woods and lawns. In an exhibition such as this, the matter of setting may involve even more of a curatorial obligation than the choice of the individual works. But out of the constellation of guest and resident curators complicated by artists who may or may not advocate for particular sites, it is often difficult to establish the map of responsibility for both the successes and the failures.

For example, whose thought was it to place Allen Glatter’s powdered aluminum fabrication...

By Craig Stockwell

I am contemplating how to undertake a loss of control in the studio. I visited Katherine Bradford at her Harpswell, Maine studio on an August afternoon. In the barn, as it should be. It was raining and later we sat by a wood fire in the kitchen. Katherine Bradford’s work frightens me. It is such a brave and delicate world she is attempting. In this particular world of painting there’s not much there. The paintings are insubstantial, undernourished, even poorly painted. There is a conscious proclivity to refuse continuity. There is a fumbling about in the dark which runs the risk of that abstract expressionist existentialist bravado. But this painting is done with so little bravado and the expressionism is quiet and yearning. Without being histrionic, this painting believes in the possibility of emotional exchange.

Katherine Bradford's...

 By Bansie Vasvani

Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, an expansive, multi-venue exhibition in New York at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the El Museo del Barrio, and the Queens Museum, dislodges the common perception of art from this region as derivative, inauthentic, and peripheral. This comprehensive representation of 500 works by 250 artists not only encompasses a vast geographical territory, but it also reveals the impact of African, Asian, European, and indigenous elements that prevailed through the years.

Dating from the Haitian Revolution of 1791 and extending to the present, the works selected by a team of nine scholars and curators—Gerald Alexis, Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, Deborah Cullen, Hitomi Iwasaki, Naima J. Keith, Yolanda Wood Pujols, Lowery Stokes Sims, and Edward J. Sullivan, led by Elvis Fuentes, curator for special projects at El Museo del Barrio—examine a broad range of themes in their strident effort to formulate an identity of their own. Drawing...

By Trevor Fairbrother

This essay was originally published in (SIC), a Belgian magazine about modern and contemporary art (www.sicsic.be). An abridged version appeared in the September/October 2012 issue of Art New England, and appears here in full for the first time in English.

William John Kennedy, Warhol Holding Marilyn Acetate I, executed 1964, 2010, © 2011 William John Kennedy, courtesy of KIWI Arts Group.

It is about twenty-five years since Andy Warhol's death, and history seems to be loath or unable to take full possession of him. While the post-modern 1980s have paled, he looms in the collective rearview mirror. Bits of him, from wisecracks to costly studio products, are never far away. He's become a kind of "Exploding Plastic Inevitable," which was the name he gave to his indecipherable raptures of sound, light, film, and music in the 1960s. In April...

By Bonnie Barrett Stretch

As Curator of Visual Arts at MASS MoCA since 2006, Susan Cross has organized a string of major exhibitions, beginning with Spencer Finch: What Time Is It on the Sun? (May 2007–Spring 2008); Material World: Sculpture to Environment (April 2010–February 2011), presenting immersive site-specific installations by seven US and European artists; The Workers: Precarity/Invisibility/Mobility (May 2011–April 14, 2012), featuring nearly forty works in multiple media by a broad group of emerging and established international artists whose work addresses contemporary labor issues; and the current Invisible Cities, which opened April 15 and runs through February 4, 2013. During these six and a half years, Cross has commissioned numerous new works for MASS MoCA, and authored essays for exhibition catalogues and books for which she also served as editor.

Prior to MASS MoCA, Cross was a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, organizing exhibitions...

By Craig Stockwell

On a cool rainy June day I visited Altoon Sultan at her home/studio in Groton, Vermont. I wanted to visit Altoon because I think that she has gone through an evolution in her work that speaks to what I see as a generous and expanded role of the studio artist.

It begins with Facebook. There’s nothing sacrosanct about Facebook but it happens to be, at this moment, a truly useful tool for me as an artist. Blogs are passing out of their usefulness. Facebook is alive and the conversation amongst the art community, if you can locate it, is rich and engaged in all of the aspects of that which those of us that love this conversation do love.

Altoon in her studio

Altoon is dedicated to Facebook and that is how my friendship with her deepened from a passing acquaintance to a lively interaction....

By Craig Stockwell

There are without doubt many committed artists who have chosen to live and work in New England. My intention with this regular feature is to visit many of them and to write about the ones that seem to exemplify some aspect of development in current practice that is notable. We have artists who trained in New England or were born here and have gone off to international reputations. We have artists who carry on tenacious and original practices with perhaps only local notice, and we have artists who work in New England and have major careers in New York and Europe but are rarely seen or heard of here.

I am making studio visits, and writing about them. This effort sprang from a conversation I had with the new Editor of Art New England, Judith Tolnick Champa. I had just come from visiting the artist Sonia Almeida in Somerville. Sonia is a painter whose work I had recently encountered at Simone Subal gallery in New York. The art world is a constant and delicate...

By Bansie Vasvani

Can authenticity be a yardstick for judging a work of art regardless of its ethnic or geographical origin? This question looms large as one walks into Alwar Balasubramaniam’s solo exhibition at the Talwar Gallery in downtown Manhattan. We are confronted by a series of works that push us to understand and probe what is unseen.

Alwar Balasubramaniam, Unfold, 2012

Appropriately titled Nothing from my Hands, Bala’s current exhibition continues to explore the theme of absence found in his previous works. In Link, a fishing hook attached to a length of string appears magically suspended in mid-air, tautly stretched across two adjacent walls. In order to create this illusion, the artist manipulates the wall surface from where the string emerges to make it seem as soft and pliable as fabric. At the other end, a magnet embedded in the wall attracts the hook...

by Lois Tarlow

This interview with Charles Weyerhaeuser moves back in time to reveal the nature of a special family museum and its evolution to the present. It simultaneously offers an intimate view into a now-rarified art and cultural landscape. The Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts, is anomalous. It is the gift of Carl and Edith Weyerhaeuser as a place to house their extensive art collections for the enjoyment of the residents of Duxbury and the public at large. The founders bought and cleared the land, and implemented the architectural design. Unlike other museums existing through the largesse of the donors, this one does not, at the insistence of the founders, bear their names on the marquee. Remarkably, a family member, their son Charles Weyerhaeuser, has been at the helm for nearly forty years. On its large rural campus the museum has become a community-minded center for regional art and the family collections, from Shaker furniture through Asian art, with...

By Shawn Hill

The Sixth International Encaustic Conference takes place during the weekend of June 1–3 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Conference founder and director, artist Joanne Mattera, has partnered with the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, working closely with their executive director, Cherie Mittenthal, in order to combine close knowledge of the Outer Cape with planning for what has become known informally as "Wax Week" in Provincetown.

 Lynn Basa, Riven, 2011.

With 250 conferees this year, the Conference has more than doubled its attendance since attracting just over 100 people in 2007. They've also moved from Beverly, on the north shore, to the Cape, which has allowed the conference...

by Bonnie Barrett Stretch

C. Ondine Chavoya is Associate Professor of Art and Latino/a Studies at Williams College. He is co-curator with Rita Gonzalez, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA, of the exhibition Asco: Elite of the Obscure, at Williams College Museum of Art, through July 29, 2012. I spoke with him when I visited the College to review the show for the March-April, 2012 issue of Art New England.

Asco, Instant Mural, 1974, color photograph by Harry Gamboa

BBS: Asco survived as a vibrant transgressive group from 1972 to 1987—a period of fifteen years. Why I haven’t heard about it before?

Chavoya: That’s an excellent question. I think for a long time, their work didn’t seem to fit the narratives and paradigms we’d come to understand about conceptual art, political art,...

by Christian Holland

Mary Sherman, director of TransCultural Exchange. Photo: Emily Sypher.

It was the late ‘80s. It was Chicago. An emerging artist named Mary Sherman had just met a couple of young Austrian architects who traveled to the city to study its architecture. They needed a place to stay, and Mary offered.

The architects, to whom Mary had been connected through Viennese friends she made while studying abroad, happened to like Sherman’s work, and several months later she was showing at Vienna's WUK Kunsthalle with other Chicago-based artists. That show was the first of a two-part exhibition entitled Reverse Angle in 1989–1990, with the second part, composed of Vienna-based artists, taking place at the Ludwig Drum Factory building in Chicago.

What was happening during the architects’ trip to Chicago and Sherman’s subsequent exhibition in Vienna was an exchange of ideas and resources, but it couldn’t have happened if Sherman wasn’t one of those...

 By Alicia Faxon

“Whose woods these are I think I know….” With these words, the poet Robert Frost might have been writing about the representations by Nina Bohlen on view at the Danforth Museum. In monotypes made in 2010 and 2011, the artist captures the fierce beauty of the woods surrounding her cabin in Lubec, Maine, the farthest point of land east on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.

In Bohlen’s monotypes, each of the trees or animals she depicts are highly individualized, never generic. They are expressive portraits that evoke moods, temperaments, and relationships. With fine draftsmanship Bohlen has staked out a territory of her own in the stark presence of her familiar woods.

The expressiveness of Bohlen’s view is not surprising. She was a member of the Boston Expressionist group, whose work was exhibited at the Danforth...

By Robert Moeller

 

 There is a wall separating these two shows at Gallery Kayafas, but don’t let that fool you. The wall is merely a structural trope metaphorically insisting on a purpose, for the kinship between these two artists is amazingly evident. Having their work on view simultaneously is clearly no accident.

Peter Kayafas works out in the open—more specifically, out in the very open. He photographs an assortment of disheveled buildings, some in the process of being swallowed by the earth, others simply tolerated by it. These stark sculptural structures, blistered by the wind, almost hum as they sit on the prairie, alone and undisturbed.

In North Dakota, 2010 a house or barn (or both) disappear into the ground, the roofs angled like the prows of two sinking ships. There is something ghostly about the image,...

by Robert Moeller

Dina Deitsch is Curator of Contemporary Art at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Prior to working at the deCordova she held curatorial positions at the Williams College Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is currently working on the 2012 deCordova Biennial and a number of group exhibitions for the Sculpture Park. The show she curated Temporary Structures: Performing Architecture in Contemporary Art is on view until December 31. For more information about the exhibition you can visit the deCordova website. We spoke recently.

RM: I like the idea that you thought about the museum’s surrounding landscape, architecture, and traditions when shaping Temporary Structures. Can you talk about that?

DD: Of course. I think that curating at deCordova for the past three years has made me somewhat sensitive to its rather unique characteristics. The building...

By Dina Deitsch

After the big fair, the two of the smaller-scale fair offerings – Pulse and Nada were welcomed visits.

Although the power was in flux during my visit – literally – the lights were dark in about a third of the fair – the energy at Pulse seemed properly pumped. Impulse, Pulse’s smaller side show, featured Boston’s Ellen Miller Gallery who had a solo presentation of everyone’s favorite Deb Todd Wheeler. A boat and remarkableseascapes made out of scans of plastic bagsfilled the booth nicely with a timely and elegant message about landscape. An aisle over, Elizabeth Leach hade a wall of New Hampshire-based Anna von Merten’s hand-stitched quilts from her newest series You and Me which will be on view in the deCordova Biennial this coming January. Subtle white and grey stitching on black fabric sketch out the fluctuating poles of energy. Metaphors of relationships turned a bit more literal with the fair’s fading lights…

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By Abigail Goodman

For my third day in Miami, I started off at the De La Cruz Collection, the personal museum of Miami collectors Carlos and Rosa De La Cruz. The 30,000 square foot building is impressive itself, and walking through the doors I was immediately in the midst of some stellar work. For instance, just the entrance had a salon hang of paintings by Glenn Ligon, Christopher Wool, Jacob Kassay, Nate Lowman, Wade Guyton, Mark Grotjhan and Seth Price, a giant by David Altmejd and a view to the Ugo Rondinone that had been at the ICA Boston on the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall as well as several Thomas Houseagos. Again, I was in the entrance. The commitment of their collecting was evident all around. I was excited to find an installation by Aaron Curry on the 2 floor and was particularly moved by the 3rd floor installation of works by Felix Gonzàlez-Torres, Gabriel Orozco, Jim Hodges, Ana Mendieta and Cesar Trasobares.

 

Despite the grandeur...

By Dina Deitsch

Miami – Day Two While Abi was militantly covering the collections and Main Fair – Art Basel – I found myself on a slightly stranger and later schedule, meandering through Art Basel and then in Collins Park late Wednesday night, fighting the rush of human traffic attending the Bass Museum’s Erwin Wurm opening (whose video Am I a House? Is featured in deCordova’s Temporary Structures - up until Dec 31).

But from the beginning. At Art Basel, a few notable installations were the solo projects. Sarah Oppenheimer (another Temporary Structures artist) created a new wall installation of metal and glass that seemed to bend space, literally. As Abi mentioned, Matt Saunders (2012 Biennial) has a near-solo presentation at Harris Lieberman where he is debuting large-scale photographic prints that riff off lost cultural producers – Weimar-era actress Asta Neilson and the writer Robert Musil, famous for his epic, unfinished novel, The Man without...

By Abigail Goodman

Day 1 of Art Basel Miami did not disappoint! First stop was the Rubell Collection bright and early at 9 am. American Exuberance, their new exhibit was timely, sincere and impressive. From John Miller and Sterling Ruby, whose respective monumental installation and paintings made up the first two galleries, to the seductive (and early) Jacob Kassay and Analia Saban works, the exhibition boasted a variety of expression and material exploration. Other sure favorites were the John McAllister’s paintings, Hannah Greely’s installation Dual, Dana Schutz's ever painterly and bold canvases, Ruby Neri “naïve” classicism and Kaari Upson’s grotto. Also not to be missed was Jennifer Rubell's food installation Incubation -- servings of homemade yogurt in glass jars and honey dripping from a box on ceiling, leaving visitors to catch their sweetness as it falls to earth.

   

   

From there I headed...

New England, renowned as a cutting edge in academia, is embracing its evolving reputation as a hub for contemporary art. Case in point--Art New England, is celebrating its 32nd year as the region’s premier magazine focusing on contemporary art and culture. Today, ANE finds itself at Art Basel Miami Beach—the only North American edition of this most prestigious of art fairs which is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Thousands of galleries are participating in more than a dozen fairs, 46,000 visitors are expected and, quite simply, Miami Beach is on fire as “the” place to see, experience and thoroughly immerse oneself in the provocative world of contemporary art.

Art New England is proud to partner with the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park and Freeman’s Auction House to honor the museum’s 2012 Biennale and to acknowledge New England’s important contribution to this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach.

Follow deCordova Biennial co-curators Abbi Ross...

By Julia Kelley

DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, recently acquired a piece by artist Dan Graham, Crazy Spheroid- Two Entrances. This addition to the sculpture park is the fourth in a series of recent acquisitions, and it was chosen because its unique hybrid of styles, lending a modern architectural element to the park.

Andy Ryan

Crazy Spheroid – Two Entrances is a half-ellipse made of mirrored glass, with its interior divided into two unequal parts, each accessible through cutout doorways. The reflective glass makes the piece seem composed entirely of its surroundings—the trees, the sky, the people viewing the work—aside from its sparse steel supports. Viewers are encouraged to enter the sculpture and experiment with their distorted reflections.

“There’s something in it for everyone,” according to Graham. For example,...

By Debbie Hagan

Judith F. Baca, Farewell to Rosie the Riveter and Development of Suburbia (1983) - A detail from "The Great Wall of Los Angeles". Photo: Linda Eber. Courtesy of SPARC

Next Thursday, November 3, Simmons College will offer a free screening and panel discussion of !WAR: Women Art Revolution, beginning at 6:30 p.m.  It will be shown in the Main College Building, Room C103.  A panel discussion will follow the film.

“Based on forty years of interview footage [Lynn Hersman] Leeson shot of major figures in the feminist art movement, the documentary aims to fill in the gaps of a forgotten chapter—it’s a book, really—in the story of art,” Ethan Gilsdorf wrote in a review of the film in the November/December issue of Art New England....