As home to over 65 colleges and universities, information, biotechnology and high-tech industries, and an increasingly diverse cultural demographic, Boston is quickly developing a new physical and cultural profile for the new millennium. For contemporary art this can only be good news in a town already known for having some of the best museum collections and an increasingly strong contingent of contemporary art collectors. Bill Arning, curator of the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, sums up his impression of Boston thus: ‘It’s a wonderful power trip to curate in greater Boston. Most of the future leaders of the world go to school here. You get to shape their idea of visual art. They end up on museum boards, and government funding bodies later in life, and what they think, positive or negative, is influenced by the shows they saw at your space.’
What’s different now is that, much like the
rest of the world, several institutions are embarking on major museum
expansions, including the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), The Fogg Art Museum at
Harvard University and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), which
promise to increase the focus on the collection and exhibition of
contemporary art, as well as provide a much-needed civic boost. In February
2002, the encyclopaedic MFA unveiled a staggering 50-year master site plan
for their building headed by the architectural firm of Norman Foster; while
at the ICA, the New York-based architecture and design firm of Diller +
Scofidio were recently selected to design the new museum when it relocates
to the Boston waterfront in 2005. Additionally, many Boston and Cambridge
institutions have also made several important curatorial appointments in
recent years, further underscoring the local commitment to artistic and
intellectual excellence in exhibition programming.
Needless to say, Boston has always had the distinction of artistic
excellence but also of being the first to give one-person exhibitions to
important emerging and mid-career artists. At the ICA, Jessica Morgan has
curated exhibitions on the work of Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas, Olafur
Eliasson and Cornelia Parker. Recent travelling exhibitions organised by the
ICA include Chic Clicks: Creativity and Commerce in Contemporary Fashion
Photography, which was on view at the Fotomuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland,
this summer and tours to the NRW Forum for Culture, Düsseldorf, in spring
2003; as well as Ellen Gallagher: Watery Ecstatic, which travelled this
spring to Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
Across the Charles River, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum recently held its largest exhibition of contemporary art in the form a group show entitled Extreme Connoisseurship, a thought-provoking and philosophical exploration into the somewhat tenuous relationship between anti-form and process art and a collecting institution deeply invested in objects. The exhibition included the work of Marcel Broodthaers, Bas Jan Ader, David Hammons, Roni Horn, Bruce Nauman, Gabriel Orozco, Yvonne Rainer, Bridget Riley, and Boston-based sculptor Alice Swinden Carter. Exhibition curator Linda Norden drew on a definition of connoisseurship as ‘the articulation and symptomatic examination of visual evidence’, as offered by Harvard University art historian Henri Zerner. Furthermore, she asked ‘what part the physical encounter with an artwork plays in our assessment of contemporary art and its larger, often non-art, claims’.
Over at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, the exhibition Tele-journeys, curated by MIT professor and internationally recognised artist Joan Jonas and List Visual Arts Director Jane Farver, focused on the ever-expanding vocabulary of performance and installation-based video. The featured artists included Carlos Amorales, Mark Bain, Yael Bartana, Michael Blum, Nabila Irshaid, Runa Islam, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Tomoko Take and Fiona Tan, most of whom have studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
Boston-area galleries and non-profit spaces are also raising the bar as a handful of young, energetic gallerists have managed to consistently present relevant, strong work that satisfies both the desire to keep up with the international art scene while promoting the best work produced locally. Contemporary art consultant and gallerist Dan Elias has been an active force on the Boston art scene since 1986, when he worked for Barbara Krakow Gallery on Newbury Street, and from 1997 to the present at his own gallery, Elias Fine Art in Allston. His interests range from big international names such as Richard Artschwager, Charles Long and Sigmar Polke, to national and local artists such as Taylor Davis, Alice Swinden Carter and Shellburne Thurber.
On Harrison Street, in Boston’s fashionable South End, a cluster of galleries have begun to create a buzz, including Bernard Toale, OHT and Clifford-Smith. The newest South End resident, Allston Skirt Gallery, was founded in 1999 by Randi Hopkins and Beth Kantrowitz and has shown the work of Robin Dash, Michelle Grabner, Scott Reeder and David Robbins. A recent highlight was a one-person exhibition of the up-and-coming artist Kanishka Raja, a Calcutta-native, Boston-based painter who is gaining recognition for his slightly psychedelic, one-point perspectives of imagined interior spaces. Finally, The Gallery @ Green Street, located in a Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority subway stop in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, is an artist-funded and artist-run gallery in its fourth year which aims to promote the work of national, regional and local artists, both emerging and established. Earlier this year, James Hull, director of The Gallery @ Green Street invited maverick collector Kenneth L. Freed to curate an exhibition of new sculpture that showcased the work of Stephen Aljian, Jay Batlle, Nathan Carter, Lucky De Bellevue, Evan Holloway, Liz Larner, Charles Long, Jason Meadows, Gianni Piacentino, Matthew Ronay, Gary Webb and Claude Wampler.
This autumn, the ICA will present the first US survey of the late Chinese-born, Paris-based artist Chen Zhen titled Chen Zhen: Inner Body Landscapes, and in the winter a survey exhibition of the work of Carsten Höller. The MFA will be presenting the first survey exhibition of the work of Adam Fuss, organised by the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany.
Gilbert Vicario is Assistant Curator at the ICA, Boston, and organised the exhibition Chen Zhen: Inner Body Landscapes