Western Ho!

I realize that driving 2 ½ hours west of Boston isn’t exactly reaching the great frontier but in the aptly titled Purple Valley, in the shadow of Mt Greylock, one could find a veritable world full of art treasures. North Adams alone could fill a week – with its vibrant studio scene, street front galleries, and of course, the largest contemporary art space in the US – Mass MoCA. And right down the road is the ever bucolic Williamstown, a theater-haven in the summer, and art haven all year round between the Clark and the Williams College Art Museum (WCMA). 

In a hurried, or as we like to say, efficient, trip, the Biennial team made a number of studio visits this month but also had a few moments to visit both Mass MoCA and WCMA where we were stunned by scale and brilliance in the first and smart art historical thinking in the second.

Michael Oatman: All Utopias Fell, 2010

With galleries scaled to the ginormous size of contemporary art (as well as old, unused New England factories) Mass MoCA is expanding its campus even further with a new installation by the Troy, NY-based Michael Oatman. Known for his collages and collection-savvy installations, Oatman goes 10 steps further in All Utopia Fell – an installation of epic proportions that begins with a precarious climb up a three-story catwalk and ends with an elaborate narrative of an Airstream trailer flying too close to the sun and now holding solar panels.

Katharina Grosse: One Floor Up More HIghly, 2001, installation view

But Mass MoCA’s ode to the epic and monumental begins much earlier on with an entrance piece by Federico Diaz – an abstracted deconstruction of the building’s façade via thousands of computer-generated little spheres. Even more impressive is the Katarina Gross installation, One Floor Up More Highly, in Building 5, Mass MoCA’s famous football field-sized space devoted to single artist installations each year. In this round, Gross has seized the space with grit and boldness – quite literally. Her signature dirt piles spray painted with primary colors are punctuated by enormous styrofoam icebergs and the convenient bench, here and there. The space is converted into the stuff of painting – color and light – in a spectacular new way. Nari Ward’s show Sub Mirage Lignum has a similar effect on the 2^nd floor. Connecting the rarely-associated locals of Ward’s native Jamaica and the very New England North Adams, the installation converges on thematics of the sea, tourism, migration, race and poverty with a simply amazing suspended fishing boat and a 30-foot fish trap. We are indeed all lost at sea…

Nari Ward, Nu Colossus, 2011

In the academic enclave of Williamstown, WCMA holds one of the best art collections of any American college. Over the past year, they wisely reinstalled their encyclopedic collection, which is especially strong in contemporary art, under educational themes such as Art about Art, or how an artwork is made and commissioned. In a contemplative space, they’ve even set up a single object – currently Janine Antoni’s timely Deficit, 1991 - for a focused look in a new series called Room for Reflection. There are some wonderful gems of American art from mainstays like Grant Wood, Maurice Prendergast and Edward Hopper that are nicely abutted with contemporary international work. If only we could take the week! But sadly – we rushed back down Route 2 the very next day.

Janine Antoni, Deficit, 1991

 ‘Till next time-

Dina

Maineline

Portland, Maine is one of those cities that looks like it fell out of snow globe – kind of spherical, yes, but it’s graced with beautiful water views, a killer culinary scene, and of course, great art. On a recent trip to visit a handful of excellent Mainer artists, the Biennial team stopped in at two very tucked away but smart exhibitions. One was in the silent study room at the University of Southern Maine’s Glickman Family Library (a challenge for a chatty viewer like myself). The Storytellers, curated by Henry Wolyniec, features 8 Maine artists who address the form and content of narrative objects. Highlights included Greta Bank’s (2010 deCordova Biennial Artist) Cashmere Roadkill, a remarkable fusion of Grecian urn painting via meticulous hand-stitched leather-work which comes together in a semi-human figure that signals both the grotesque and beautiful side of humanity. “The piece is the perfect metaphor, the abused flesh fashioned into a statement about abuse” notes Wolyniec. Other notables included Adriane Herman’s Plunder the Influence project that sets out to document people’s bookshelves. The “stacks” site is a must-visit procrastination tool for anyone with a slight hint of intellectual voyeurism in them.

Cashmere Roadkill, detail, by Greta Bank.

The next stop was Portland’s gem – Space – a well-rounded arts space that manages to balance films, music, theater, and fantastic visual art shows making it perhaps one of the strongest alternative art spaces in not only Maine but New England. While we caught the last days of Cannonball Press’s impressive display of fun, cheap prints-for-all, stop in later this month to see The Sketchbook Project, a mobile library of over 10,000 artists’ sketchbooks. Imagine that…

- Dina Deitsch

Colliding at RISD

Collision Installation View

Last week Dina and I had a full day of visits in Rhode Island, one of the highlights being a stop at the RISD museum to see Collision, organized by curator Judith Tannenbaum and artist Jackie Saccoccio. The installation is an expansive, phantasmagoric cornucopia of visual delights, a result of an experimental exhibition-making concept. The seventeen invited visual artists submitted their work to an improvisational process in order to “break down physical limitations, encourage pairings and layering” and to explore ideas of “open-endedness.” This is a great example of new, smart collaborative projects and is a must-see if you’re in Rhode Island.

Collision Installation View

Collision Installation View

Collision Installation View

Collision Installation View

Abigail Ross Goodman

Co-Curator, 2012 Biennial

HYPERSLEEP

The Montserrat College of Art Galleries’ alternative display space, Frame 301, is currently exhibiting Corey Corcoran’s installation HYPERSLEEP, which reveals a mysterious human figure stratified with turf, peat, and moss. Corcoran’s blooming structure calls attention to the awe of nature’s uncertainty while investigating its constant regeneration. Corcoran’s first 3D site-specific installation, HYPERSLEEP, engulfs  Frame 301 with heaps of biomass, growth, and decay as a terrarium through creation. The window holds a cocooning figure saturated with earth, root systems, and endless unidentifiable matter. This obscure creation spans the entire length and depth of the window, enhancing every viewer’s looking experience. 

 Completely sculptural in nature, HYPERSLEEP refers to a science fiction term similar to hibernation when life processes are halted completely for some duration. It addresses the artist’s continuous ideas concerning the persistence of life, fluidity of time, and the simple strangeness of nature. Corey is a lending artist to deCordova’s Corporate Program where several of his 2D works have been installed at Corporate Member sites throughout Boston. HYPERSLEEP can be seen from February 7, 2011 through March 11, 2011 at 301 Cabot Street, Beverly, Massachusetts. Frame 301 is accesible to its viewers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  

- Lydia Gordon

Corporate Program Assistant

Looping it up in Providence

Holding the auspicious slot as the inaugural exhibiting artist, Julianne Swartz (deCordova, Fall 2012) opened up the new Cohen Gallery at Brown University with Loop on February 4^th.  While I admittedly missed the Artist talk by greatly underestimating Boston-Providence Friday traffic, I did catch a glimpse of this beautiful and witty installation, curated by Jo-Ann Conklin and Natasha Khandekar.

Granoff Center

The Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts officially opened Thursday as Brown’s new interdisciplinary arts center. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, this striking, new tower is meant to encourage “faculty and students to create bold new directions for research, teaching, and production across the boundaries of individual arts disciplines and among artists, scientists, and scholars.” The beauty of this building is that its contents and uses (i.e. shows, courses, etc) will be juried by various committees each semester, allowing for unprecedented department collaboration across all fields. The building’s design reflects this blurring of boundaries with glass reveals between floors and walls that leave a visitor (well, this one at least) guessing exactly what floor she is on…

Julianne Swartz, Camera-Less-Video (2009): Stainless Steel, optical lenses, Plexiglas, hardware

Floor to Ceiling

Swartz’s work is a great first start for the new gallery space, as she is an artist who trades on the slippages in perception and space. The show includes three distinct works: Camera-Less-Video, that flips the view outdoors through a neat play of light and lenses; Floor to Ceiling, two thin metal rods suspended from the ceiling by magnetic force with a beautifully tense gap in between; and finally, the newest work Loop, a tapestry of wire and speakers that quietly and subtly whispers and hums. The result is magical, and the whispers of strangers add a quirky warmth to this shiny, stark building.

Julianne Swartz, Loop, 2011

Loop – on view until March 20^th.

- Dina Deitsch

Sculpture in New York

In late January, 2011, I traveled to New York to attend the preview party and celebration for the exhibition Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture 1991-2009 at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, near P.S. 1. This show runs through March 28, and the will appear at deCordova as our major summer sculpture exhibition, May 28 – August 28. I was especially eager to see Ursula’s newest work, Elegantka, an illuminated outdoor resin sculpture. Elegantka was commissioned by an anonymous deCordova patron especially for inclusion in Ursula’s retrospective. It will travel with the show to deCordova (where it will be installed on our Roof Terrace), and then to the Museum of Contemporary Art Clevelandand the Frost Art Museum in Miami. In late 2012, Elegantka will return to deCordova as part of our Permanent Collection.

Elegantka, Ursula von Rydingsvard

Here’s a link to the New York Times review of the exhibition:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/arts/design/28sculpture.html?_r=1&ref=arts

While in New York I also took in several sculpture shows in Chelsea: Mika Tajima at Elizabeth Dee, Patrick Hill at Bortolami, Tony Smith at Matthew Marks, Tony Feher at Pace, Cornelia Parker at D’Amelio Terras, Ghada Amer at Cheim and Read, and a large group show at Marlborough Chelsea (including Ursula!).

Nick Capasso

Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs

Fashionably Loud

 

Over 40 of Nick Cave’s famously fantastic Soundsuits (so named for the noises they make when worn and performed in) are on display in the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida in the exhibition Nick Cave: Meet Me in the Center of the Earth. Sequined, buttoned, crotched from doilies, or patched together from scavenged sweaters, socks, or human hair dyed in impossibly fluorescent colors, the Soundsuits are meticulously crafted by the artist who has been teaching fashion design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for nearly two decades. They are playful, showy, loud, and resemble fantastical Mardi Gras ensembles and elaborate African ceremonial costumes. Made to be worn and danced in, the suits were also accompanied by photographs of the artist wearing them as well as video clips of them in “action.” Definitely fun for all at the Norton. 

- Lexi Lee Sullivan 

Nick Cave, Soundsuits, mixed media, 2008-2009

Nick Cave, Soundsuits, mixed media, 2008-2009

Nick Cave, Soundsuits, mixed media, 2009-2009