Urgent Museum Notice

Art Fix Friday: December 11, 2020

Blog Category:  Art Fix Friday
A black-and-white photograph of a light-skinned adult woman holding a newspaper with news about World War II. She wears a coat and her short, curly hair is caught in the wind.

For the Boston Globe, culture columnist Jeneé Osterheldt’s multimedia series “A Beautiful Resistance” centers and celebrates Black lives and Black joy. The stories of Black Bostonians and Massachusetts residents—including artists and performers—are told “through the lens of love.”

A medium-skinned woman with light brown curly hair stands in a construction box, elevated over city streets. She wears a safety harness and looks off into the distance. Behind her a vibrant mural is rendered on the side of a building in bright orange and purple. It is a pattern, but the exact makeup is obscured.
Featured in the “Beautiful Resistance” series, Sneha Shrestha is a Nepali artist who paints mindful mantras in her native language and meshes the aesthetics of Sanskrit scriptures with graffiti influences; Photo by Todd Mazer

“Too often in media, Black people are only in the news when it’s a hashtag because they’re dead, they’re brutalized, [they’ve experienced] injustice, or because we’re talking about racism,” Osterheldt said. Her goal for the project is to “acknowledge injustice without being defined that way.”

Front-Page Femmes

Amy Lipton, curator, gallerist, writer, and nonprofit director, has died at age 64; Lipton spoke at NMWA’s Fresh Talk: How can the arts inspire environmental advocacy? in 2017.

The Guardian reviews Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s current exhibition, Fly in League with the Night, at Tate: “The artist has boldly reclaimed figurative oil painting.” 

Hyperallergic interviews photographer Nydia Blas about her “Black feminine lens.”

Artnet reports that Louise Nevelson’s little-known Midtown Manhattan chapel is launching a fundraising campaign to refurbish its sculptural interior.

Advancing Women Artists, the nonprofit devoted to restoring artwork by women in Florence, Italy, has announced it will permanently close in June 2021.

ARTnews looks at how painter Gertrude Abercrombie cultivated her own Surrealist language.

Inside a thick gold frame is a tiny Surrealist painting depicting a dark, moody sky and landscape. Three trees are in the background and one larger one is in the foreground atop dark green grass. Half the tree is dead, the other with leaves. One lone white horse stands towards the bottom of the frame.
Gertrude Abercrombie, White Horse, 1939; Courtesy of the artist and Karma, New York

Hyperallergic profiles the Black women behind The Gumbo and Honey & Smoke, new hubs for underrepresented artists.

Architectural Digest spotlights Brazilian painter Lise Grendene’s London townhouse, which is filled with original artworks by Judy Chicago, Cecilia Vicuña, Francesca Woodman, Lisa Brice, and Kiki Smith.

Artist Julia Christensen has partnered with scientists and engineers at NASA to send an artwork into outer space; A prototype of the work is on view in her current show at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Art and Design.

Artnet reports on Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s recent arrests and current house arrest after protesting for artistic freedom.

For Hyperallergic’s “Beer with a Painter” series, Jennifer Samet interviews Judy Glantzman: “A painting is a surface, but we are hoping to elicit a response to what is underneath.”

Shows We Want to See

At London’s Serpentine Gallery, Jennifer Packer’s The Eye is Not Satisfied with Seeing is the artist’s first exhibition at a European institution. It features “portraits of [fellow] artists, monochromatic paintings, intimate interiors and flower still lifes, including a painting in response to the murder of Sandra Bland.” View exhibition images and listen to a conversation between Packer and Hans Ulrich Obrist at Serpentine’s website. For Artforum, Packer recently wrote about her changing approaches to painting. On view through March 14, 2021.

A figurative oil painting featuring a dark-skinned man with a loose afro sitting in a relaxed pose with his legs crossed and hands folded in his lap. He leans against a wall or seat, his expression is placid and he looks directly at the viewer.
Jennifer Packer, Jess, 2018, Oil on canvas; Collection of Ursula Burns Photo by Jason Wyche

At the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, Genesis Belanger: Through the Eye of a Needle presents a new body of work specially conceived for the museum—her largest and most elaborate installation to date. Spanning sculptures and tableaux “primarily composed out of porcelain, stoneware, and upholstery…Belanger’s methodology blends Surrealism and Pop art with a self-possessed feminism informed by a career inside the fashion and advertising industries.” On view through May 9, 2021.

Related Posts