Strategies of Engagement at McMullen Museum of Art Our current political storm is exposing how few people (myself included) have a solid knowledge of the history of racism in America. Books like The Strange Career of Jim Crow, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, or Hope in the Dark are replacing the navel-gazing […]
IMAGINING AN AFTER
Exploring the Museum of Capitalism I was looking and looking for a quote that I thought was from the philosopher Wittgenstein about how difficult—how structurally impossible it is—to analyze a cultural phenomenon from inside of it, but I was never able to find the quote and am now not even sure it was […]
GALLERY REVIEWS 5.10.18
Pilgrims, Feeling of a Feeling, and Art in the Age of the Internet Chuck Webster: Pilgrims: Drawings 2017-2018—Steven Zevitas Gallery The naivete in Chuck Webster’s work is misleading. What looks like pan watercolors and marker doodles on sheets of bond is shellac-based inks on vintage paper. The noodly line work comes from the […]
GALLERY REVIEWS 4.10.18
Playtime, Drawn, & Questions and Answers Playtime—Peabody Essex Museum You know that you’re in Playtime from the squealing emanating from one of Martin Creed’s two pieces in the show, Work No. 329 (2004). The installation, following the artist’s precise instructions to “fill latex balloons with half of the air in a given space […]
GALLERY REVIEWS 2.22.18
Inventur, Culture Hustlers, and Sandrine Schaefer Inventur: Art in Germany, 1943-55—Harvard Art Museums Five years in the making, Inventur examines German artistic production in the decade-plus of recovery after World War II. It takes its name from a Günter Eich poem that describes his meager belongings, including a “precious nail / I keep concealed […]
LIFE AS A HUNGRY GHOST
Extension Gallery’s 2018 season is off to a haunting start Extension Gallery has been quietly filling the gap in emerging art presentation in Allston that’s been left vacant more or less since Allston Skirt Gallery and Pan 9 went the way of all things (in these rapidly gentrifying lands). Its programming this year […]
6,000 PROTEST SIGNS
from the 2017 Boston Women’s March preserved as an online archive After the 2017 Boston Women’s March, thousands of participants left their protest signs around the iron fence surrounding the Boston Common Central Burying Ground. They were going to be thrown away—until three local teachers came along. “Towards the end of the march in […]
GALLERY REVIEW: Annette Lemieux: Mise en Scène—Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
They barely move, but are distinctly not still, hovering above with all of the tension of a cat about to pounce—but never pouncing—on a mouse that is you.
GALLERY REVIEW: Joan Jonas: Ice Drawing—Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Enter through the Seeking Stillness exhibition if you can—Jonas couldn’t have asked for a better prelude to her work. The artifacts you first encounter in the darkened, theatrical Krupp Gallery greet you as if you were an archaeologist. They were used as tools for something, but what? The “what,” as it always is with […]
GALLERY REVIEW: The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766-1820—Harvard Art Museums
In the early days of the republic, the Philosophy Chamber at Harvard College housed an assortment of natural specimens, scientific instruments, and various objects of curiosity and delectation. This was a place to apprehend the logic of the universe and to ruminate on divine influence in the natural world. It was also a […]
