The announcement of the Museum of Fine Arts’ Maud Morgan Prize winner is eagerly awaited by the Boston art community each year. Given to a "Massachusetts woman artist in mid career," this prestigious award is intended to honor under-recognized local artists. It is a "purchase prize," which means that artwork created by the lucky winner enters the MFA’s permanent collection. And she gets a one-person show at the MFA, going shoulder-to-shoulder with the already anointed.
This year’s winner is Boston-based video artist Suara Welitoff, who makes short films exploring the little things around us that might go unnoticed if she didn’t train her camera on them, fragments or moments that we might otherwise miss. Welitoff plays with the way a video camera captures images over time, slowing down her footage or extending it in order to highlight the way someone holds a cigarette, or how a skateboard moves across a sidewalk. Fourteen of her short videos will be on view in the MFA’s lower rotunda in "Suara Welitoff: 2002 Maud Morgan Prize Winner," which opens November 21. Also at the MFA, contemporary photographer Adam Fuss — who’s known for his almost Victorian images of dead rabbits and ghostly birds — will speak about his poetic current exhibition (it’s up through January 12) with MFA contemporary curator Cheryl Brutvan. That’ll be this Wednesday, November 13, at 7 p.m. in Remis Auditorium.
Another speaker you shouldn’t miss is Trevor Fairbrother, the former curator of contemporary art at the MFA. Fairbrother is currently a Luce Visiting Scholar at Brandeis, and he’s curated the Rose Art Museum’s current "Skin to Bones" (up through November 24), a look at painting since the 1970s that focuses on works in Brandeis’s collection. The show is fabulous and unexpected — what’s the last time you looked seriously at an Audrey Flack painting? — and the lecture that Fairbrother will give on Wednesday November 20 at 7 p.m. promises to visit our recent past with humor and funk.
Or you’re looking to get a little more down and dirty? The Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts is opening an intriguing new show, "Rest Room: Privacy & Consciousness," next Friday, November 15. Curated by the BCA’s Rebecca Tasker, this group exhibition showcases 24 artists whose artworks use the metaphor of the bathroom to explore human experience, following in a long and worthy tradition that runs at least from Marcel Duchamp up through Mike Kelley.
"Suara Welitoff: 2002 Maud Morgan Prize Winner" is at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, from November 2 through December 15. "A Conversation with Adam Fuss" takes place November 13 at 7 p.m. in the MFA’s Remis Auditorium. This talk is free; call (617) 267-9300. Trevor Fairbrother speaks at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, 415 South Street in Waltham, November 20 at 7 p.m. This one is also free; call (781) 736-3434. "Rest Room: Privacy & Consciousness" will be up at the Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street in the South End, from November 15 through December 31. Call (617) 426-5000.
