“I think we’re at a sort of watershed moment in Boston,” says Russell LaMontagne, who was co-owner of the hot-shot LFL Gallery in New York (which shows Dana Schutz, who had a major Rose Museum retrospective in 2006). LaMontagne opened a gallery at 51 Melcher Street in Fort Point last spring; after his landlord pushed him out, he reopened in January in a second-floor space that he bought at 555 East Second Street in South Boston. “Boston has put a lot of money into these art museums. I don’t know if it makes sense to have great contemporary museums without great contemporary galleries. You need to have a dialogue between the two. The point is: how are you going to introduce young artists?”
Many in the city’s arts community were insulted when a December 2007 Boston Foundation report on the area’s arts and culture non-profits stated, “If a non-profit lacks a clear vision, struggles to attract an audience, and cannot grow to a larger scale to realize a greater vision and increase support, it should consider exiting the market or merging.” The report didn’t address for-profits, but the combo of expired leases and a gloomy economy makes it almost seem that some commercial galleries are following its recommendation.
Kathleen Bitetti, executive director of the non-profit Artists Foundation, says that agencies and institutions like the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Boston Foundation focus their attention — and grants — on non-profits and/or individual artists but pay little attention to commercial galleries. She feels that this needs to change. “There’s all this talk of the ‘creative economy,’ and yet this key piece of these small businesses that actually sell this stuff is left out. How do we keep this piece?”
Related:
Boston gallery shake-up, Drawing to a close, The devil in the details, More 
- Boston gallery shake-up
Three of Boston's most important galleries are about to make major changes, and rumors exist that several others may soon move or close —signaling a major upheaval in the city's art scene.
- Drawing to a close
With the end of the 2008 art season quickly approaching, the following South End shows offer a last chance to squeeze in some high-class viewing.
- The devil in the details
It’s hard to imagine stopping to look at drawings that don’t coalesce till you let them pull you in and spin you around a bit.
- Dollhouses and dream states
Autumn highlights in the museums and the galleries.
- Blake babies
Nature is mysterious and mystical in "And the fair Moon rejoices" (at the BCA's Mills Gallery through August 16), as foreign as the wilds of New England probably seemed to its first English settlers. And maybe there are witches about.
- Happy endings
The end is nigh! And I’m not talking about the mortgage market.
- Naughty by nature
Landscape has inspired artists as varied as the romantic 19th-century Hudson River School painters and the macho 20th-century Earth Artists.
- Must warn others
It’s a cliché of bad novels and late-night movies that scientists and artists represent two extreme — and mutually exclusive — poles of objectivity and subjectivity.
- Flora, fauna, and the female figure
The Art Nouveau movement of the late-19th/early-20th century distanced itself from the mass production of the Industrial Revolution with elaborate, one-of-a-kind works made from unusual materials.
- Sixteen candles
Kingston Gallery has been operating as an artist-run cooperative since 1982, when it opened on Kingston Street in Chinatown.
- Knocking on Heaven’s Door
It’s difficult to embrace the idea of Utopia these days.
- Less
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Visual Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art, Stephanie Walker, More
, Visual Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art, Stephanie Walker, Steven Zevitas, Artists Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Rose Museum, Cultural Institutions and Parks, Museums, Phaedra Shanbaum, Less
