‘Trans’ at Atlantic Works, ‘Red’ at Cambridge Art Association, Caroline Jones and David Joselit at MIT, Ralph Gibson at BU
By RANDI HOPKINS | December 9, 2007
Leah DeVun, Joshua |
| “Trans” at Atlantic Works, 80 Border St, East Boston | December 7-12 | “Red” at Cambridge Art Association, Kathryn Schultz Gallery, 25 Lowell St, and University Place Gallery, 124 Mount Auburn St, Cambridge | Through January 19 | Opening receptions December 7: 6-8 pm | 617.876.0246 | Caroline Jones in Conversation with David Joselit at List Visual Art Center, Bartos Theatre, 20 Ames St, Cambridge | December 13 at 7 pm | 617.253.4680 | Ralph Gibson Lecture at BU’s College of General Studies, Jacob Sleeper Auditorium, 871 Comm Ave, Boston | December 13 at 7 pm | $15 non-members, $5 full-time students | 617.975.0600 |
Two well-judged shows light up the holiday horizon, both hosted by artist-membership organizations that have invited local curators to evaluate and select works by artists within and also outside their membership for exhibition. Leonie Bradbury, gallery director and curator at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, does the honors for “TRANS” (which opens at Atlantic Works in East Boston on December 7), selecting work by 14 artists who explore that slippery little prefix, with all that it implies of change and movement, passing through and traveling on, from translation to trans-gender to transparency and beyond.Jane Farver, director of MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, brings her mad skillz to selecting the multitude of works that make up “RED,” which is up at both of the Cambridge Art Association (CAA) galleries through January 19, with opening receptions at both sites on December 7. CAA, which has more than 500 artist members working in media including photography, printmaking, glass, painting, and textiles, hosts juried exhibitions open to all New England artists twice a year. This year’s incarnation finds its true color in works like Louisa Bertman’s Boston Red Sox, David Ortiz, Andrew Child’s One-Room Schoolhouse Infrared Photograph, and Lydia Anne McCarthy’s Red Flowers.
If you’re in the mood for artistic food for thought, you have a choice of two lectures on December 13 at 7 pm. In conjunction with “VIDEO TRAJECTORIES” (at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center through December 30), super-bright exhibition curator and MIT art-history professor CAROLINE A. JONES speaks with Yale University art historian DAVID JOSELIT, author of Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press 2007), which looks at tactics developed by artists and media activists in the 1960s and 1970s to co-opt and otherwise make smart use of television. And at BU’s College of General Studies, the Photographic Resource Center presents an evening with RALPH GIBSON, whose fine black-and-white images have been moving viewers since the early 1960s. Gibson worked as an assistant to Dorothea Lange and also to Robert Frank back in the day, and his uncanny location of beauty in minute details — a curve or a shadow or a glance — continues to set his work apart.
On the Web
Atlantic Works: www.atlanticworks.org
Cambridge Art Association: www.cambridgeart.org
List Visual Art Center: http://web.mit.edu/lvac
BU’s College of General Studies: www.bu.edu/prc
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