Save the Dates: Six Highly Anticipated Museum Exhibitions
Harmony Hammond, Rib, 2013, oil and mixed media on canvas, 901⁄3 x 72½” (229.36 x 184.15 cm). Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © Harmony Hammond/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
With a news cycle saturated with talk about shoring up borders, six compelling upcoming exhibitions remind us of the importance of building bridges rather than walls. From an artist-curated series of shows that will transform an entire museum to an exhibition confronting the pressing crisis of human displacement, three long-overdue surveys and an installation that promises to nudge our perceptions into a more generous way of seeing—art connects us to what matters.
Making Migration Visible:
Traces, Tracks & Pathways
October 5–December 14, 2018
Institute of Contemporary Art
Maine College of Art
Portland, ME, meca.edu
With increasing numbers of refugees perishing each year and millions more struggling not just with displacement but their very survival, taking a closer look at human migration couldn’t be timelier. This was the impetus behind Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks & Pathways, an effort that promises to bridge the gap between what we believe about migration and the actual experiences of individuals. The NEA grant–awarded exhibition will include work of international reach and caliber, from textiles to painting to installation, co-curated by Julie Poitras Santos, assistant professor in the MFA program at MECA, and Catherine Besteman, professor of anthropology at Colby College. But Santos and Besteman and their institutional partners are taking the exhibition “beyond the walls of the gallery,” Santos says, by partnering with more than 40 organizations across Maine with companion exhibitions, films, performances, lectures, poetry readings and community conversations. Santos hopes viewers will come away with “a deepened understanding of what is happening globally in terms of human movement.”
Emily Mason: To Another Place
October 5, 2018–February 10, 2019
Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
Brattleboro, VT, brattleboromuseum.org
Emily Mason, The Purple Could Not Keep The East, 1994, oil on claybord, 20 x 16″ (50.8 x 40.6 cm). Copyright is held by Emily Mason and licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of the artist.
Now well into her 80s, lyrical abstract artist Emily Mason continues to create ethereal works of art that embrace balance, harmony, spontaneity—and emotional intensity. To Another Place at the Brattleboro, the first major survey of her work, celebrates Mason not just as a mainstay in this vibrant Vermont community, but it also positions her in the firmament of second-generation New York school artists, which includes her husband, painter Wolf Kahn. Curator Mara Williams has known Mason and watched her work for decades. “Her commitment to paint has led
to a commitment to craft, even though it looks largely like serendipity,” Williams says. “How she works between the pouring and the blotting and the mark-making…It’s uniquely her vocabulary.” While maintaining a continuity of style, Mason’s works are always dynamic and evocative. The exhibition will span 60 years, from Mason’s 1958 paintings produced on a Fulbright scholarship in Italy to work created last January in Vermont.
Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective
October 18, 2018–January 6, 2019
MIT List Visual Arts Center
Cambridge, MA, listart.mit.edu
October 18, 2018–December 30, 2018
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Harvard University, carpenter.center
Cambridge, MA
Iconoclast, Renaissance man, avant-garde—however you characterize him, Tony Conrad (1940–2016) broke aesthetic and philosophical ground with music, film and installation work—often combining all three. Inspired by John Cage, Conrad’s unique take on art, like Duchamp’s, also nudged other artists to move outside of conventional and predictable expressions; he is said to have inspired the Velvet Underground and maybe even Andy Warhol. The dual-location Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective, originally organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the University at Buffalo Art Galleries (Conrad taught at the university for several decades), promises a number of film and music-related programs in addition to exhibition materials. While calling a retrospective an “introduction” might seem a contradiction, it represents a long overdue effort at reappraising the extraordinary creative achievement of one of the most influential artists you’ve never heard of. MIT List’s Mark Linga says Conrad’s untimely passing two years ago “was looked at as a major event” in the art world. As Conrad himself famously said, “You don’t know who I am, but somehow, indirectly, you’ve been affected by things I did.”
Harmony Hammond: Material Witness,
Five Decades of Art
March 3–September 15, 2019
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Ridgefield, CT, aldrichart.org
Among the 23 exhibitions Amy Smith-Stewart has curated at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 17 have been one-person shows of women she describes as being “at significant junctures in their careers.” In that context, the Aldrich will present the first major survey of Harmony Hammond’s five-decade-spanning career, which Smith-Stewart says, “will give scholars, artists, curators as well as a wide audience of museumgoers a chance to look up-close and in depth at one of the most influential artists working today.” Hammond bridges minimalist and post-minimalist expressions and is considered a trailblazer, not just as an artist but also as a feminist and lesbian scholar, writer, activist and curator—often bridging these worlds. The exhibition will explore all aspects of Hammond’s cross-disciplinary contributions and is being organized in close collaboration with the artist. As Smith-Stewart puts it, “Hammond has been imploding art historical boundaries and socially conditioned binaries for 50 years. This survey is long overdue.”
Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen Nguyen: Ellis-Beauregard Foundation
Fellowship Exhibition
Spring 2019
Center for Maine Contemporary Art
Rockland, ME, cmcanow.org
Eric Gottesman, Jordan Is Not A Country/Desert Fence, 2006, 30 x 40″, pigment print. Part of the Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks & Pathways coming in October to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art. Courtesy of Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art.
While collaborative artists Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen Nguyen have long challenged viewers’ perceptions through site-specific installations across the U.S. and overseas, next spring they will present their first Maine museum show—as recipients of the inaugural Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellowship award. “For us it’s an opportunity to do a large-scale project in Maine, which for me is home,” Kavanaugh says. It will soon be home to Nguyen too, as he prepares to relocate there from Brooklyn where the duo began collaborating more than 15 years ago while they shared studio space. While both artists also create independent work, they’ve become known for their installations, often employing great amounts of paper—a medium they have manipulated to suggest rope, trees, walls and even snow, conjuring sublime immersive experiences. What can audiences expect next spring? “I think the context for this work is going to be somewhere in between climate change, glaciation and resource extraction when it comes to water,” Kavanaugh says. “But it could entirely change.” Such is the creative process.
Raid the Icebox Now
Fall 2019–Summer 2020
RISD Museum
Providence, RI, risdmuseum.org
Andy Warhol continues to invite us to question tropes about art. In 1969, the RISD Museum invited Warhol to curate a show from its collections; unsurprisingly, he bucked norms by suggesting the storage of art was itself aesthetically interesting—and thus Raid the Icebox was born. That long-ago effort will reincarnate in a reboot of the same name late in 2019: a rollout of exhibitions culminating in a transformed museum. A total of ten artists and artist collectives will investigate RISD’s holdings and comment on the art as Warhol did by presenting it uniquely, interacting with the art and, if they wish, creating their own in response. From a fashion design group to a digital media design firm, these artists already work outside a traditional curatorial framework, so the results should be mind-opening and fascinating. RISD Museum’s deputy
director Sarah Ganz Blythe is intrigued by the transformative possibilities: “How can [the artists] grow, and how can the museum grow in working with them?”
Julianna Thibodeaux is an independent journalist, art critic, writing teacher and editor. She lives north of Boston.