Art In A Neon Cage: Welcome To The Havana Biennial

By Nick Miroff   |   Friday, May 11, 2012   0 comments.

Jared Bowen's Arts Ahead: Considering the Future

By Jared Bowen   |   Thursday, March 22, 2012   0 comments.

March 22, 2012

A Tour of Roxbury's "Living Legends"

By Talia Whyte   |   Monday, March 12, 2012   0 comments.

BOSTON — Artist Susan Thompson participated as a “living legend” in a trolley tour, examining the contributions of Roxbury women to Boston history. The tour was hosted by Discover Roxbury as part of a women’s history month celebration. Other women both living and deceased given praise on the tour included community organizer Melnea Cass, METCO head Jean McGuire and Dr. Susan Dimock, the founder of what is now known as the Dimock Community Health Center.

I have passed through the turnstiles at Roxbury Crossing many times and never knew the history behind the beautiful textiles. I think it is really great to have such a tour because it helps give more context to things people may see on a regular basis in their daily lives, but don’t take much notice to, like passing through a T station. More importantly, the tour is designed to help attendees better appreciate the contributions of the many people from a neighborhood that is generally seen in a negative light in the media.

“The tour is designed to help people from other communities better understand all that is great in this neighborhood,” said Discover Roxbury executive director Derek Lumpkins at the end of the tour. “We hope we can make all communities stronger this way.”

This article was produced as part of the Black Perspectives Now series.

Art for Sale!

Friday, February 24, 2012   0 comments.

Feb. 24, 2012



Don't miss your chance to bid during the 30th annual WGBH Fine Arts Auction, from Saturday, March 3 to Saturday, March 24. Juried paintings, sculpture, photography, drawings, ceramics, and jewelry will be available from world-renowned artists, including Peter Batchelder, Joan Colomer, Robert Kipniss, Jon Sarkin, and many others.

Also, be sure to tune in for the auction finale on Saturday, March 24 from 6-8pm on WGBH 44 and 8-10pm on WGBH 2.

Browse and bid now at auction.wgbh.org.

Figuring Color at the ICA

By Jared Bowen   |   Thursday, February 23, 2012   0 comments.

Feb. 23, 2012

BOSTON — With one striking exception, the Institute of Contemporary Art is awash in lush color at the moment. At the outset, it would appear to be the output of bubbly artists.

“I’m really flaunting color,” said Kathy Butterly

 “Orange is orange and it just gets to be orange,” added Roy McMakin. Sue Williams elaborated.  “I think of them as attractive colors. I don’t use browns. I don’t use neutrals," she said.
 
Look closer, though, and the ICA’s new show Figuring Color is about the meaning of color—how it relates to the body, to emotion, to comprehension. A red curtain references the height of the AIDS crisis. A skin-toned chair is a seat, but also looks like your own. Cheerfully rendered paintings, viewed up close, belie their subject matter.

Three of the four featured artists talked with WGBH about their use of color. Sue Williams said, “I like contrast a lot, opposite colors contrast. Bright. I want them to because paintings can’t make light so I want them to have brightness.”
 
In her more recent pieces however, like Record Profits or American Enterprise, the subject matter is anything but bright. They’re the manifestations of her activist side she says, her frustrations about US Military intervention rendered on the canvas.

“It is one place where people see what I do so that’s why they used to be more abstract and became more figurative because I wanted it to be connected to what I was interested in. And being abstract, it wasn’t compelling to me anymore,” she said.
 
Since he was a child, Roy McMakin says he’s been rather obsessed with furniture. This work of 19 independent sculptures was conjured from memory. It’s what he remembers of furniture in the homes of his parents and maternal grandparents.
 
“The idea to unify them all with the same color of gray was partly to unify them. At one point, because it’s a memory-based piece, I was thinking I could go with my memory of those colors, but I felt like I wanted them to be significant in some other way, kind of pulled out of normal objects a little further,” he said.
 
“I feel as I get older I understand the psychology of color more. And I’m using some really intense color,” said Butterly.
 
Kathy Butterly’s ceramic sculptures toy with the notion of bodies. Their colors compel, and embarrass.
 
“Some of the earlier pieces, which are very provocative, seductive in a way, naughty, they happen because that’s what was happening in my life. I was falling in love and I was thinking about my body and just…that was my world,” she said.
 
Butterly says her works are largely psychological self-portraits, but her environment also influences her color choices. “A lot of the time I’ll be listening to public radio. I’ll be listening to what’s going on in the world and the wars and whatnot, and maybe it’s not so clear in the works that that’s what I’m thinking about, but it does get infused. So there might be like a camouflage color on the body,” she said.
 
The sum of In Figuring Color, at the ICA, is wonderfully complex.

Jared Bowen's Arts Ahead: New, Bold and Beautiful

By Jared Bowen   |   Thursday, February 23, 2012   0 comments.

Feb. 23, 2012



BOSTON — Premiere performances, bold comedy and daring exhibitions prove Boston's art scene is to be taken seriously.

Wild Swans
American Repertory Theater
Now through March 11th
The set is georgeous, and Jung Chang consulted a great deal on getting the details just right in this first ever production of her best-selling book. See Jared's full report for Greater Boston and participate in the Wild Swans community memoir project, created in collaboration with Harvard's metaLab and Zeega.

The Little Pricks
Presented by Ryan Landry and The Gold Dust Orphans
Machine in the Fenway
Now through March 11
Landry is at it again, this time interpreting Lillian Hellman's "The Little Foxes," mocking the one percent with characters conniving to get rich quick by means of a slavery scheme. With outrageous costumes and great wit, you can't help but let out a laugh.

Figuring Color: Kathy Butterly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roy McMakin, Sue Williams
Institute of Contemporary Art
Now through May 20th
A major exhibition exploring the use of color and form to convey ideas about the body. McMakin’s fleshy chairs mimic the human form, Butterly’s intricate ceramics are rich with bodily humor and desire, Gonzalez-Torres’s installations of candy and plastic beads abstractly evoke physical absence and presence, and Williams’s electrifying canvases convey the viscera of war and politics.

Jared Bowen
Jared Bowen is an Emmy-winning reporter with WGBH-TV’s nightly news magazine program, Greater Boston with Emily Rooney.
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