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I know what girls like
Girl culture, boys’ life, and Andy Warhol at Boston museums
BY RANDI HOPKINS


Women on the town, boys being boys, artists portraying artists, and the cotton-candy world of dreams and sentimentality give Boston-area museumgoers a lot to look at in 2005, as group shows rule and our own cultural legacy (our cars, our chairs, our celebrities) continues to prove endlessly fascinating — visually and intellectually — in the hands of artists in all media. World travel, recent history, and the architectural fantasies of the rich also inspire new exhibitions in the New Year.

Gender issues have fueled some truly provocative art in recent decades, and the hot topic seems to grow only more so as we move from Shere Hite and Carolee Schneeman to Mean Girls and Lisa Yuskavage. "Girls’ Night Out" at the Addison Gallery of American Art (180 Main Street at Phillips Academy in Andover, January 22–April 3) is a confident, hair-flipping take on the gentle sex, featuring photography and video by 10 international artists including Rineke Dijkstra and Katy Grannan, whose forthright photographic portraits of contemporary women get to our inner lives through our external lives — our skins, our couches — in a way that is almost uncomfortably intimate. Also potentially uncomfortable — but in a good way — "Alexis Rockman: Manifest Destiny" comes to the Addison March 12–June 5, with a sprawling mural depicting the mad scientist/painter’s apocalyptic vision of downtown Brooklyn in the year 5000.

The topic of growing up female is also under scrutiny in "Lauren Greenfield: Girl Culture," "Barbara Zucker: Time Signatures," and "Alex McQuilkin: Get Your Gun Up and Teenage Daydream" at Tufts University Art Gallery (40R Talbot Avenue in Medford, February 10–March 27). Greenfield’s photographs examine how girls today express their identities, insecurities, and ambitions through their bodies. Zucker’s seemingly abstract sculptures are actually based on wrinkles in women’s faces. And McQuilkin imports such hackneyed but lovable genres as the spaghetti Western and the music video into her video investigations of contemporary female protagonists; the press release for "Get Your Gun Up" promises a psychological showdown borrowed from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, replacing guns with sexuality. Let’s hope the music’s as good!

The dancer, choreographer, performer, filmmaker, writer, and all-around pioneering avant-garde personage Yvonne Rainer is the subject of "Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002" at Harvard’s Carpenter Center (24 Quincy Street in Harvard Square, March 18–April 22). A founding member of the influential Judson Dance Theater in 1962, Rainer has made experimental films on fraught political and social issues that reveal avenues of exploration for batches of subsequent artists; you can re-examine the real deal in this critical retrospective. Cairo-born artist Ghada Amer picks up an embroidery hoop rather than a camera to make her political points: her installation "Ghada Amer" in the lobby of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College (106 Central Street in Wellesley, March 9–June 19) features wallpaper and tableware focusing on definitions of terror and terrorism found in English, French, and Arabic dictionaries from the 1700s to the present.

Snakes and snails, etc., are the focus of "Boys Life" at Evos Arts (98 Middle Street in Lowell, February 14–March 16). Curated by Denise Markonish, and featuring work by seven guy-artists, the show looks at stereotypically male activities, like fishing and war, with humor and bite. And two boyishly charming shows come to the Museum of Fine Arts (465 Huntington Avenue in Boston) in ’05: namely, "Damien Hirst" (January 24–April 24) and "Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection" (March 6–July 3). British sensation Hirst is notorious for his prescient, edgy curatorial abilities as well as for sculptures that could be on the run from a natural-history museum or a pharmaceutical lab: a 12-foot tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde, for example, or medicine cabinets with dozens upon dozens of apothecary bottles. The MFA show promises eight works that span Hirst’s career, including a 2004 piece featuring live butterflies. Not-so-bad boy Ralph Lauren must have exquisite taste, wouldn’t ya’ guess? Sixteen of the fabulous cars he’s collected, by such fine automakers as Bentley, Bugatti, and Ferrari, will be on view at the MFA as examples of innovative design and sculptural form (and excessive testosterone?).

American cultural identity forms the roots of "Brad Kahlhamer: Let’s Walk West" at Mass College of Art’s Bakalar Gallery (621 Huntington Avenue in Boston, February 10–March 23), an exhibition of recent work by this renowned Arizona-born, New York–based artist and musician. Kahlhamer’s work draws on his Native American heritage, recent treks into the desert, and visits with Native American rock musicians in the Phoenix area. Also at Mass Art, "Outpost" (January 26–March 19) looks at constructed utopias along the lines of American transcendentalism and ’60s counter-cultural experiments — a rich, proud, and admittedly kind of odd tradition around here.

The faces and figures of most contemporary artists are not well known outside the small circle of the art world, and when artists make images of other artists, the portraits they create are necessarily multilayered, revealing artistic lineages, social dynamics, and collaborative aspects as well as physical resemblance. In "Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists" at the Institute of Contemporary Art (955 Boylston Street in Boston, January 19–May 1), the relationship between artist-portrayer and artist-portrayed becomes very much part of the subject matter in more than 50 depictions of artists by artists, including Deborah Kass’s silkscreen of Cindy Sherman as Liza Minelli (by way of Andy Warhol). Also at the ICA during this time, "Momentum 3: Kanishka Raja" presents large-scale paintings of interior spaces crammed with disorienting convergences of texture, pattern, perspective, and objects, all created specifically for the ICA, and referencing the idiosyncratic space itself. Of course, the whole "artist as celebrity" thing can be traced to celebrity-hound Andy Warhol, himself the subject of "Andy Warhol: Intimate and Unseen" at the Fitchburg Art Museum (Merriam Parkway in Fitchburg, February 27–May 30), featuring photographs from the private collection of former Paramount Pictures exec and Warhol pal Jon Gould.

"Dreaming Now" at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (415 South Street in Waltham, January 27–April 24) presents eight mixed-media, interactive installations, each reflecting the unique cultural perspective of its creator. The show promises to raise questions about the political, social, and cultural potential of dreaming, with works such as Marina Abramovic’s Dream Bed, where visitors may enter a private space and nap for an hour, then record their dreams in a conveniently provided "Dream Book."

Pink curlicues, along with hearts, flowers, candy, and birds, are some of the sugary decorative motifs employed in "Pretty Sweet" at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (51 Sandy Pond Road in Lincoln, January 15–April 15), which brings together more than 100 artworks by 33 artists that will presumably fill the museum with sweetness and light . . . except for the works that use this appealing visual imagery to tackle such heavy subjects as domestic abuse, racial and gender oppression, consumerism, and pornography. Some artists use sentimental imagery because it makes them happy, some use it because of its nostalgic associations, and some use it with irony; this show offers much food for thought on a rich topic.

Not many of us know much about contemporary life in the Republic of Moldova (located between Romania and Ukraine), but a young artist from the region is changing that. "Pavel Braila" at MIT’s List Visual Art Center (32 Ames Street in Cambridge, February 3–April 10) presents a large-scale installation consisting of a selection of large photographs and six enormous video projections, including the video "Baron’s Hill," in which Braila records elaborate fantasy homes built by the city’s powerful, to be used purely for entertaining, often without any utilities or permanent residents. On a humbler scale, "The Paper Sculpture Show" at Art Interactive (130 Bishop Allen Drive in Cambridge, February 18–March 27) lets you bend it (or rip it or crumple it) like Beckham, inviting gallery visitors to create sculpture following instructions designed by 29 artists, including E.V. Day, Rachel Harrison, Glenn Ligon, and Fred Tomaselli. More designing artists appear in "Strategic Design" at the fledgling GASP (362 Boylston Street in Boston, February 11–28) in a group show curated by the always-thought-provoking Micah Malone.

Or just relax and imagine taking a seat at "Chairs" at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (280 the Fenway in Boston, February 11–May 8), where Indian photographer Dayanita Singh’s contemporary "chair portraits" will be shown with — and projected onto — historic chairs from the Gardner’s permanent collection. For armchair travelers, "Island Thresholds: Contemporary Art from the Caribbean" at the Peabody Essex Museum (East India Square in Salem, February 19–June 5) presents the work of four artists, each of whom takes a very different look at the role of the sea in the region’s cultural identity. n

 


Issue Date: December 31, 2004 - January 6, 2005
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