The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research

MPG Contemporary to close

2008-05-15T17:25:00.002-04:00

MPG Contemporary at 450 Harrison Ave. will close after its next show.

“My lease was up,” owner Michael Price says, “rents are up, the economy’s not good.”

He opened the gallery on Newbury Street in 1998 and moved to his current location roughly five years ago. A highlight of the gallery’s programming has been its annual “New Art” show, an exhibit of emerging artists from across the country juried by prominent local museum curators (Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Raphaela Platow, Linda Norden, Ted Stebbins, etc.). The gallery’s final show will be a retrospective exhibit from June 6 to July 12 featuring some two dozen artists who have shown at MPG Gallery over the decade it’s been in business.

Asked about his future plans, Price says, “I’m going to take a little time off and look around.”

The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition

2008-05-15T08:58:00.000-04:00

From my review of the 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition, the last major show at the museum before its new director Dennis Kois arrives in June:

The aim of the DeCordova Museum’s Annual Exhibition is to round up “some of the most interesting and visually eloquent” New England artists. If that’s what the DeCordova’s Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Nick Capasso, Dina Deitsch, and Kate Dempsey have actually found in the 11 individual artists and one collective they’re featuring in the 2008 edition, the result is a depressing report of the mostly bland state of art here.

Read the rest here.

“The 2008 DeCordova Annual Exhibition,” DeCordova Museum, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln, May 10 to Aug. 17, 2008.

Pictured from top to bottom: Matt Brackett, “Distant Waves”; Niho Kozuru, “Liquid Sunshine” (detail); Mitchel K. Ahern, “On the Road Scrolls” (detail).

Pepper Gallery closing

2008-05-13T18:07:00.000-04:00

Pepper Gallery, after operating for 15 years on the fourth floor of 38 Newbury St., will close at the end of this month.

“I’m leaving the space but I’m continuing in some way,” owner Audrey Pepper said today. “I want to leave my options open and be able to meet a lot of interesting people and see where the business is going to go.”

In February, the New England chapter of the International Association of Art Critics awarded the Boston gallery both first and second place in the “best monographic show in a commercial gallery” category.

But Pepper said that her current five-year lease will expire at the end of May and with the economy struggling it seemed time to consider something new. “The business is very different now [than it was 15 years ago]. Foot traffic is down,” she said.

Pepper, who was a private dealer before opening the gallery, declined to discuss what specific options she was considering for the future, but said she plans to continue working in the field, retain clients and maintain access to artists.

“I’m not disappearing,” she said.

Related:
My review of Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick show at Pepper Gallery in May 2007, which won one of the AICA awards.

Miller Block moving

2008-05-13T18:06:00.000-04:00

Miller Block Gallery, which opened in Boston in 1990, plans to move from 14 Newbury St. to 38 Newbury St. in June.

Ellen Miller said she has signed a five-year lease for the fourth floor space where Pepper Gallery is now, and plans to reopen there July 1 with an exhibition of campaign buttons that she’s asking Boston-area artists to create.

Miller’s longtime business partner Katie Block is expected to adopt a smaller role. Miller Block will retain its current name for roughly six months to a year, Miller said, but may then be renamed Ellen Miller Gallery.

“I’ll run the space. Things will seem fairly similar,” Miller said. “Change is happening. I don’t know that it’s going to be hugely apparent to people.”

Miller said she plans to continuing showing most of the artists Miller Block does now, but also add some artists, including St. Louis’s Andrew Millner and perhaps some local artists whose galleries have closed in the current art scene shuffle. And she said she plans to do more “community-based” shows, like the campaign button exhibit.

Miller said she and Block will continue to sell artwork at art fairs together, and Block will continue working with clients.

“We’ve worked together for 17 years. It’s time for a change,” Miller added. “The change that made the most sense for us as individuals was for me to take the space and run the gallery. We still have an amicable relationship.”

Miller Block originally was located at 207 Newbury St., then 11 Newbury St., until moving to its current location in 1998. The upcoming move was triggered by the gallery’s lease, which is set to expire at the end of June, with a tough art market lurking in the background.

Robert Rauschenberg has died

2008-05-13T17:05:00.001-04:00

"Painting relates to both art and life.... (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” – Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg died Monday night at his home in Captiva, Florida, according to news reports. He was 82. The cause was apparently heart failure, after a short illness.

See: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times.

ICA raises $75 million

2008-05-12T17:25:00.000-04:00

Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art announced today that it had raised $75 million in its capital campaign.

Gary Panter interview

2008-05-09T09:09:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week I posted a link to my review of Gary Panter’s exhibition “Daydream Trap” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and excerpts from a public talk he gave at RISD in 2006. Below are excerpts from my interview of Panter at his Brooklyn home on April 11, 2008:

“I thought the next generation of pop artists would put things into the media and then pull them back out of the media. … And then it would be a warmer kind of pop art. In some way it’s about images running through systems.”
On his art: “I think it’s a self-discovery. You’re your own shrink. … I can find out what I like and don’t like about my interests and I can sort of evolve in that way.”
“It’s really trying to make a hieroglyphic of my experience as a human in a way.”
“It’s got characteristics of infantilism and arrested development and nostalgia. I just tried to find images that were powerful to me in my life. And the funniest.”
“It’s a bower bird kind of instinct. … Put the shiny stuff out front of it that I think will be the greatest attraction.”
“I want it to be seductive. I want it to control the mood. Because I think that’s what painting does. It tries to emanate or resonate and make some bell tones.”
“These things are landscapes. They’re inhabited. … I really like thinking very simply about things. If it’s blue and it’s up high, it’s sky. And if it’s green and it’s down low, it’s grass.”
“There’s this kind of mark I want and it comes from a short stubby brush. … This is kind of a really human hand-made printing process.”
“When I took LSD in the ‘70s I was really shocked by how everything was in there. I thought I was going to have this organic religious experience. And I was just full of synthetic commercials. It was horrifying.”
“Aesthetics are about seduction in some way. It’s coming out of mating symbols in some way. … And then we can use it in different ways.”
“If you’re going to be dealing with imagery as a painter it should probably be primal. So it speaks to the species in some way.”
“A lot of things is is it poetic or not. If it connects too readily it becomes entertainment. And if it’s poetic it’s probably a little less determined to you. I don’t want to make dead art. I don’t want it to be a TV show.”
“Low tech is important in a way. I like cave men art. I think we’re cave men, we’re gophers pretending to be something else.”
“It’s a pretty horrible world. You can scream, you can cry, you can laugh or all of the above. … I think humor is wise. If you talk to Sufi and Zen masters, they’re pulling this way. And it’s a way of reconciling opposites. … Zen humor short-circuits your assumptions.”

Pictured: Gary Panter, “Where Was the Air Force,” 2001 from “Satiroplastic” sketchbook, 1999-2001, courtesy of the artist.

Sister Corita Kent

2008-05-09T08:08:00.000-04:00

From my review of “Corita Kent: We Can Create Life Without War” at Breslin Fine Arts:

Sister Corita Kent was something of a celebrity. Newsweek put her on the cover as “The Nun: Going Modern” in 1967. She drew up a rainbow-striped “Love” stamp for the US Postal Service in 1985. She’s best known locally for designing the rainbow stripes painted across the giant National Grid gas tank off Route 93 in Boston in 1971. But she was never quite part of the fine art world, and since her death in 1986, she’s all but disappeared from art history.

So you might not know that Kent was one of the best artists to emerge in the ’60s. Her giddy, neon pop art screenprints featured jitterbugging commercial slogans and long poetic quotations that vividly advertised her Catholic faith, called for civil rights and social justice, and opposed the Vietnam War. Which got her in trouble with the conservative Catholic hierarchy in LA, where she taught art for 20 years at Immaculate Heart College before leaving the order and settling in Boston in 1968.

Read the rest here.

Related:
I’ve previously written about Kent’s work here and here.

Corita Kent, “We Can Create Life Without War,” Breslin Fine Arts, 187 Main St., East Greenwich, Rhode Island, April 12 to May 15, 2008.

Pictured from top to bottom: Corita Kent’s screenprints “Come Alive,” 1967, and “News of the Week,” 1969.

Gary Panter talk at RISD in 2006

2008-05-08T09:29:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I posted a link to my review of Gary Panter’s exhibition “Daydream Trap” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Here are excerpts from a public talk he gave at RISD on Sept. 20, 2006:

“There used to be an underground and only the right people would find it. But now there’s the Internet and everybody finds it. My dad reads it. He’s part of the underground now.”
“The Red Hot Chili Peppers used to live on the same street that I did in LA and they used to march bare-chested into traffic … because they were tripping and they wouldn’t have known if someone hit them with a board. Or they would have thought it was interesting.”
“In punk rock, how do they look so serious in those pictures? They really know how to stand there and glower. How do they do it without cracking up? I don’t know how they do it.”
“I like Bill Gates. I can send e-mail now. I don’t know if he invented it, but I’m going to give him credit because he’s the only computer guy I know. Charles Burns was in junior high with Bill Gates and said he was an okay guy.”
“Commercial art is not personal art. For me it’s not. I can try to make it interesting or good … but I’m in their service. … I’m just trying to do whatever they want to do whether it sells corn flakes or uranium.”
“In commercial art, I just can’t put my heart in it because someone will say change it, do it over, and I’ll get hurt.”
“People think you’re a rich and famous illustrator when you do one of those [Rolling Stone illustrations]. But it’s only 1,225 bucks, so it’s pretty sad around the ranch if that’s all you do all year.”
“Once you do a Jack Kirby rip off then suddenly they want big hands on everything you do.”
“I was a kid who was doing two things. … ‘You’re going to burn in hell because you’re going to the wrong religion.’ I was that kid on the playground. … The other thing I was into as a kid was dinosaurs. Which was great because it helped me unthink the whole religion because there’s this verse that says dinosaur bones were just put into the ground to make wise men look stupid. That didn’t make much sense to me.”
“Some people believe chocolate milk is a gateway drug. … I guess you can do ecstasy. But it made me feel like there was an anvil on me. It didn’t make me love anybody. I just wanted to have the anvil off me.”
“My father found [my] ‘The Asshole’ [comic] on the Internet. He was trolling around for stuff. … He said, ‘You must be really proud of that comic.’”
“I think painting can stop time. I think it’s a mood control device.”
“Elvis was from another planet … the Sun Ra planet. He and Sun Ra came down together. … Why wasn’t Elvis ever in a monster movie? He could have been any monster.”
“There’s a lot of people before the age of scanning that aren’t there [on the Internet]. … So go to libraries. They’re throwing out all the books, I know. So wait by the garbage can.”
“If you want to fuck up white people, call them pink people.”
“I’m very emotional. I cry easily. Every movie I go to I cry.”

More wisdom from Gary Panter tomorrow.

Pictured: Gary Panter, “Traffic,” 2004, courtesy of the artist and Clementine, New York.

Gary Panter

2008-05-07T10:45:00.001-04:00

From my review of “Gary Panter: Daydream Trap” at Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut:

In the 1980s, Gary Panter was an Emmy-winning designer of fabulous sets for "Pee-wee's Playhouse." His illustrations have appeared in Time, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and The New Yorker. One of the most important cartoonists to emerge in the late 1970s and '80s, his work was featured in the "Masters of American Comics" exhibition that opened at Los Angeles's Hammer Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005.

All this time he has painted, too, but somehow, while operating in plain sight, the 57-year-old has been one of those artists who float under the art world's radar.

Read the rest here.

Coming soon:
Excerpts from Panter's 2006 talk at RISD and my recent interview of him.

“Gary Panter: Daydream Trap,” Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main St., Ridgefield, Conn., March 9 to Aug. 31, 2008.

Pictured: Gary Panter, "Flypaper,” 2004, courtesy of the artist and Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Dallas.

Mass. House supports MCC budget increase

2008-05-06T12:12:00.000-04:00

The Massachusetts House of Representatives last week voted to recommend increasing the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s budget by $400,000 to nearly $12.7 million for the fiscal year beginning July 1, according to the MCC. The House also budgeted $6.5 million for the state Cultural Facilities Fund, down from $12 million in the current fiscal year.

That puts the House higher than Governor Deval Patrick’s recommended budget for the MCC (a $100,000 increase to $12.4 million), but somewhat below his proposed budget for the Cultural Facilities Fund ($7 million).

The state Senate has yet to weigh in. The Senate Ways and Means Committee is expected to release its version of the state budget later this month. The two chambers must then agree on a budget before sending it to the governor for final approval.

Portland Museum director switches roles

2008-05-06T09:09:00.005-04:00

Portland Museum of Art Director Daniel O’Leary “retires” today, the museum announced this morning, to instead lead the institution’s restoration of Winslow Homer’s studio in nearby Prouts Neck, Maine.

Deputy Director Thomas Denenberg has been appointed acting director, while a search committee, to be formed this summer, seeks O’Leary’s replacement.

Homer’s studio (pictured below), which was created in 1883 by Portland architect John Calvin Stevens and acquired by the museum in 2006, served as the artist’s home and studio until his death in 1910. The museum says it has raised more than $5 million in gifts and pledges toward the expected $8.3 million cost of the acquisition, preservation and an endowment. The restoration is expected to be completed in 2010, the hundredth anniversary of Homer’s death, and studio and surrounding grounds opened to the public.

O’Leary has lead the Portland museum since 1993, coming from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where was assistant director for five years.

“The acquisition and preservation of the Winslow Homer Studio represents one of the most meaningful and significant projects in the history of American art,” Dr. O’Leary said in a press release. “I am very pleased that the Board has enabled me to give this activity the full effort and commitment that it so richly deserves.”

Photo of exterior of Winslow Homer studio by meyersphoto.com.

Julie Chae: “We are not closing”

2008-05-06T08:48:00.000-04:00

Julie Chae tells me by email this morning:

No, we are not closing. We had to unexpectedly move out of the 450 Harrison Avenue space and I have a temporary display space which will be open by appointment. I am planning an awesome photography show on Martha's Vineyard in August of Jayson Keeling's portraits of Harlem which were commissioned by the Studio Museum of Harlem in the past year. Then I will be reopening in the fall. I am looking into South Boston as a potential location and I am also looking into the possibility of having gallery presence in both Boston and New York.

My previous report on this is here.

Julie Chae closes?

2008-05-05T22:04:00.002-04:00

Julie Chae Gallery, which opened last September at 450 Harrison Ave., seems to have closed. The gallery’s sign is gone and the space appears to have been emptied out.

More details to come.

Update:
Chae says, "We are not closing."

Related:
My review of Alexander DeMaria and Natasha Bowdoin’s show there from December to January.

Walid Raad

2008-05-05T13:31:00.000-04:00

Walid Raad’s exhibit “We Can Make Rain But No One Came To Ask” at Brown University’s Bell Gallery, as I write in my review,

feels like a Borgesian detective story in which truth is elusive, and cities themselves shiver with post-traumatic stress disorder.

For several years, the Lebanese-born New York-based artist has made art about the Lebanese Civil War of 1975 to 1991. This installation, Raad writes, focuses on a single car bombing in Beirut in 1986. The gallery is filled with five long tables, with 44 sheets of paper laid atop them like evidence. A fractured, impressionistic 17-minute video projected on a wall of the gallery seems to cover some of the same territory.

“My photographs [of Beirut] began to manifest colors and lines that were, at times, significantly different from the ones available to my eyes,” Raad writes in a group of pages that depict buildings mirrored, turned upside down, cut-up, and blurred. “I came to believe that something in . . . the time and space of the [bombed] neighborhood may have been affected not only by the 1986 detonation but also by every other war, skirmish, and assault in Lebanon since 1975 . . . I decided to print my photographs even if I still doubted what I was seeing in them.”

Read the rest here.

Walid Raad, “We Can Make Rain But No One Came To Ask,” Bell Gallery, Brown University, 64 College St., Providence, April 10 to May 25, 2008.

Pictured: “I Feel A Great Desire to Meet The Masses Once Again,” which a sign says was painted by Elly Boueri at Raad’s request. Supposedly.

“Grand Scale” at Davis Museum

2008-04-30T11:01:00.001-04:00

"Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Durer and Titian," now on view at Wellesley College's Davis Museum, looks to be one of the best local exhibits of 2008. From my review:

We tend to think of old-master prints as small because most of the ones that survive could fit into books or albums where they were sheltered from light and wear. But the great exhibition "Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Durer and Titian" at Wellesley College's Davis Museum shows that beginning in the late 15th century, artists stretched the technical boundaries of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings with multipage prints that rival tapestries and easel paintings in size and drama.

You have to see them in person to really get it. In reproduction, Jacopo de' Barbari's 1500 bird's-eye "View of Venice" is a tight maze of buildings, ships, streets, and canals. But in the gallery, the vista opens up to about 9 feet wide. The point of view feels more godlike than birdlike in its all-seeing, all-knowing vision. You understand why the marvelous woodcut - assembled from six unprecedentedly large carved wooden plates printed on six unprecedentedly large sheets of paper - was one of the first images to be protected by what we now call copyright.

Such large-scale Renaissance prints are rarely seen or discussed because few remain. So the 48 prints, dating from 1486 to 1636, that curators Larry Silver of the University of Pennsylvania and Elizabeth Wyckoff of the Davis Museum have assembled in "Grand Scale" produce a rare sort of exhibition - one that rejiggers our sense of history.

Read the rest here.

“Grand Scale” At: Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, 106 Central St., Wellesley, March 19 to June 8, 2008.

Pictured: Albrecht Dürer, “The Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I,” 1515, woodcut, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Frederic Remington

2008-04-23T09:48:00.000-04:00

From my review of “Remington Looking West” at the Clark Art Institute:

Others painted the American West before Frederic Remington. George Catlin made iconic portraits of Native Americans in the 1830s and '40s. Albert Bierstadt painted sweeping Western vistas from the 1850s to the 1870s.

But the sharp, concise exhibit "Remington Looking West" that curator Cody Hartley has organized at the Clark Art Institute reminds us that Remington painted the Wild West that became the stuff of pop-culture legend.

Remington (1861-1909) traveled around what is now Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, Texas, Canada, and Mexico. But his base for much of his life was in and around New York City, where he made his name as an illustrator for major magazines and then as a fine-art painter, sculptor, and writer.

Remington's central subject was America's Indian wars of the second half of the 19th century, which were sparked by white colonization of the West.

Read the rest here.

“Remington Looking West,” Clark Art Institute, 225 South St., Williamstown, Feb. 17 to May 4, 2008.

Pictured: Frederic Remington’s painting “Friends or Foes? (The Scout),” c. 1900-05.

Neal Walsh, William Schaff

2008-04-22T11:41:00.001-04:00

From my review of Neal T. Walsh and William Schaff at 5 Traverse gallery:

Providence artist Neal Walsh’s great new abstract paintings bring to mind peeling paint, rust, and cracking plaster in old mills or houses, maybe the wall in the hall of an apartment building. On view at 5 Traverse gallery — along with work by Warren’s William Schaff — they embody the romance of ruins, capturing a particularly Providence love of old buildings and their majestic rot. But they also reach toward humanity’s ancient awe of ruins from Egypt to Greece to Mexico — to Edward Hopper’s sagging Victorian homes and tired city streets.

Read the rest here.

Neal T. Walsh and William Schaff, 5 Traverse, 5 Traverse St., Providence, April 11 to May 3, 2008.

Pictured from top to bottom: Neal Walsh’s “Dry Salvages,” 2007, and William Schaff’s “Cornered Eagle,” 2008.

Joseph Solman dies

2008-04-18T12:11:00.000-04:00

Joseph Solman, a New York painter who was among the last living ties to the generation of American artists who pioneered American modernism and helped New York supplant Paris at the avant garde art capital of the world, died Wednesday at age 99.

Solman, who began summering at Cape Ann in the 1950s and maintained a summer home in Gloucester, formed The Ten with Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, among others, in 1935. They were a group of artists who challenged the conservatism they saw in American art then.

Throughout his life, Solman resisted art world orthodoxy – abstracting before it was acceptable, and later maintaining an expressionist realist style when it was no longer cool to do so.

“I need a subject,” he told me in 2004. “The advantage of subject matter is you can dig into it.”

Related:
The New York Times obit.

Malcolm Grear Designers, Roger Mayer

2008-04-09T11:25:00.000-04:00

From my reviews of the Malcolm Grear Designers exhibit at Rhode Island College's Bannister Gallery and Roger Mayer's “Soundless” at Chazan Gallery at the Wheeler School:

In 1969, Malcolm Grear Designers was hired by New York’s Guggenheim Museum to develop a new graphic identity for the institution. One of the results was a series of posters that boiled down the building’s trademark spiraling architecture into a design of four flat curving stripes that feel like the ideal form of the building that hovers in our minds.

Seen in the exhibition “Inside/Outside: Design and Process, Malcolm Grear Designers” at Rhode Island College’s Bannister Gallery (600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence, through April 24), the posters remain strikingly fresh. It’s obvious why the image helped lead to the firm doing all of the Guggenheim’s graphic designs — posters, books, invites, signs, gift bags — from 1969 to 1990.

“Inside/Outside” presents a trade show-like retrospective of the work of the Providence graphic design firm, which longtime RISD teacher Malcolm Grear founded in 1960. Here are examples of logos, package design, textbooks, exhibition catalogues, posters, signs, Olympic medals, and museum exhibits that it has produced. And there are plenty of sketches and mock-ups that give glimpses into the firm’s process.

Read the rest here.

“Inside/Outside: Design and Process, Malcolm Grear Designers” at Rhode Island College’s Bannister Gallery, 600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence, through April 24, 2008.
Roger Mayer “Soundless,” Chazan Gallery at the Wheeler School, 228 Angell Street, Providence, through April 20, 2008.

The Institute for Infinitely Small Things

2008-04-08T08:07:00.000-04:00

From my profile of The Institute for Infinitely Small Things:

One night at the end of February, seven members of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things were premiering their new performance, “The Working Is the Work,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art. (They perform it again on April 24.) Wearing their trademark white lab coats, with their Institute’s name and infinity symbol on the back, the collective of artists spread out through the museum and helped the ICA’s staff — scrubbing the lobby, counting visitors, standing guard, cleaning the café.

Instituter Katharine Urbati, who tidied the museum store, was asked about items for sale. Someone turned in a lost guidebook to her. “I love that people think I work here, and I’m wearing this ridiculous coat.”

One person asked Savic Rasovic, who was running an elevator for the evening, how long it took him to learn the job. “About a minute. We specialize in small things. And one of them is operating elevators.” Later, a woman suggested that he expand his horizons. “This is my stage,” he insisted — but then he quipped, “I’ll think about it. I may work in another elevator.”

Read the rest here.

The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, “The Working Is the Work,” Institute for Contemporary Art, 100 Northern Ave., Boston, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., April 24, 2008.

Pictured: Savic Rasovic cleans an ICA bathroom during the Institute for Infinitely Small Things’ March 27 performance of “The Working Is the Work.”

Feeney wins Pulitzer

2008-04-07T21:08:00.001-04:00

Congrats to the Globe’s Mark Feeney of Cambridge who today won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism – in particular, the Pulitzer board says, “for his penetrating and versatile command of the visual arts, from film and photography to painting.”

More gallery closings, changes

2008-04-01T17:04:00.003-04:00

From my report in this week’s Boston Phoenix on big changes in the Boston gallery scene:

A week after Allston Skirt Gallery got two of its artists named among the four finalists for the Institute of Contemporary Art’s 2008 Foster Prize, word began to spread that the nine-year-old gallery would be closing at the end of its next show.

The news turned out to be the first sign of a major gallery shake-up involving a number of Boston’s most prestigious venues. Three galleries are closing, several are moving, and others are restructuring. Are these changes just the start of a contraction as the tanking economy begins to affect the local art market?

The three-year-old Space Other gallery at 63 Wareham Street will close after its April 4-26 show, but it’s planning a series of “Space Other at other spaces” exhibits in Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, San Juan, and Mexico City in 2008 and ’09. Judy Ann Goldman at 14 Newbury Street plans to close, at least temporarily, at the end of June and “use the summer to reassess my next move.” There are widespread rumors that Rhys Gallery at 401 Harrison Avenue may leave town; owner Colin Rhys declined to comment. At least three additional galleries seem to be on the bubble and may close in the coming months.

Read the rest here.

Space Other to close

2008-04-01T11:10:00.003-04:00

I was saddened to learn last week that Space Other gallery at 63 Wareham St. will close after its April 4 to 26 show "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni/We go in circles in the dark and are consumed by fire." The closing is another piece of the major shakeup happening in the Boston gallery scene that I reported on last week.

The 3-year-old gallery, which is run by Gamaliel Herrera and Mark Schwindenhammer, specializes in smartly produced, challenging shows, generally with an international bent. And they slipped in some locals, like Bostonian Andrew Mobray, whose “Bathyscape” show made my list of the best art of 2007.

Schwindenhammer says economics weren’t the driving factor. Instead they’re pursuing new opportunities, including planning a series of international projects over the next couple years. And, he says, they’re mulling eventually opening another gallery somewhere around Boston, or Europe.

Herrera writes in a press release issued today: "For the next year Space Other abandons its sessile exhibition space in Boston's South End and proceeds to develop a series of exhibitions under the umbrella title 'space other at other spaces,' which will take place in non-traditional exhibition spaces in Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, and San Juan during the remainder of 2008. During the fall of 2006 we participated in an exhibition where we took over an empty store space in a commercial district in Hamburg for one month. This is the nomadic model to follow. A self published book compiling information on the 21 exhibitions and the many artists presented in Boston during the last three years will be published this fall."

Related reviews:
Andrew Mowbray’s “Bathyscape” at Space Other.
Erik Levine’s “More Man” at Space Other.
Alexander Apostol’s “In Lieu of Modernity” at Space Other.

Berwick announces resident artists

2008-03-28T13:21:00.000-04:00

Berwick Research Institute has announced that its 2008 “Artists in Research” are Boston conceptual artist Laura Torres, Boston sculptor Jesse Kaminski and Brookline sculptor Nathalie Miebach.

The Roxbury nonprofit says “Artists in Research” is a “residency program that provides emerging artists essential time, space, community, financial assistance, and critical feedback to develop and present their work. The artists have two public events that offer a venue to test their ideas in a dialog with other artists, curators, and the general public. The AIR program is run by two co-curators, Bonnie Bastien and Rosie Branson Gill who devote all their free time for the love of it.”