Museum And Gallery

Photos: RISD's Chace Center

FLINT BORN — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:35:43 GMT

Images from Rhode Island School of Design's new museum

Photo by Flint Born

Just a little bit

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:19:08 GMT

‘Lossless’ at The Sert Gallery, ‘Overflow’ at Laconia Gallery, Garry Knox Bennett at the Fuller, and String-Theory-inspired art and music at NESAD
Digital-era experimental filmmakers occupy a rich and interesting place in relation to the new technology available to them.

Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, from Lossless #2

“Lossless” at Sert Gallery, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge | October 2–December 7 | 617.496.6617

“Overflow” at Laconia Gallery, 433 Harrison Avenue, Boston | October 3–November 22

“Garry Knox Bennett: Call Me Chairmaker” at Fuller Craft Museum, 455 Oak Street, Brockton | October 4–February 8 | 508.588.6000

“String Theories” at New England School of Art & Design Gallery, 75 Arlington Street, Boston | exhibition on view through October 24; concert October 3 at 7 pm | 617.573.8785

Digital-era experimental filmmakers occupy a rich and interesting place in relation to the new technology available to them, as well as to the access this technology gives them to, yes, the works of their avant-garde forerunners. In “LOSSLESS,” which opens on October 2 in the Sert Gallery at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, filmmaker Rebecca Baron and artist/writer Douglas Goodwin present five works exploring the radical possibilities that arise from the dematerialization of film into bits. The use of high-quality bit torrents not only makes file sharing possible and enables those in the know to share first-run movies and amateur video diaries, it also facilitates a much higher circulation of rare experimental films, creating creative opportunities for a new generation. In “Lossless,” Baron and Goodwin interrupt data streaming and remove basic information that holds digital formats together to create film and video that bring a new viewpoint to such works as Maya Deren’s iconic 1943 trance film Meshes of the Afternoon and John Ford’s mythic 1956 Western The Searchers.

A headlong dash into ideas of wildness and excess, as found in nature as well as in 18th-century interior design, is the driving force behind “OVERFLOW,” which, curated by Resa Blatman, opens at the Laconia Gallery on October 3. The show brings together work by Sara Hairston-Medice, Mary O’Malley, and Blatman herself. Hairston-Medice uses knitted yarn, thread, and fabric to create “paintings” and sculpture that mimic and also embellish the organic growth patterns of nature. O’Malley makes tangled, tightly rendered drawings that form vast topographies. And Blatman paints flora, fauna, berries, birds, and bats with an eye to beauty that is disturbing.

Chairs that pair precious materials like rosewood and yellow satinwood with less fancy plywood, aluminum, plastic, and paint are the signature creations of contemporary studio furniture maker Garry Knox Bennett. Fifty-two examples of Bennett’s skill at making objects you’d probably rather ooh and aah at than sit on are presented in “GARRY KNOX BENNETT: CALL ME CHAIRMAKER,” which opens at the Fuller Craft Museum on October 4. They give new meaning to the phrase “sitting pretty.”

Generation gap

GREG COOK — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:26:56 GMT

"Black Womanhood" at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center
It’s an uneven show with a dour vision that leaves a mediciny taste in your mouth — and, I think, offers signs of a generation gap among curators.

DOUBLE FUSE: Wangechi Mutu’s playful razzmatazz makes reference to the past but lives in
the present.

“Black Womanhood: Images, Icons and Ideologies Of The African Body” | Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, 106 Central St, Wellesley | Through December 14

“Black Womanhood,” the exhibit at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center, must have seemed like a sharp idea when it was being put together. It examines the ways in which “contemporary artists are challenging historic and often stereotypical images that present black women as the alluringly beautiful Other, the erotic fantasy, or the super-maternal mammy.” By now this is familiar, if still urgent, stuff; what makes this outing special is that it gathers more than 100 objects — traditional African art, Western colonial photos and postcards, and contemporary art — that connect today’s dissectors with the origins of the ugly stereotypes they’re working to take apart.

Barbara Thompson, who organized the show for Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art in New Hampshire, does a good job of mapping the territory. But it’s an uneven show with a dour vision that leaves a mediciny taste in your mouth — and, I think, offers signs of a generation gap among curators.

The art of African women was traditionally pottery, beadwork, basketry, textiles, and the decoration of their own bodies (tattoos, scarification, hairstyles, body paint). But Westerners collected primarily African sculpture, masks, and costumes — which tended to be made by and for African men. The women’s portrayal of themselves was more abstracted, less obvious than their men’s literal, if stylized, depictions of women. The show presents women-made pots with bumps and patterns that make reference to women’s physiques and body scarification. The women’s pieces emerge directly from their work and their rituals — like a leather skirt beaded by an adolescent girl in her seclusion as she made the traditional passage into womanhood.

The most charged part of the show surveys early-20th-century Western photos and postcards of African women. Western attitudes are apparent in images that treated the women as curious ethnographic specimens and pin-ups — either untamed, sexually available African primitives or Oriental harem girls. Photographers tailored their shots to different audiences by photographing the same models elaborately garbed or in various states of undress. A postcard of a young topless Temne woman lounging on a rug was published around 1910 as “Timnie Girl, Sierra Leone.” When it was republished in the 1920s, the caption read, “Just you and me. Sierra Leone.” These postcards could be the foundation of an electrifying stand-alone exhibit.

When the red, red robin . . .

RANDI HOPKINS — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:58:09 GMT

‘Language Of Color’ at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, ‘Speaker Project’ at MassArt, Cathy McLaurin at Montserrat
This exhibit explores the basic nature of color and its relationship to survival and pleasure in the world.

Andrew Schaper, Resplendent Quetzal

“Language Of Color” at Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford St, Cambridge | September 26–September 6, 2009 | 617.495.3045

“Juan Ángel Chávez: Speaker Project” at Stephen D. Paine Gallery, Mass College of Art and Design, 621 Huntington Ave, Boston | September 22–November 22 | 617.879.7333

“Where The Arms Hook Onto The Body” at Montserrat College of Art Gallery, 23 Essex St, Beverly | September 24 at 7 pm | 978.921.4242

Instantaneous color change in flounder and cuttlefish, the hows and whys of zebra stripes, colors as they appear through the eyes of some of our fellow critters — these are among the topics covered in “LANGUAGE OF COLOR,” which opens at the Harvard Museum of Natural History on September 26. This exhibit explores the basic nature of color and its relationship to survival and pleasure in the world. It features real animal specimens (birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, mollusks, and insects from Harvard’s extensive collections) along with video presentations, computer interactives, and live dart frogs, in an attempt to answer questions about how colors in animals are produced and perceived, and about the variety of messages these colors convey. Okay, so the art here is really all nature’s doing, but culture takes its cues from its environment, and our physical response to hue is tied to our æsthetic appreciation.

Turning our sensory attention to our ears: “JUAN ÁNGEL CHÁVEZ: SPEAKER PROJECT,” opening at Massachusetts College of Art on September 22, is a sculptural installation made of found materials, light, and sound by a Chicagoan who got his start painting large-scale urban murals as a member of the Chicago Public Art Group. Chávez’s show at MassArt will turn the gallery into an interactive sound studio, using the likes of old billboard signs, wood-panel siding, and traffic cones; special performances will take place during the run of the exhibit.

Stone age

GREG COOK — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:41:43 GMT

Assyrians get their war on at the MFA
The works range from the ninth to the seventh century BC, when Assyria dominated the Near East, ruling lands from present-day Iran to Israel to Egypt.

STRIDING SPHINX Stone reliefs that proclaimed Assyrian royal power to visitors and gods and spirits
now do so to us.

“Art And Empire: Treasures From Assyria In The British Museum” | Museum Of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave, Boston | September 21–January 4

Slideshow: Art and Empire at the MFA

In 1841, Austen Henry Layard was traveling to India, by way of Baghdad, to find work practicing law. But the Brit craved adventure, and he seized every excuse to wander off track. So in what is now northern Iraq, he rode his horse into mounds near Mosul. He spotted pottery shards and fragments of mud bricks that got his mind working over the old tales that this had been the site of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh.

“Desolation meets desolation,” Layard wrote, “a feeling of awe succeeds to wonder; for there is nothing to relieve the mind, to lead to hope, or to tell of what has gone by. These huge mounds of Assyria made a deeper impression upon me, gave rise to more serious thoughts and more earnest reflection, than the temples of Balbec and the theatres of Ionia.”

He continued on to what is now Iran but soon abandoned his journey to India, and in 1845 he secured funding (first from a British ambassador, then from the British Museum) to return to Mosul for an archæological dig. The marvels he unearthed are the core of “Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum,” an exhibit of some 250 objects that will open at the Museum of Fine Arts this Sunday.

The works range from the ninth to the seventh century BC, when Assyria dominated the Near East, ruling lands from present-day Iran to Israel to Egypt. Around 610 BC, its major cities, centered in what is now northern Iraq, were sacked; the empire crumbled, its great mud-brick palaces reverted to mud, and it disappeared into legend. Layard knew it from glancing references by the Greek historian Herodotus, and in the Bible. Genesis says Noah’s grandson Nimrod founded Ninevah. The Book of Kings and the Book of Isaiah tell how the Assyrian king Sennacherib menaced Jerusalem and how the Jewish God struck down 185,000 men in the Assyrian camp and forced the survivors to run home.

Slideshow: Art and Empire at the MFA

PHOENIX STAFF — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:36:17 GMT

Images from "Art and Empire" at the MFA
Images from "Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria" at the Museum of Fine Arts, September 21-January 4, 2009

Statue of the King, Assyrian, 875–860 B.C.
Magnesite

Dollhouses and dream states

RANDI HOPKINS — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:18:49 GMT

Memory, sound, time, and toothpicks define the season
Autumn highlights in the museums and the galleries.

“IMAGES, ICONS, AND IDEOLOGIES” María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s When I Am Not Here/Estoy
Allá is part of “Black Womanhood” at Wellesley’s Davis Museum.

Hundreds of handmade English dollhouses, collected over the past 20 years, brightly lit and set out in a darkened gallery space, will form the heart of “RACHEL WHITEREAD” at the Museum of Fine Arts (465 Huntington Ave, Boston; October 15–January 25), the artist’s first solo museum exhibit in the US since 2001. The installation continues Whiteread’s investigation into the places where architectural and psychological space collide; it’s accompanied by related sculpture and rarely seen drawings. The MFA also has ancient civilization in its sights this fall, digging into the past in “ART & EMPIRE: TREASURES FROM ASSYRIA IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM” (September 21–January 4), with monumental carved wall reliefs and small ivories, bronzes, and tablets from ancient Assyria (modern-day Iraq) dating from the period between the ninth and seventh centuries BC.

Cultural history gets physical, and political, in “BLACK WOMANHOOD: IMAGES, ICONS, AND IDEOLOGIES OF THE AFRICAN BODY" at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center (106 Central St, Wellesley; September 17–December 14), a show that explores a powerful icon in contemporary art — the black female body — and the perpetuation of symbols and stereotypes through three lenses: traditional African objects, Western colonial-era images, and works by contemporary African and African-descended artists including María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Lalla Essaydi, and Renée Cox, along with a slew of emerging and established artists from around the world. At the same time, the Davis Museum will show “ELLEN ZWEIG: HEAP” (September 17–December 14), a series of six videos portraying Western thinkers influenced by Chinese culture, among them German philosopher G.W. Leibniz and Dutch mystery writer Robert van Gulik. And the culture of Renaissance marriage is the subject of “THE TRIUMPH OF MARRIAGE: PAINTED CASSONI OF THE RENAISSANCE” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (280 the Fenway, Boston; October 16–January 18), a scholarly look at how elegantly painted wedding chests, or “cassoni,” offer insight into social and gender roles of the era.

Adventurous 19th- and early-20th-century artist explorers, fascinated by the remote vistas of the Arctic and Antarctic, were inspired to travel thousands of miles to experience the farthest limits of geography and imagination for themselves. Images of the poles created by painters including Frederic Church and Rockwell Kent are on view in “TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, PAINTING THE POLAR LANDSCAPE” at the Peabody Essex Museum (East India Square, Salem; November 8–March 1). The works reveal the influence of both the romantic sublime approach to landscape and early modernist concerns.

The nature of the beast

RANDI HOPKINS — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:56:56 GMT

Kevin Hooyman’s ‘Dark Walk’ at Proof, ‘The Exquisite Line’ at BU, ‘Material Meditation’ at The New Art Center
In the world of graphic novelist Kevin Hooyman, whose show opens at Proof Gallery on September 13, packed line drawings take you deep into strange and fantastical scenes.

Kevin Hooyman, Natural Relationship

“Kevin Hooyman: Dark Walk” at Proof Gallery, 516 East Second St, South Boston | September 13–October 18 | 508.963.9102

“The Exquisite Line” at BU’s Sherman Gallery, 775 Comm Avenue [second floor], Boston | September 16–October 24 | 617.358.0295

“Material Meditation” at New Art Center, 61 Washington Park, Newtonville | September 15–October 26 | 617.964.3424

“Hecho A Mano” at Casa de la Cultura/Center for Latino Arts, 85 West Newton St, South End | September 18–October 29 | 617.927.1707

In the wordy world of artist and graphic novelist Kevin Hooyman, whose “DARK WALK” show opens at Proof Gallery on September 13, densely packed line drawings take you deep into strange and fantastical — usually wooded — scenes, whereas his looser, washier, text-filled images look like a cross between Raymond Pettibon and a trippy coloring book. He uses his art to explore serious subjects, among them our relationship with our fellow plant and animal life, the forces of good and evil, teamwork, love, and coping strategies. In an on-line interview, Hooyman says, “I am trying to talk about some things that you might call part of the ‘big picture.’ Sometimes I feel kind of cheesy for always talking about things like time or space or the nature of the human creature, but I can’t help it. I was the kind of kid who lay awake at night completely freaking out about this stuff.” His text shows a good ear for contemporary dialogue, turning the works into little pieces of theater in some cases, and giving voice to timely and timeless concerns.

Fine lines also take center stage in “THE EXQUISITE LINE,” which opens at BU’s Sherman Gallery on September 16. With works on paper by Thomas Duncan, Ledelle Moe, Rune Olsen, Stas Orlovski, and Casey Jex Smith, BU School of Visual Arts exhibitions director Lynne Cooney explores the expression of delicacy, intricacy, and beauty, along with their dark twin, pain. Random stuff in all its stuffness comes to overflowing life in “MATERIAL MEDITATION,” which opens at the New Art Center on September 15. Curated by participating artist Denise Driscoll, the show features installations by six artists working with heaps of material including hand-dyed silk organza, wire, mesh, folded paper envelopes, deconstructed piano parts, and discarded fishermen’s knots to explore metaphors and meanings revealed through the artistic use of massive accumulation and repeated forms.

Yes, but why?

IAN SANDS — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:07:16 GMT

Bumpkin Island puzzler
Isolation was part of the challenge.

DOWN TO EARTHY: The Camofleurs combined natural disguises with, they claimed, bird nesting practices.

“I am curating for the event! Would anyone switch with me?”

That was the plea from a woman who, for safety reasons this past Sunday, was asked to give up her space on the boat taking us to the Art Encampment on Bumpkin Island. We were aboard an inter-island shuttle, commissioned to relay mainland passengers from George’s Island to Bumpkin. It was not the most convenient of locations for an art event.

Then again, isolation was part of the challenge. Ten teams of artists effectively marooned themselves on the Boston Harbor island from Thursday, August 28, through Monday, September 1, with only whatever art and survival supplies they could carry with them. Their mission in exile was to create “site-specific” performances or installations.

In Erik Conrad’s case, the remote site forced him to mine unexplored artistic territory. Conrad, wearing a suit as he manned his Tactilist Theater booth, explained that on the mainland he works with computers. But inside his tent he’d assembled a vast collection of local flora, fauna, and natural artifacts, scattered purposefully around the interior. He escorted me through his installation with my eyes closed, running my hands over the stuff. It was the sort of thing you’d find at any number of children’s museums, but way cooler, I decided, because he had put it all together from scratch.

Not long after, I ran into the Camoufleurs, a troop of artists wandering around the island in “earth outfits” made from scavenged local materials, including feathers and berries. According to a guide pamphlet I’d received, their work combined “military concealment strategies” used during World War II with “bird nesting practices.” To what end, I wasn’t sure, so I ventured to talk to these strange folks. “Why are you dressed that way?” I asked. “Why are you dressed that way?” came the rejoinder from a man with stalks of sweet grass rising from his shoulders. Fair enough, I resigned myself to concede, and didn’t push the issue.

Next I ducked into an installation called the Honorable Bumpkin Island Company, which was closed for lunch. I snooped around the makeshift structure and found an assortment of goods to be bartered: Hershey bars, canned soups, Ramen noodles. On the wall I spied a copy of the Saturday edition of the handwritten island newspaper, the Bum-kin Islander. Stories included a weather report, an alert to a bike heist, and a news item concerning a fruit-cocktail shortage.

I am I said

RANDI HOPKINS — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:33:01 GMT

‘Empire and Its Discontents’ and more at Tufts; ‘Re-View’ and visiting faculty at Harvard; GASP’s Fourth Anniversary
Tufts University Art Gallery presents “Empire And Its Discontents,” which opens September 15 with work by 11 artists tied to previously colonized regions in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.

Saira Wasim, Demockery

“Empire and Its Discontents,” "Do-Ho Suh: Paratrooper Ii,” and “Contrapuntal Lines” at Tufts University Art Gallery, 40R Talbot Ave, Medford | September 11–November 23 | 617.627.3518

“Re-View” at Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway, Cambridge | Opens September 13 | 617.495.9400

“Visiting Faculty Show” at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge | September 15–October 23 | 617.495.3251

“The Tongue Of Shadows” at GASP, 362 Boylston St, Brookline | September 12–October 18 | 617.418.4308

This is the 30th anniversary of Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism, in which the post-colonial theorist, literary scholar, and political activist described and criticized persistent Eurocentric prejudice underlying Western attitudes toward the Arab-Islamic world. In commemoration of Said’s work, Tufts University Art Gallery presents “EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS,” which opens September 15 with work by 11 artists tied to previously colonized regions in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung’s “pop-up” sculptures of the current political landscape offer a satirical look at globalization, capitalism, and democracy; Saira Wasim uses techniques of Mughal miniature painting to depict contemporary world politics, bringing in such recognizable figures as Condoleezza Rice and Ronald McDonald. Also opening September 15 at Tufts: Korean-born Do-Ho Suh explores individual identity in an increasingly global society in the looming installation “DO-HO SUH: PARATROOPER II,” and “CONTRAPUNTAL LINES: RANIA MATAR AND BUTHINA ABU MILHELM” brings together work by a Boston-based Lebanese photographer and an Arab-Israeli sculptor, both looking at ordinary life as lived under extraordinary circumstances.

With Harvard’s Fogg and Busch-Reisinger Museums closed for major renovation (until 2013!), the nearby Arthur M. Sackler Museum steps in to host “RE-VIEW,” which, opening September 13, features works from all three museums shown together for the first time. Aiming to display major and familiar works as well as some surprises, “Re-View” includes European and American art since 1900, Asian and Islamic art from 5000 BC to the present, and work in all media, mainly in the Western tradition, from antiquity to the late 19th century.

Meanwhile, Harvard’s Carpenter Center continues to present changing contemporary exhibitions. Opening September 15, the “VISITING FACULTY SHOW” boasts work by an impressive new crew: Sanford Biggers, Taylor Davis, Greg Halpern, David Lobser, and Catherine Lord.

GASP, the experimental venue on Route 9 that is slowly but surely taking up more and more of its block, celebrates its fourth anniversary with “THE TONGUE OF SHADOWS,” which opens September 12. Curated by Gilles Daigneault, the show includes installation-based work by Quebec artists Catherine Bolduc, Danielle Sauve, and Louise Viger that’s described as sharing an interest in “those strange doubles of life that are shadows.”

Photos: The '68 Democratic Convention

RON POWNALL — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:06:05 GMT

Images from the exhibit "The Whole World Was Watching" at Panopticon Gallery

In this week's Phoenix, Greg Cook looks at photographer Ron Pownall's images from 1968 Democratic National Convention as part of the exhibit, "The Whole World Was Watching: Images from the 1968 Chicago Riots" at Panopticon Gallery. Also, check out our up-to-the-minute convention coverage with updates and images from the 2008 conventions.

Time bombs

RANDI HOPKINS — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:35:58 GMT

‘Atomic Afterimage’ at Bu, Foreclosures and Risk Structures at MIT, and the Cultural DMZ At Simmons
Timely new exhibitions look at the lust for power and risky business.

Bruce Conner, Bombhead

“Atomic Afterimage” at BU Art Gallery, 855 Comm Avenue, Boston | September 5–November 2 | 617.353.3329

“Red Lines, Death Vows, Foreclosures, Risk Structures” at MIT’s Compton Gallery, Building 10-150, 77 Mass Ave, Cambridge | September 9-December 21 | 617.253.4415

“Dorothy Imagire And Ben Sloat” at Simmons College’s Trustman Gallery, 300 the Fenway [fourth floor], Boston | September 2–October 3 | 617.521.2268

Tick, tick, tick . . . something ominous is upon us. Is the end near, or is this just déjà vu? Even as Russia gets aggressive with neighboring Georgia and the American sub-prime mortgage meltdown continues to threaten our neighborhoods and the global economy, timely new exhibitions look at the lust for power and risky business.

Opening at the Boston University Art Gallery on September 5, “ATOMIC AFTERIMAGE: COLD WAR IMAGERY IN CONTEMPORARY ART” brings together work by 10 artists — among them Bruce Conner, Joy Garnett, and Richard Misrach — who reinterpret images from the era of above-ground nuclear testing (1945–1962). Garnett bases apocalyptic paintings on declassified photographs of nuclear explosions. Conner, in one fine example, uses his skillful way with collage to merge a figure wearing a military jacket with an iconic image of mushroom clouds from the first underwater atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll, reanimating (and giving a psychological dimension) to an image of power and destruction that might not seem as safely far in the past as it used to.

The complex — and currently unraveling — relationship between finance and buildings is the subject of “RED LINES, DEATH VOWS, FORECLOSURES, RISK STRUCTURES: ARCHITECTURES OF FINANCE FROM THE DEPRESSION TO THE SUB-PRIME MELTDOWN,” an exhibit by Damon Rich and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) that opens at MIT’s Compton Gallery on September 9. Rich, who founded the CUP in 1997, is trained as an architect, and in this project he investigates the history and mechanics of financing the places we call home. During his year-long residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (in 2005, well before sketchy financing schemes and lending practices across the country reached the headlines), he undertook a study of the fundamentals of real-estate markets, working with MIT students and volunteers to interview folks like the Comptroller of the Currency in Washington, and hanging out with mortgage brokers in bars in Boston. In “Red Lines,” he uses video, sculpture, graphics, and photography to reveal the inner workings and nitty-gritty details of how our neighborhoods have been created and manipulated and are on the verge of being destroyed.

A history of violence

GREG COOK — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:36:20 GMT

Ron Pownall’s photos of the ’68 Democratic Convention
It was August 28, 1968, and Ron Pownall could feel the storm brewing as he arrived at a Vietnam War protest during the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

THE FACE OF A NATION? Mayor Daley’s finest assemble.

“The Whole World Was Watching: Images From The 1968 Chicago Riots” | Panopticon Gallery, Hotel Commonwealth, 502 Comm Ave, Boston | Through October 6

It was August 28, 1968, and Ron Pownall could feel the storm brewing as he arrived at a Vietnam War protest during the Democratic Convention in Chicago: “The police were chomping at the bit to bust some butts. It was in the air, palpable tension all day.” That afternoon and night it exploded in what a national commission later declared a “police riot.”

Twenty-five of his photos of that day — 40 years ago today — are on view at Panopticon Gallery in “The Whole World Was Watching.” (The title alludes to the demonstrators’ chanting of “The whole world is watching” as the violence was filmed by television news cameras and broadcast around the world.) The anniversary coincides with this week’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, as we look again to replace a Texas president who led the nation into an ill-considered war.

Pownall, who lives in Weston, is best known as a rock-and-roll photographer. (Three of his music photos — one a shot of Jimi Hendrix — are featured here.) His finest stuff freezes rockers in mid motion, in hot, sexy, ecstatic instants. He began photographing big concerts in ’68, when he was 21. That same year, he landed a summer job photographing for the Chicago Tribune.

On Wednesday August 28, the Tribune sent Pownall out with a 35mm Nikon F to photograph a rally that was trying to draft Ted Kennedy to run for president. Kennedy announced he wasn’t interested, whereupon Pownall called the newspaper from a pay phone and was sent downtown to Grant Park to check out the anti-war rally.

“As long as I am mayor,” Chicago’s Richard J. Daley had vowed more than once in the run-up to the convention, “there will be law and order in Chicago.” Daley marshaled 25,000 armed police, National Guard, and security men against an estimated 5000 protesters throughout the city.

Pownall arrived at the park around two in the afternoon. He photographed dozens of Chicago police assembling. He photographed National Guard troops with rifles arriving by truck, panning his camera to follow the movement of the vehicle, subtly blurring a crowd of protesters in front and trees behind while keeping the ominous truck in focus, thereby drawing our attention to it.

White walls, black paint

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:31:11 GMT

Street art looking fine
Not long after walking into the Distillery Gallery on a Monday evening, Thomas Buildmore removes two painted-over NO PARKING signs that had been screwed into the wall. “This show isn’t about street art,” he says.

Not long after walking into the Distillery Gallery on a Monday evening, Thomas Buildmore removes two painted-over NO PARKING signs that had been screwed into the wall. “This show isn’t about street art,” he says.

If it were, “we’d have some cliché conversation about street art versus fine art.” Moments prior, I’d had that cliché conversation, with Cantabridgian artist Morgan Thomas. We agreed that “Paint It Now” — the show that opens tonight at the first-floor alt-gallery in the Distillery, South Boston’s living space-cum-artistic haven — is street art moved into the fine-art world. It’s just a change of location, with the added luxury of time, which most street artists — who are constantly looking over their shoulders — lack.

Buildmore’s sentiment is a surprising one, given that the show features a dozen or so artists, many of whom use city walls as their canvases. He and Thomas, who are part of a collective called Overkill Studio that’s based in the same building, organized the show with Scott Chase, the director of the Distillery Gallery.

The idea behind “Paint It Now” is simple: give two white walls and an unending supply of black paint to several of Boston and New York’s young artistic talents, and see what happens. In addition to Buildmore, Thomas, and Chase, those chosen talented contributors will include Kenji Nakayama, Dark Clouds, Noir Boston, Hargo, and Alphabet Soup — whose work, if not names, anyone who walks around Boston enough should recognize.

Artists will gradually add paint to the walls until October 2, when the show closes. The idea for the walls to be entirely black and white, says Thomas, is a limiting factor meant to both unite and challenge the artists.

As for Buildmore, he’s not disparaging street art with his entry-way comment. In fact, when the kind folks at Central Kitchen in Cambridge decided to make their alleyway wall a street-art free-for-all this past fall, they asked him to help recruit talent. But Buildmore doesn’t want the contributing group to be defined by one type of media they use.

“What we’re trying to show is a juxtaposition of styles of painting,” he says. “It’s a collision of all of the different influences we draw from. It’s like bringing all of art history right to the surface.”

The devil in the details

RANDI HOPKINS — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:40:24 GMT

‘Drawn to Detail’ and ‘Laylah Ali’ at the DeCordova, Esteban Pastorino Díaz at the SMFA, and Student Loan Art Program at MIT
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.

Laylah Ali, Untitled (2008)

In our multi-tasking, ADHD-prone world, where we watch two TV channels while texting and listening to our iPods, 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. Yet this kind of art work can also seem a canny mirror into the intricate twists and turns of our neural network, a reflection of the complexity of our cognitive experience. Opening at the DeCordova Museum on August 30, “DRAWN TO DETAIL” offers drawings by 26 artists whose work tends to the obsessive, repetitive, laborious, and intricate. The likes of Julie Mehretu, Tom Friedman, Jacob El Hanani, and Louise Marshall mix it up between the forest and the trees, sometimes losing the larger context in the act of mark making, sometimes finding order in what could be taken for total chaos. At the same time at the DeCordova, the new drawings of “LAYLAH ALI: NOTES/DRAWINGS/UNTITLED AFFLICTIONS” introduce language into Ali’s rich œuvre, as she organizes snippets of text from various sources into brief vignettes that interact with her characteristically ambiguous characters.

A hand-crafted camera mounted on a kite and a homemade stereo-panoramic camera moving at a constant speed to produce a three-dimensional image are the unusual means by which Argentine-born photographer Esteban Pastorino Díaz creates his art. “SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES: ESTEBAN PASTORINO DÍAZ” opens at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts August 29. A former student of mechanical engineering, Pastorino designs and builds each of his cameras himself, and he produces images that “see” things from a unique point of view, whether that’s the kite’s-eye perspective, or the turning of real places and people into strangely doll-like versions of themselves, or light-box presentations that, when viewed with 3-D glasses, give the disorienting illusion of movement.

Also of note: Boston Sculptors Gallery kicks off September with “THERE: MAGGIE STARK,” a mixed-media installation exploring paradoxes of time and space, and “CHRISTOPHER FROST,” with work by an artist known for his playful, transformative way with common objects. And MIT’s List Visual Arts Center opens its annual “STUDENT LOAN ART PROGRAM EXHIBITION AND LOTTERY” on September 2, with some 400 framed prints and photographs by Sarah Sze, Dana Schutz, Do-Ho-Suh and many others. Although you have to be a MIT student to borrow the work, the exhibit is open to the public.
_Randi Hopkins

One world, several dreams

RANDI HOPKINS — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 22:08:48 GMT

“Business as Usual: New Video From China” at MassArt, “Text in Video” at Axiom, and “Many Kinds of Nothing” at Montserrat
It’s no secret that recent years have seen a new “cultural revolution” in the visual arts in China.

Yang Fudong, Honey

“Business As Usual: New Video From China” at Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 621 Huntington Ave, Boston | August 18–September 27 | 617.879.7333

“Text In Video” at Axiom Gallery, 141 Green St, Boston | August 15–September 12 | 617.953.6413

“Many Kinds Of Nothing” at Montserrat Gallery, Montserrat College of Art, 23 Essex St, Beverly | August 23–October 26 | 978.921.4242

It’s no secret that recent years have seen a new “cultural revolution” in the visual arts in China. A generation of video artists who grew up in an era of increased creative freedom have been offering a complex take on their rapidly changing world, using personal visual vocabularies to examine aspects of their society that are just starting to come into focus for the rest of us. Opening on August 18 in the Bakalar Gallery at MassArt, “BUSINESS AS USUAL: NEW VIDEO FROM CHINA” presents work by Cao Fei and Yang Fudong, who reveal mixed feelings as they examine the relationship between swift modernization and traditional values and culture.

Cao Fei’s three-part video Whose Utopia was made during her six-month stay at OSRAM China Lighting Ltd in Foshan, one of the “big box” factories that have sprung up in China’s Pearl River Delta, where economic activity has boomed. The artist looks at workers who left their country homes to pursue big dreams in the city but ended up working in factories instead. She films them dressed as the dancers and musicians they were hoping to become, in the environment of their actual lives, the factory. Yang Fudong’s short films “City Light” and “Honey” show young urban intellectuals in their late 20s and early 30s, part of the emerging middle class in China; his work has been described as combining the lyricism of Chinese scroll painting with the stark tableaux of Jim Jarmsusch.

Ever since Bob Dylan held up and tossed away that series of cue cards with phrases from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” I’ve been a fan of looking at the written word on film. (Not that more-sophisticated visual artists weren’t also experimenting with this in the 1960s — I just like to mention Dylan when I can.) A look at the current state of video art’s ongoing relationship with the written word is the subject of “TEXT IN VIDEO,” which opens at Axiom Gallery on August 15, with works by Nance Davies, who explores the experience of private moments in public space through the writings of MBTA riders, and Tony Cokes, who animates a text by art historian and critic Julian Stallabrass.

Slideshow: Michael C. Smith's Carnival photography

MICHAEL C. SMITH — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:46:05 GMT

From "Streets of Color" exhibit at Lesley's Marran Gallery

From “Michael C. Smith: Streets of Color” at Marran Gallery, Lesley University, 47 Oxford St, Cambridge, through August 30.

Street art

GREG COOK — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:47:51 GMT

Boston’s Caribbean Carnival at 35
The exhibit’s 37 color photos from 2005 to 2007, plus three plumed headdresses, serve as an appetizer for the Carnival, which celebrates its 35th anniversary this month.

QUEEN, WARRIOR, SHOWGIRL: Smith’s subject matter outshines his technique, radiating
megawatts of color and fabulousness and sexy heat.

“Michael C. Smith: Streets of Color” | Marran Gallery, Lesley University, 47 Oxford St, Cambridge | Through August 30

Slideshow: Michael C. Smith’s Carnival photography

The battery powering Michael C. Smith’s “Streets of Color” photography exhibit at Lesley University — and electrifying its subject, Boston’s Caribbean Carnival — is spectacle.

In one photo, the queen of a mas (as in masquerade) band grooves down a street during the Carnival parade. Her swaying hands up, a smile across her face, she’s wearing an orange outfit, with gold boots, and giant green and orange wings and red plumes. Another shot shows a mas-band king as a riveting dream in black and gold, trailing great green flags, with green heads sprouting from the end of curving arms on his costume, and three lion heads scowling down from a pole. King and queen costumes rise as much as 15 feet tall — so big that they’re built as wheeled carts that hitch to the performers.

The exhibit’s 37 color photos from 2005 to 2007, plus three plumed headdresses, serve as an appetizer for the Carnival, which celebrates its 35th anniversary this month. The main event, the Carnival parade on August 23, offers streams of vividly costumed, scantily clad masqueraders shaking their booties to DJs and steel-drum bands playing soca and calypso plus some spooge, reggae, salsa, and zouk.

Smith, who lives in Milton, has photographed the festival since 1983. He’s an electronics engineer who grew up in Trinidad before moving to Boston in 1977. He’s served on the event’s organizing committee, the Caribbean-American Carnival Association of Boston.

Here he presents photos of costume designers paired with shots of their sketches, images of teams of dancers, a shot of a girl with her face painted with pink and orange butterfly wings. His best photo is a monumental shot of a monumental woman in a red bikini, beaded epaulets, and a crown decorated with orange plumes, red pompons, and peacock feathers. An army of similarly dazzling women follow behind. Smith photographs their leader from below, giving her an epic look — part queen, part warrior, part showgirl.

No sex, please, it's Boston?

GREG COOK — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:02:44 GMT

Nicholas Hlobo tones it down at the ICA
It’s a big, curious, floating object, a leaping whale, a flying squash, a makeshift anatomy display, with a bit of carnival atmosphere.

THOBA, UTSALE UMNXEBA When he finished his performance, it seemed Hlobo could use a hug.

The South African artist Nicholas Hlobo quietly walked into the hallway at the Institute of Contemporary Art, sat down in a corner on a nest of curry bush, and put on a black headdress or crown that was connected by braided cords to plant-like suction-cup-looking things clinging to the walls. The July 29 performance, Thoba, utsale umnxeba (in Hlobo’s native Xhosa language it means “to lower onself and make a call,” or, as the wall text described it, a “gesture of respect and diplomacy”), was part of his new exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art. “It’s about the idea of communication,” Hlobo says of his act when I telephone the next day. “I was trying to make some sense of the space and the idea of the space, the museum, the gallery, the location of the museum, the culture — the culture is almost foreign to me.”

He sat on the circular nest and fussed for a long while with the hat, adjusting its fit over his dreadlocks, shifting the red tassels on the side, and pulling on his goatee. Then he settled into a long silent sit, seeming to meditate, eyes closed and then open, rocking forward and then sitting upright again, repeat. VIPs arrived for the show’s opening reception, watched him for a while, then wandered into the gallery to see the rest of his art and chat.
The exhibit, “Vula zibhuqe” (which means “to turn a blind eye”), was organized by ICA associate curator Jen Mergel. The 11th in the ICA’s Momentum series, which showcases emerging artists from around the world, it features the props and the costume from Hlobo’s performance, a soft sculpture, and two “drawings” in colored satin ribbons stitched into 10-foot-wide sheets of white paper. Pink scrims, placed over ceiling lights to give the gallery a fleshy feel, make the room seem murky, underwater.

“In my works,” the 32-year-old Johannesburg resident explains, “I celebrate my identity as a South African, a gay man, a Xhosa man, which is my ethnic identity, and I also celebrate my colonial heritage.”

The best piece here is Umphanda ongazaliyo (2008), an 18-foot-long black sack made from old-rubber-tire inner tubes, with pink ribbon stitched along ribs that run from its head to tail. Veins of colored ribbon wander the surface. Pockets and protrusions grow along the sides and the bottom. Metal nozzles sprout from the skin. The whole thing dangles from the ceiling by wires. A tube tail burrows into a gallery wall, with a ring of pink fringe, and emerges on the other side as a large black “orifice” — as the wall text politely describes it.

Peabody rising

GREG COOK — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:42:21 GMT

Bold leadership and an ambitious curatorial vision have vaulted the Peabody Essex Museum into a spot among the country’s best
Could the Peabody Essex Museum be the Boston area’s most exciting art museum right now?

The Peabody Essex's atrium

Slideshow: Peabody Essex Museum exhibit highlights

Could the Peabody Essex Museum be the Boston area’s most exciting art museum right now? It’s a question nobody would have asked five or 10 years ago. But a string of excellent shows — in particular this past summer’s landmark Joseph Cornell retrospective, but also the current “Wedded Bliss” — has placed the Salem museum squarely in the same league as the Museum of Fine Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and other top-rank museums around the country.

The transition, which Boston is only beginning to recognize, has been some 15 years in the making, including a merger, a building expansion, more exhibitions, and increasingly ambitious shows. The Cornell show, Peabody Essex chief curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan told me this past December, “really is about signaling, in as direct a way as we could think of, that we mean business about doing work in the modern- and contemporary-art arena.”

It’s a striking transformation. The Peabody Essex evolved out of the East India Marine Society, founded in 1799 as a repository for cool stuff brought back by Salem’s China trade. In 1992, it merged with its neighbor, the Essex Institute, a locally focused antiquarian society dating back to 1821.

The new Peabody Essex Museum was the sole-surviving Enlightenment-era cabinet-of-wonders museum from the early American republic, but it felt dark, dusty, and stodgy. When Dan Monroe arrived from Oregon’s Portland Museum of Art to become director in 1993, it was a backward-looking, colonial institution concentrating on New England, Native American life, natural history, and the cultures Salem touched via the China trade.

Between 1996 and 2003, Monroe tripled the museum’s operating budget, and led a capital campaign to renovate and expand the museum, which culminated in the opening of a new Moshe Safdie–designed facility in 2003. It offered new galleries, a soaring glass atrium, and a 200-year-old merchant’s house that was shipped from China and reassembled on the museum campus.

Signs of a new curatorial vision could be detected in such exhibits as a 1997 show that mixed works by contemporary Native Americans with historical Native works from the museum’s collection. Barbara O’Brien, director of Simmons College’s Trustman Art Gallery, says a turning point came with the renovated museum’s 2003 opening exhibit, “Family Ties: International Contemporary Artists Interpret Family.” In it, freelance curator Trevor Fairbrother — a former contemporary-art curator at Boston’s MFA — assembled a “provocative” and “subtly conceived” (according to The New York Times) but accessible theme show of contemporary art by Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Kerry James Marshal, Zhang Huan, and others.