Museum And Gallery

Beauty and the East

EVAN J. GARZA — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:03:53 GMT

Boston-area art spaces look to Asia this winter
Gallery-goers with an affinity for art from Asia will have plenty of reason for excitement with a handful of enticing shows this winter.

ON THE WALL—GUANZHOU (II) Weng Fen’s photograph is part of “Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection” at the Peabody Essex Museum

Gallery-goers with an affinity for art from Asia will have plenty of reason for excitement with a handful of enticing shows this winter. "MAHJONG: CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART FROM THE SIGG COLLECTION" at the Peabody Essex Museum (East India Square, Salem; February 21–May 17) will mark the debut of the PEM's new curator of contemporary art, Trevor Smith. The Sigg Collection includes works from several groundbreaking Chinese megastars including, among others, Ai Weiwei, Yue Minjun, Zhang Huan, Fang Lijun, and Weng Fen, famous for his stunning photographs of young schoolgirls staring out into an ever-changing Chinese landscape. LaMontagne Gallery will host the work of Japanese-born up-and-comer MISAKI KAWAI (555 E. 2nd Street, South Boston; February 21 — March 28). Her memorable installations of colorfully odd dollhouses, cartoon space ships, and suspended swarms of fabric smoke trails have been featured across the globe, including a spot in the ICA'S Momentum series in 2007. The Museum of Fine Arts will look back in time, however, for "SHOWA SOPHISTICATION: JAPAN IN THE 1930S", comprising 17 large paintings recently acquired by the museum (465 Huntington Ave, Boston; February 11–November 9). Images of affluent and fashionable Japanese citizens, on skis and in elegant teahouses, document the bourgeois affectations of a highly Westernized 1930s Tokyo.

The Tufts University Art Gallery will present "A TAPESTRY OF MEMORIES: THE ART OF DINH Q. LÊ," a survey of photographic work, video, and installation by the Vietnamese-born artist best known for his trademark photo-weavings, which often combine Hollywood iconography, Vietnamese film stills, and photojournalistic images of the war in Vietnam (40R Talbot Avenue, Medford; January 22–March 29). Also on view at Tufts: "CHRISTIAN TOMASZEWSKI: HUNTING FOR PHEASANTS," an installation of works on paper and video by the Polish-born, New York-based artist (January 22–March 29). Inspired by Polish posters of the 1960s and '70s, Tomaszewski's show will include works on paper, some featuring collage, drawing, and stained glass, which advertise nonexistent films amid an array of colored panels on the perimeter walls and a snaking maze throughout the gallery.

Mexico City and the unique Mexipolitan culture it has created will be explored in "MELANIE SMITH: SPIRAL CITY & OTHER VICARIOUS PLEAURES" at the MIT List Visual Arts Center (20 Ames St, Cambridge; February 5–April 5). Curated by Cuauhtûmoc Medina, Associate Curator of Latin American Art at the Tate Gallery in London, the exhibition will follow the British-born artist's social investigation of the megalopolis, where she has lived for the last two decades. Featuring painting, photography, and video, Smith's exhibition will study the intersection of "abstract" art and the urban environment through the colors, textures, and materials found in the Mexican capital.

ICA artists ring in the new year

EVAN J. GARZA — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:33:49 GMT

Andrew Witkin at LaMontagne, Douglas Weathersby at Judi Rotenberg
If you feel you haven’t spent enough high-quality time with ANDREW WITKIN at the ICA’s Foster Prize exhibition (which closes March 1) or you just weren’t paying attention — fear not.

Douglas Weathersby, From ICA Installation Project, Installation View, 2003 (C-print, courtesy the artist and Judi Rotenberg Gallery)

If you feel you haven’t spent enough high-quality time with ANDREW WITKIN at the ICA’s Foster Prize exhibition (which closes March 1), or you just weren’t paying attention — fear not. Your second chance comes in the form of “OTHERS AMONG OTHERS,” his new solo show, which opens January 3 at LaMontagne Gallery in South Boston. Witkin’s unique brand of post-medium sculpture and installation continues with a number of works that meditate on the idiosyncratic and the personal, among them an installation of 143 white cotton T-shirts collected over a 14-year period and suspended horizontally from the gallery ceiling, each with printed text, and a shelf-like installation of 250 copies of a catalogue for artist Kate Shepherd.

Playing in the gallery through the show’s duration will be some 189 variations of “Stagolee” (also known as “Stagger Lee,” “Stacker Lee,” “Stack o’ Lee,” and so on), which was inspired by the 19th-century folk story of a man who got shot in a fight over a Stetson. There are more than 200 known versions of the song; it’s been performed by everyone from bluegrass idols Mississippi John Hurt and Big Bill Broonzy to Bert Jansch, Nick Cave, and the Clash. Witkin’s painstaking craftsmanship and ebullient sense of personal narrative — evident at the Foster Prize show — here has room to breathe in a much larger gallery space.

Also happy to confound viewers is DOUGLAS WEATHERSBY, another Foster Prize alum. (It was actually called the ICA Artist Prize back in 2003, when he won.) Weathersby’s artwork is almost indistinguishable from his day job as a one-man performance-art/professional-cleaning hybrid, Environmental Services (ES), which according to the Web site “brings the conceptual focus of art making to the many cleaning and repair projects offered for your home or place of work.” (No joke: he charges $35 an hour for cleaning, three hours minimum.) His first solo exhibition at Judi Rotenberg Gallery, “ESINAUGURAL RETROSPECTIVE AND STORAGE LOFT,” brings together documented images of previous projects and major installations, video, and new photographic work as it transforms the main gallery into an Environmental Services storage space. Weathersby’s work pits familiar objects and materials against their intended uses, subverting function in favor of æsthetics. Even dust and filth are displayed so as to make light of the mundane with imaginative precision.

Year in Art: Beyond the gloom

GREG COOK — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:01:36 GMT

Continuing cheer in dark times
The Boston art scene felt muted for much of 2008, with 10 galleries closing and the death of two local icons: Harriet Casdin-Silver and Jules Aarons.

ANNUNCIATION: El Greco’s 10-foot-high altarpiece painting starred the MFA’s blockbuster Spanish show.

The Boston art scene felt muted for much of 2008, with 10 galleries closing and the death of two local icons: Harriet Casdin-Silver and Jules Aarons. But the art itself was a source of continuing cheer. Museums showcased a "genius" of styrofoam cups, a rascally Chinese forger, and folk artists from across Massachusetts. The ICA went on a roll, the Peabody Essex Museum maintained its good run, and by November a rejiggered Harrison Avenue gallery district seemed to have regained its footing. Here are the bright spots of a dark year.

Yokels
When last month the DeCordova Museum announced that its trademark "Annual Exhibition" of local art will be going biennial, it seemed to be saying that there's not enough worthwhile stuff made here to sustain a yearly round-up. Or maybe curators just need new ways of envisioning the Boston scene. "This Is Boston, Not LA" at LaMontagne Gallery identified a crackling group of artists fueled by rock and roll and '80s nostalgia. "Keepers of Tradition," organized by the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Heritage Museum (it's at the NHM through June 7), plumbed the magic in often-overlooked contemporary folk art from around the state. In Laconia Gallery's "Overflow," Somerville artists Resa Blatman and Mary O'Malley bore witness to the group of locals (see also Pixnit) coalescing around sexy rococo decorative pattern painting.

Here and there local artists glittered in group shows. In the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists' "Reflections in Exile," Chaz Maviyane-Davies stood out with posters aimed like poison darts at the bloody dictatorship of his native Zimbabwe. Andrew Witkin's living-room-like installation in the ICA's Foster Prize exhibit (up through March 1) argued for the tastefully lived life and persnickety interior design as art. Now-closed Gallery XIV's "a politic" offered a glimpse of the Web art that Elaine Bay (a friend) has been making by distilling the style of Web sites, MySpace, and even terrorist videos into bright, crazy, flashy, pointed pop art. (Samples at www.revolt2die.com, www.goldenjasmineyetidancers.com, and www.myspace.com/centralregioncoastguard.)

Big minimalist spectacles
After a blah first year in its new Waterfront building, the Institute of Contemporary Art produced back-to-back hits from riffs on classic Minimalist sculpture. Brit Anish Kapoor's sleight-of-hand turned mirrors and funnels, bumps and caves, into streamlined sublime spectacles. MacArthur "genius" Tara Donovan explored the secret life of disposable cups and drinking straws to produce sculptures that recall seas and clouds. (The show's up through January 4.) A gem in the otherwise dull "The World As a Stage" was Brit Jeremy Deller's heart-rending video documenting his large re-enactment of an infamous British miners' strike, with dozens of the original participants returning to fight another day.

Grand seductions

GREG COOK — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:25:03 GMT

Marriage at the Gardner, decoration at Montserrat, Milton Rogovin at Kayafas
If you've been desirous of an eminently tasteful exhibit that undermines the sanctity of marriage, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's "The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance" may be for you.

MARCUS FURIUS CAMILLUS BRINGS STATUE OF JUNO TO ROME: The wealth of detail in the Gardner’s “Marriage” is spellbinding.

“The Triumph of Marriage” | Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 the Fenway, Boston | Through January 18
“In Pursuit of Beauty” | Montserrat College of Art, 23 Essex St, Beverly | Through January 24
“Milton Rogovin: A Clear View” | Gallery Kayafas, 450 Harrison Ave, Boston | Through January 10

If you've been desirous of an eminently tasteful exhibit that undermines the sanctity of marriage, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's "The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance" may be for you.

Oh, I exaggerate. A bit. But how better to introduce a lovely little show whose highlights include a pair of delicately rendered Renaissance paintings depicting the tale of the ancient Greek prince Antiochus, who had the hots for his young stepmom, Stratonice? (It's also the subject of next year's Boston Early Music Festival opera production, Christoph Graupner's Antiochus und Stratonica.) The first painting finds the prince sick with love. He appears next — as an exhibit brochure politely explains — "dangling a military baton: his secret love has sapped his strength." (Wink, wink.) A doc explains what's up to his dad. Off stage, the king generously annuls his marriage so that his son can wed his wife; he also gives the lad half his kingdom. The second panel shows the young 'uns getting hitched by the king and a wedding party.

"To give to another his beloved spouse," the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch wrote when recounting the tale, "O utmost love, unheard-of courtesy." The moral of the story might be something about the sacrifices of marriage and serving the greater good of the community.

"The Triumph of Marriage," which was organized for the Gardner by Cristelle Baskins, chair of Tufts University's Art & Art History Department, is a sharply focused scholarly show of 16 paintings (including four matched groups) that originally served as panels of cassoni, or Renaissance hope chests. These particular wedding trunks are believed to have been commissioned — usually in pairs — during the period 1445–1500 for brides by the men of wealthy families in Florence and Siena.

Drawing to a close

EVAN J. GARZA — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:02:28 GMT

Lalla Essaydi at Howard Yezerski, Julia Featheringill and Barbara Gallucci at Carroll And Sons
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 diary of a young girl

KARA HADGE — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:41:53 GMT

Found art
Twenty-two years ago, Jessica Deane Rosner was headed home from a job as an artist’s model in Rhode Island and discovered her car had been towed.

I wanna rock

GREG COOK — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:49:05 GMT

LaMontagne’s vision for Boston art
In 1982, a group of local hardcore punk bands released what would turn out to be a landmark compilation album, This Is Boston, Not L.A.

AFTER BEFORE: Bostonians like Taylor Davis weight the scene toward an æsthetic that’s serious and angsty.

In 1982, a group of local hardcore punk bands released what would turn out to be a landmark compilation album, This Is Boston, Not L.A. The hardcore scene was very territorial, and the title of the album, taken from the Freeze song on the record, was seen as a challenge and an F-you to the prominence of Los Angeles and Washington hardcore, as well as a call to Bostonians to assert their own local (musical) identity. Now comes “This Is Boston, Not LA” at LaMontagne Gallery to take up that old title as a sort of manifesto of what Boston art can be.

There are three modus operandi that local artists bunch around today: deadpan set-up photos; new-media explorations; and rigorous conceptually driven installations, often with video of a performance. There are outliers, of course, and the visionary expressionist painting that began here in the ’30s continues, and a cluster of lush decorative pattern painters is forming. But the photo, new-media, and installation folks are most prominent. And they weight the scene toward an æsthetic that’s serious and angsty.

Take the work of Bostonian Taylor Davis, who won the 2001 ICA Artist Prize and was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. She comes out of classic hardcore Minimalism, making stuff like a wood-and-mirrors version of a typical shipping pallet. Her current show at Samson Projects, “N W rk Ab t,” offers esoteric sculpture on the edge between art and carpentry: an iron rod rising up from two crossed wood planks; a plywood screen; a beaver-gnawed log inside a spinnable wood box; a log milled flat on two sides but otherwise left raw. It epitomizes a certain branch of Boston art (the kind that, say, the ICA tends to reward): cold, rigorous, smart, dry, and (too often) kind of boring.

The 22-artist line-up of “This Is Boston, Not LA” suggests a different Boston art (though note that a number of the artists are former Bostonians), a scene fueled by rock and roll and ’80s nostalgia that includes Larry Bird’s Celtics and the sort of murals you might have painted on the side of your tricked-out van back then. The big difference is attitude. It’s a vision of a Boston scene that makes you want to throw up your hands and flash the devil’s-horns salute: yes!

End-of-year exhibitions reveal mystery and beauty

EVAN J. GARZA — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 20:23:28 GMT

Laura Baring-Gould and Laura Evans at Boston Sculptors Gallery, ‘Regarding Mystery and Beauty’ at GASP, Korean-born artists at Smith College Museum of Art
Think it’s impossible to find a newish gallery show at the end of December? Think again.

Think it’s impossible to find a newish gallery show at the end of December? Think again. (Although in one case you’ll have to think Northampton.) Here are a few suggestions for exhibits to check out before naught-nine arrives.

On December 31, Boston Sculptors Gallery will open its winter installations by LAURA BARING-GOULD and LAURA EVANS. Evans’s work (some of which you may have seen in the restrooms at the Mills Gallery) revolves around form and physical processes, often transforming pipes or hoses into humorous displays of color and oddly constructed figures. Both artists’ work is made with unconventional or found objects, from honey and salt to sand and latex fabric. Baring-Gould’s 2006 show at BSG featured a 10-foot conical beehive made of beeswax; here her fondness for bees takes the form of a large-scale installation of swirling strips of pine wood that mimic, according to the artist, “the ways that bees might fly through space.” If insects flying through the cosmos isn’t your thing (but how could it not be?), you can reflect on Baring-Gould’s small bronzed objects.

Another show using interesting materials is “MOVEMENT,” an exhibit of 12 Korean-born artists that includes a large wall installation by Yong Soon Min composed solely of CDs and LPs. On view at Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton through January 11, “Movement” offers work by some of the best known Korean and Korean-American talent in contemporary art, among them the late, great Nam June Paik, Do-Ho Suh, and Nikki S. Lee. Lee is best known for immersing herself in a community for several months and taking on the personae of different women — a Latina, a skateboarder, a punk, an exotic dancer, a senior citizen — for her photographic series Projects.

A collection of equally compelling photographs by Michael Padnos and paintings by a handful of others is on view in “REGARDING MYSTERY AND BEAUTY,” which is up through January 31 at Gallery Artists Studio Projects (GASP) in Brookline. Curated by Consuelo Isaacson, the show offers a small group of self-taught artists including Alejandro Lazo, Mark Pescovitz, and Isaacson herself. The term “beauty” in that title applies across the artist roster, but it’s particularly applicable to the work of the Paris-based Padnos, who practiced law in the States before moving to France. Taken in Paris, Copenhagen, and Havana, his images of shop windows and their respective reflections capture the displays inside and the passers-by outside, playing with context, surroundings, and the unknown.

Instant messages

EVAN J. GARZA — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:27:46 GMT

Cindy Bernard at the Mills Gallery, Do-Ho Suh at Tufts, ‘Human Nature(S)’ At The Worcester Art Museum
The immediacy of communicating personal information that Internet culture and high bandwidth provide is not part of the new exhibition at the Mills Gallery, which eschews digital technology altogether.

HUMAN NATURE(S) at the WAM: Zhang Huan, Foam #1, 1998

“Cindy Bernard: Silent Key” at Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St, Boston | December 12–February 15 | 617.426.8835

“Artist Talk: Cindy Bernard” at Mills Gallery | December 12 at 6 pm | 617.426.8835

“Do-Ho Suh: Paratrooper II” at Tufts University Art Gallery, 40R Talbot Ave, Medford | Through December 21 | 617.627.3094

“Human Nature(s)” at Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury St, Worcester | Through February 15 | 508.799.4406

Thanks to modern technology, communicating one’s identity to others is as easy as completing an “About Me” section in an on-line profile or accepting a Facebook group invitation to join “Polar Bears Against Sarah Palin” (which does exist). But the immediacy of communicating personal information that Internet culture and high bandwidth provide is not part of the new exhibition at the Mills Gallery, which eschews digital technology altogether. Opening December 12, “CINDY BERNARD: SILENT KEY” documents the correspondence between the artist’s grandfather and fellow ham-radio operators across the globe over a period of 70 years. Among the nostalgic works is a slew of old QSL cards, or written confirmations of radio communication, made by ham-radio operators, often as a means to communicate their identity or creativity to others. Several of the cards have origins in entities that no longer exist, like French Indochina, colonial Africa, and the USSR. Although the QSL documents may have taken weeks to reach one another, inquiries for Bernard will be answered much sooner, thanks to an artist talk preceding the opening reception.

“DO-HO SUH: PARATROOPER II” examines more-contemporary relationships — it’s an elegant and enormously scaled installation by one of Asian art’s rising stars, and you can see it in the Remis Sculpture Court at Tufts University. A life-size headless torso of a paratrooper is suspended beneath a 15-foot “parachute” made of 200 red and peach-colored figures. Made entirely of knitted resin-coated nylon monofilament, the body of the paratrooper is removed from the other silken figures floating above it yet still physically connected — which makes for a dramatic and captivating commentary on identity, the transient nature of global culture, and the Korean-born Suh’s experience of “landing in a foreign culture.”

The Apocalypse versus stupid human tricks

GREG COOK — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:19:11 GMT

Paul Chan, Adel Abdessemed, and Andrew Neumann
Among the most poetic and moving artwork to come out of 9/11 is Paul Chan’s series of videos The 7 Lights .

PRACTICE ZERO TOLERANCE (RETOURNÉE) Abdessemed's sculpture is cast from a relic of the
2005 Paris suburb riots, but it also suggests the wreckage of a car bomb.

“Paul Chan: Three Easy Pieces” | Carpenter Center, Harvard, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge | Through January 4

“Adel Abdessemed: Situation and Practice” | MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames St, Cambridge | Through January 4

“Andrew Neumann: The Last Picture Show” | Axiom, 141 Green St, Boston | Through December 13

Among the most poetic and moving artwork to come out of 9/11 is Paul Chan's series of videos The 7 ~~Lights~~ . Most other major works addressing the attacks are documentary — Joel Meyerowitz's photos of the wreckage at Ground Zero, Paul Greengrass's 2006 film re-enactment United 93. But Chan's videos, which he began making in 2005, distill the feeling and the meaning of that day into charged symbolic elegies. And they've propelled him to art stardom — a solo survey at New York's New Museum, major profiles in the New Yorker and the New York Times.

"Three Easy Pieces" at Harvard's Carpenter Center offers one of his 9/11 pieces plus two other videos about war. 5th Light, a triangle of light projected onto the floor, seems like sun from a window. Shadows of leafy branches, wiggling wires, chunks of who knows what drift across the floor toward the gallery wall. Then a shock as a body plummets from the sky. Then more people fall. It brings to mind, of course, the people who threw themselves from the burning World Trade Center towers.

A coat rack, a key, a suitcase, pistols, and rifles slowly glide skyward. With 9/11 in mind, you might find that the failure of gravity suggests the Christian Rapture, the end of the world, the Apocalypse. Which in turn points to the religious fundamentalism that fueled the terrorists, as well as our American response. The floating things break into pieces and continue upward. More bodies fall. Big blurry things woosh down in the foreground. It's jarring. And heartbreaking.

The other two videos can't match its power. Chan shot Baghdad in No Particular Order (2003) while visiting Iraq with a group of anti-war activists a few months before the US invasion in March 2003. It shows footage shot from a vehicle driving through the desert countryside, men in a café, girls dancing in a living room, a sleeping monkey, men singing in a mosque, a wedding party, uniformed women with rifles chanting, "With blood and soul, we sacrifice for you, Saddam." But 51 minutes of rambling random snippets grows tedious.

Loud and clear

EVAN J. GARZA — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:48:47 GMT

The 2008 Foster Prize at the ICA, Adel Abdessemed at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center
Although it's no stretch to say that contemporary artists are eager to say something, the art world has seen its fair share of awkwardly shitty gallery talks.

Adel Abdessemed, Practice Zero Tolerance Retournûe

“Artist Talk: James and Audry Foster Prize Finalists” at Institute of Contemporary Art, 100 Northern Ave, Boston | December 7 at 1 pm | 617.478.3100

“The 2008 James and Audry Foster Prize” at Institute of Contemporary Art | Through March 1 | 617.478.3100

“Gallery Talk With Mark Linga” at MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames St, Building E15, Cambridge | December 10 at 12:30 pm | 617.253.4680

“Algeria in France” at Bartos Theatre at the MIT List Visual Arts Center | December 11 at 7 pm | 617.253.4680

“Adel Abdessemed: Situation and Practice” at MIT List Visual Arts Center | Through January 4 | 617.253.4680

Although it's no stretch to say that contemporary artists are eager to say something, the art world has seen its fair share of awkwardly shitty gallery talks. Apart from a few bad apples, however, the opportunity to hear an artist speak about his/her work can be as rewarding as seeing it in the flesh (as long as the work is good to begin with). If the quality of the "2008 James and Audry Foster Prize" exhibition at the ICA is any indication, the discussion will be well worth your time. On Sunday December 7, the quartet of featured artists — Catherine D'Ignazio, Rania Matar, Andrew Witkin, and Joe Zane — will verbalize their points of view in "ARTIST TALK: JAMES AND AUDRY FOSTER PRIZE FINALISTS" (while implicitly making their case for the $25,000 award, which gets announced in January). The annual exhibit, which seeks to acknowledge locally based early-career artists "of exceptional promise," is divided among four galleries, one space for each artist, and the truly diverse assortment of media includes photography, video, neon, painting, sculpture, and installation.

If that doesn't slake your thirst for art chat, the following two talks at the MIT List Visual Arts Center are sure to quench. On Wednesday December 10, "GALLERY TALK WITH MARK LINGA" will find the LVAC educator addressing the work in "ADEL ABDESSEMED: SITUATION AND PRACTICE." Abdessemed has lived in Paris since 1999, but he was born in Algeria, and that leads right into the next evening's lecture. "ALGERIA IN FRANCE," with Paul A. Silverstein, Carnegie Scholar and associate professor of anthropology at Reed College, will address the Algerian relationship to France and its impact on Algerian immigrants in contemporary French culture. For those who haven't seen it: Abdessemed's show is a profound collection of photographs of the artist introducing wild North African animals (among them a pack of boars and a full-grown lion) to the streets of Paris, large-scaled looped video projections, the life-size terra cotta mold of an overturned and incinerated car, and a monumental 16x24 foot black-charcoal drawing created while the artist was suspended from a helicopter by his feet. Why on Earth does any of this require an explanation? Your guess is as good as mine.

Help wanted

EVAN J. GARZA — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:54:19 GMT

‘Anything But Paper Prayers (The Annual Aids Benefit)’ at Barbara Krakow Gallery, ‘Icons + Altars’ at the New Art Center, ‘Annual Holiday Sale’ at Massart
I can’t speak for everyone, but I’d take a painting over a snowflake sweater any day of the week.

Heidi Dauphin, Making a Point (2008)

“Anything But Paper Prayers (The Annual Aids Benefit)” at Barbara Krakow Gallery, 10 Newbury St, Boston | November 29–December 18 | 617.262.4490

“Icons + Altars” at New Art Center, 61 Washington Park, Newton | Through December 14 | 617.964.3424

"The Annual Holiday Sale” at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 621 Huntington Ave, Boston | December 1-6 | 617.879.7710

Next week is Thanksgiving, which means that the holiday shopping season will soon be as unavoidable as thermal underwear and black snow. If you harbor a shred of contempt for the retail industry, you’d be doing yourself (and a sweater-folding employee) a favor by avoiding the annual mind fuck that is Black Friday. The following fall fundraisers not only offer a much less chaotic shopping experience, they also encourage the purchase of far cooler gifts: works of art. (I can’t speak for everyone, but I’d take a painting over a snowflake sweater any day of the week.)

First on the list is Barbara Krakow Gallery, which will open its annual AIDS benefit exhibition, “ANYTHING BUT PAPER PRAYERS,” November 29 in celebration of World AIDS Day (December 1). Works by more than 70 artists will be on view, each one available for a donation of $350 to either the African AIDS Initiative based out of Harvard University or the Boston Pediatric/Family AIDS Project at the Dimock Center in Roxbury. Artists from the gallery’s roster — Michael Beatty, Peter Downsbrough, Sally B. Moore, Flora Natapoff, and more — will share the walls with a slew of other local artists.

Not to be outdone, the New Art Center in Newton has mounted its 15th annual benefit event, “ICONS + ALTARS,” a collection of works by more than 100 local and regional artists invited to create art inspired by personal, cultural, social, or spiritual iconography. Each exhibited work is available for sale through the purchase of a ticket, which is placed in a drawing that takes place at the closing reception, on December 14. The last night of the show will also be marked by a Special Auction of work by long-time “Icons + Altars” artists Stephanie Chubbuck, Heid Dauphin, Bonnie Mineo, and Jessica Straus to celebrate the benefit’s 15-year history. Each ticket will set you back $250; proceeds benefit the NAC’s arts education and exhibition programming.

Game show

GREG COOK — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:03:41 GMT

Who will win the ICA's Foster Prize?
On November 12, the Institute of Contemporary Art opened its biennial Foster Prize exhibit of “Boston-area artists of exceptional promise.”

DEFIANT: Rania Matar's photos show women and children living amid the rubble of war in her
native Lebanon.

On November 12, the Institute of Contemporary Art opened its biennial Foster Prize exhibit of "Boston-area artists of exceptional promise." The game show works like this: four finalists present their work in the museum and we wait till early 2009 for the institution to announce the $25,000 winner. (The three others get $1500 consolation prizes.) So for those of you playing along at home, let's meet the contestants.

Catherine (Kanarinka) D'Ignazio of Waltham, best known locally as a founding member of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things and other local art gangs, goes solo here with recent work addressing the climate of fear drummed up by our leaders since 9/11. Last year she jogged most of Boston's disaster evacuation routes (you've probably seen the signs) while recording her breathing. Those recordings are broadcast here along with a new video installation, Exit Strategy. In a loop of quick cuts, D'Ignazio exits through doors (slam, slam, slam) all over the ICA building but never escapes. The slamming and the insidious breathing induce extreme, punishing claustrophobia. It's very effective, and terribly unpleasant.

Rania Matar of Brookline presents black-and-white photos of women and children living amid the rubble of war in her native Lebanon. A hole that a rocket blasted through a bullet-pocked wall frames an ornate building behind. A stout Orthodox Christian nun's veil ripples in the wind. A girl hugs the concrete-block corner of a bare room in a Palestinian refugee camp. A family hang out in the debris where their apartment used to be. Running through the images is a meditation on Muslim and Christian women adopting the veil.

This is the fifth exhibit I've seen of this work. In the past I've felt that Matar would make a good newspaper photojournalist but that her work needed more urgency or vision. This grouping is more vivid, more dramatically composed — even though it includes familiar shots. I think that's because the images have been more sharply selected.

Joe Zane of Cambridge makes dry, cerebral, art-referential, self-depreciating joke paintings and sculptures about the nature of art and museums and what it means to be a great artist. He's explored these themes in past work; he addresses them in the context of the Foster competition with pieces like a silver-plated trophy whose shape is based on his profile.

Id vicious

EVAN J. GARZA — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:22:27 GMT

The Museum School Art Sale at SMFA, ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock + Roll’ at Steven Zevitas Gallery
Money is a dominant topic of conversation in the art world even when there isn’t a global financial crisis.

The great Boston art shakeout

GREG COOK — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:01:33 GMT

Ten local galleries closed this year. Where are we going?
By September, the Harrison Avenue gallery district seemed to have become a zombie, stiffly stumbling forward, as the citywide exhibit-space upheaval that began this past spring caught up with the neighborhood.

FIRST FRIDAY CROWD I: Visitors browse Howard Yezerski Gallery’s new digs at 460 Harrison.

By September, the Harrison Avenue gallery district seemed to have become a zombie, stiffly stumbling forward, as the citywide exhibit-space upheaval that began this past spring caught up with the neighborhood. Ten galleries were shuttered across Boston in 2008, seven of them in the South End, driven mostly by expiring leases and gloomy economic forecasts. The number of local venues deeply engaged in the future of contemporary art — particularly locally-made contemporary art — shrank. This fall, with each day auguring further economic catastrophe, the future looked even worse.

But this past week, Harrison Avenue came back to life, abuzz with hundreds of people out for the First Friday gallery receptions. All told, eight galleries have opened or changed addresses in the district since February. On Friday four of those galleries participated in the monthly showcase for the first time since settling in. Two more spaces are slated to open there next month.

Over the past decade, the South End has increasingly challenged Newbury Street as the heart of the city's art scene. This year's changes shifted the center of gravity to Harrison Avenue. "Before we were a destination because of the uniqueness of First Fridays," says Arlette Kayafas of GALLERY KAYAFAS. "Now I think we will be a destination because of that, but also the quality of the work."

Friday's visitors and dealers were energized, hopeful, and happily surprised. The rearrangements landed substantial players in more prominent storefronts, making the neighborhood feel as if — maybe — it was in better shape than it was a year ago.

The upheaval has made the South End feel excitingly new, but has diminished Newbury Street. Economic nervousness abounds. And some worry that this new world order may mean more shows of less adventurous work.

A wash
This year's gallery shakeup has been nothing short of seismic. Over the course of 2008, the gallery building at 450 Harrison Avenue — where multi-year leases were up and rents were increasing — lost ALLSTON SKIRT GALLERY, BERNARD TOALE GALLERY (whose namesake, Bernard Toale, switched his focus from exhibiting to consulting), Michael Price's MPG CONTEMPORARY, GALLERY XIV (which last fall had taken over the 450 space previously occupied by Locco Ritoro), and JULIE CHAE GALLERY (which opened in 2007 in space vacated by Genovese/Sullivan when it moved to Andover; Chae now plans to move to New York).

Exposures

GREG COOK — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:51:06 GMT

Photos from Yousuf Karsh, William Christenberry, and the PRC
In "Karsh 100: A Biography in Images," which is now up at the Museum of Fine Arts, his iconic shots of Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and Ernest Hemingway are defining portraits of the men in all their crusty manliness.

OLD HOUSE, NEAR AKRON, ALABAMA (1964): The soul of Christenberry's photography is in his
Southern Gothic subjects, not his compositions.

Photos: Yousuf Karsh, William Christenberry, and the PRC

"Karsh 100: A Biography In Images" | Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave | Through January 19

"William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961-2005" | Massart, 621 Huntington Ave, Boston | Through December 6

"Keeping Time: Cycle And Duration In Contemporary Photography" | Photographic Resource Center, Boston University, 832 Comm Ave, Boston | Through January 25

You might say Yousuf Karsh was a one-man golden era of portrait photography. In "Karsh 100: A Biography in Images," which is now up at the Museum of Fine Arts, his iconic shots of Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and Ernest Hemingway are defining portraits of the men in all their crusty manliness. And check out his willowy profile of Audrey Hepburn, the craggy face of Boris (Frankenstein's monster) Karloff, and a smoldering Anita Ekberg, eyes closed, smiling, hair blowing across her face, bosom thrust forward.

MFA photo curator Anne Havinga brings together more than 100 of Karsh's photos. The time line runs from his apprenticeship in Boston (1928-'31) to setting up his own business in Ottawa (1932) to his great success photographing for Life magazine and other major publications to his return to Boston (1997 until his death in 2002). It's a seductive star-studded show.

The development of photography in the 19th century made realist painting really, really uncool for a long time, and it cleared the way for photography to be the primary medium of portraiture in the 20th century. Karsh had the good luck to arrive on the scene just as advances in printing were fostering the birth of Life (founded in 1936) and other glossy photography-centered publications — and thus whole new markets for photos. He angled to become the court portraitist of the rich, famous, and powerful of this era.

His breakthrough was his 1941 photo of Winston Churchill as a great, grand, stately ruler. Churchill's head is spotlit while the rest falls into shadow; the result highlights a defiant expression that was read as his steadfastness during wartime. But what stands out in Karsh's oft-told account is his fawning before Churchill, who was grumpy about posing because his staff had not informed him of the sitting. Karsh wrote, "I timorously stepped forward and said, 'Sir, I hope I will be fortunate enough to make a portrait worthy of this historic occasion.' " Churchill granted him just two exposures. The British leader's expression seems to have been provoked by Karsh's politely plucking his cigar from his mouth.

Photos: Exposures

BOSTON PHOENIX WEB STAFF — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:46:08 GMT

A slideshow of photos from Yousuf Karsh, William Christenberry, and the PRC
A slideshow of photos from Yousuf Karsh, William Christenberry, and the PRC

Audrey Hepburn, 1956
Yousuf Karsh, Canadian (born in Turkish Armenia), 1908–2002
Photograph, gelatin silver print

Part of the exhibit: "Karsh 100: A Biography In Images," at the Museum Of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave, through January 19

Body and Sol

EVAN J. GARZA — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:51:34 GMT

‘Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective’ at Mass MoCA
What’s the last time you really enjoyed 100 of something?

Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing 1152: Whirls and Twirls (Met.)

“Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective” at Mass MoCA, 87 Marshall St, North Adams | Opening November 16; on view for the next 25 years | 413.662.2111

What’s the last time you really enjoyed 100 of something? Chances are, especially in this economy, it was grains of rice. (Thank you, Mitch Hedberg.) But if your palette craves something more elegant and colorful, you’ll have 25 years to enjoy 100 works by Sol Lewitt in a new installation dished out by Mass MoCA. (Yes, you read that correctly.) “SOL LEWITT: A WALL DRAWING RETROSPECTIVE” will be on view in North Adams for a whopping two and a half decades. So if you can’t make it out for the opening ceremony on November 16, check back when your unborn children graduate from UMass-Amherst.

LeWitt’s wall drawings have been difficult to come by — they’re generally executed for installation over short periods of time in various major museum surveys across the globe. (He did one for the Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum’s Special Exhibition Gallery in 2005.) Now, selected pieces from his body of 1254 works made from 1968 to 2007 will be on view in a single location for a quarter-century, an exhibit that Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the co-organizing Yale University Art Gallery, has called a “visual feast.” The galleries are being filled with walls donning radically simple and carefully organized lines, multiple planes of solid color, isometric and geometric forms, layers of free-form shapes, and an endless display of color configurations. The amount of visual stimuli is staggering; the result is nothing short of awesome.

Conceived by Yale and the artist before his death in April 2007, and executed in collaboration with the Williams College Museum of Art, the semi-permanent exhibit is housed within a 27,000-square-foot mill on MASS MoCA’s sprawling campus. The three-story historic building is chock full of colorful wall drawings on a complex sequence of new interior walls constructed to LeWitt’s specs that span nearly an acre of physical wall space. It’s an elaborate and involved installation, especially for someone whose name is practically synonymous with Minimalism. But as an artist who frequently deployed conceptual thought across a multitude of media, LeWitt explained (in Artforum in 1968) that the idea is more valuable than the work itself: “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art."

Slideshow: Andy Warhol

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:13:20 GMT

Andy Warhol: Pop Politics, Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, September 27 – January 4

Now on Display
Andy Warhol: Pop Politics through Jan 4
Spotlight New England: Kirsten Reynolds through Feb 1

Political Andy?

GREG COOK — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:52:01 GMT

Warhol's court-painter years; plus doodling at the Rose
Was Andy Warhol more politically engaged than he's given credit for?

NO KIDDING: In Warhol's Jackie, we witness her transformation from sunny, smiling first lady to
shattered widow.

“Andy Warhol: Pop Politics” | Currier Museum Of Art, 150 Ash St, Manchester, New Hampshire | Through January 4

“Invisible Rays: The Surrealist Legacy” | “Project For A New American Century” | Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 415 South St, Waltham | Through December 14

For a while now I've been mulling over a question: was Andy Warhol more politically engaged than he's given credit for? My thought begins with his 1963 Race Riot screenprints based on Life photos of police siccing German shepherds on civil-rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. The subject of civil rights rarely appears in books documenting '60s art. Could Warhol's taking it on be significant?

"It just caught my eye," he said of Race Riots in 1966. Two years later, he added, "I feel I represent the US in my art, but I'm not a social critic. I just paint those objects in my paintings because those are the things I know best."

Of course, Warhol was notoriously and deliberately flaky in interviews, so we write off much that he said and look for clues in his work. The consensus verdict: his art is about media, celebrity, and the nature of art. The corollary: he focused on electric chairs, atomic mushroom clouds, Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, and Communist hammers and sickles because they were in the news at the time — he was just channeling the zeitgeist. But could he have been engaged in the political substance of his images?

Of all those works, the Currier Museum of Art's "Andy Warhol: Pop Politics" has only Mao. On the other hand, you'll see Warhol's most outright political statement: a 1972 poster of a green-faced Richard Nixon above the slogan "Vote McGovern" that he made to raise money for the McGovern campaign. Later he backed off, claiming, "The idea was that you could vote either way." He didn't want to offend potential clients — and the portrait business is the show's focus, not politics. I still recommend "Pop Politics" for what it is: a fizzy survey of Warhol's effort to become a modern-day court painter.