'Big Bang!' at the DeCordova, 'Classified Documents' at Harvard, 'Trans am' at the New Art Center
By RANDI HOPKINS | January 9, 2007
Sarah Walker, Descending Order #2 |
“Abstract painting” is a broad historical category that takes in everything from the utopian spiritual and formal purity of the early decades of the 20th century (when forward-thinking artists decided to leave it to the camera to depict the physical world) to the macho of the purely visual as championed by Clement Greenberg later in that century. But as the 21st century gets under way, a new strain of “non-representational” painting draws vitality and purpose from its relationship to the world around it. Curated by Nick Capasso, “BIG BANG! ABSTRACT PAINTING FOR THE 21ST CENTURY” opens at the DeCordova Museum on January 20 with 15 painters whose work finds its structures and patterns in the complex world of science and technology, informed by the likes of cosmology, quantum physics, and neurology. Thaddeus Beal’s intricately patterned paintings reflect the struggle between chaos and order that we face on scales ranging from the cellular to the planetary. Sean Foley employs formal as well as psychological means to explore teetering multi-dimensionality. And Sarah Walker describes her mesmerizing paintings as “visualizing the reality of our existence being in many spaces at once.”Documentary photography was an innovative and powerful tool for social progress a century ago, when Harvard University’s then-new Department of Social Ethics established its Social Museum to promote a comparative study of societal conditions and institutions in America and abroad. “CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS: THE SOCIAL MUSEUM OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 1903–1931” opens at Harvard’s Sackler Museum on January 20 with more than 100 of the Social Museum’s original exhibition boards, including photographs and graphical illustrations. This collection, which was meticulously divided into categories (“Crime,” “Defectives,” “Races,” “War”), offers images, by professionals and amateurs, of such scenes as a table full of white-capped women workers in the H.J. Heinz Company’s Pickle Bottling Department.
Modern, media-saturated life is the subject uniting work by painters Jason Chase, Will DiBello, and Scott Listfield in “TRANS AM,” which opens at the New Art Center in Newton on January 18. All three are influenced by visions of an increasingly corporate and commercial America; the aspects of contemporary society their canvases explore include Internet pop-ups, graphic detritus culled from “logo spare parts” (advertising letters and words come loose from their original context), and images of a lone astronaut caught in a futuristic landscape that features both UFOs and Starbucks.
“Big Bang!” at DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln | January 20–April 22 | 781.259.8355 | “Classified Documents” at Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway, Cambridge | January 20–April 22 | 617.495.9400 | “Trans Am” at New Art Center in Newton, 61 Washington Park, Newtonville | January 18–March 4 | 617.964.3424
On the Web
Decordove Museum: www.infoatdecordova.org
Sackler Museum: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu
New Art Center: www.newartcenter.org
Related:
Return to the edge of the world, Whitewash, Dam cute, More 
- Return to the edge of the world
Photography and new media loom large on the horizon in 2007, with cameras pointed in every direction.
- Whitewash
“Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture in Classical Antiquity” presents striking evidence that the white marbles were once painted in bold Technicolor.
- Dam cute
There has been a great wave of Cute in Japanese contemporary art in recent years — colorful nodding mushrooms and balloons from Takashi Murakami, big-headed kiddies and doggies from Yoshitomo Nara, and Dark Cute in the form of movies like Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away .
- Art beef
Bostonians are plenty familiar with the collaborative video works of choreographer Ann Carlson and video-installation artist Mary Ellen Strom, but the DeCordova is the site of their first major museum show.
- People get ready
Fourteen New England artists/artist teams hook up to produce a variety of interconnecting installations.
- The devil in the details
It’s hard to imagine stopping to look at drawings that don’t coalesce till you let them pull you in and spin you around a bit.
- I am I said
Tufts University Art Gallery presents “Empire And Its Discontents,” which opens September 15 with work by 11 artists tied to previously colonized regions in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.
- Time after time
The DeCordova Annual has been going strong since 1989, indefatigably showcasing work by New England artists chosen each year for the quality of their individual work.
- Auntie Em! Auntie Em!
Those utterly disturbing flying monkeys, the little ruby-slippered feet sticking out from under the farmhouse, the freaky talking apple trees . . .
- Ah, painting!
“Big Bang! Abstract Painting for the 21st Century” rounds up 15 painters who reinvigorate abstraction by drawing inspiration and imagery from computers, stars and constellations, quantum physics, data mapping, the Internet, genetics, squiggly microscopic critters.
- Folk my brains out
Toby Kamp's 'The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes In Contemporary Art' at The Decordova Museum
- Less
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Politics, Science and Technology, Harvard University, More
, Politics, Science and Technology, Harvard University, Sciences, Espionage and Intelligence, Astronomy, Painting, Visual Arts, Cultural Institutions and Parks, Museums, Less
