Drawing is often seen as art’s most intimate process — as an activity in which ideas flow intuitively and directly from the mind’s eye onto paper, and also as a kind of halfway house where artists work out their problems in composition or perspective while on the road to more significant or more fully realized compositions. It’s only in the past century that works on paper have come to be created and collected as an end in themselves. Perhaps it’s precisely because of drawing’s long existence on art’s periphery that the form has attracted the attention of some of the most experimental artists working from the 1960s to the present — it’s even become an unexpected hotbed of innovation in contemporary art. " Visions and Revisions: Art on Paper Since 1960, " which will open April 2 at the Museum of Fine Arts, looks at the diversity of style and unconventional use of media that’s erupted in late-20th- and early-21st-century art on paper, a category that includes prints, drawings, photographs, and books. The exhibition showcases some of the museum’s recent acquisitions, with work by Jasper Johns and Gerhard Richter as well as a wide variety of artists active in New England, including Abelardo Morell and John Walker.
Organized by outstanding long-time MFA curator Cliff Ackley, " Visions and Revisions " focuses on evolutions and revolutions in recent art, which as we know has been growing in many directions at once, combining, recombining, and recycling various modern-art traditions. One section of the show highlights works on paper by sculptors; it includes a powerful paintstick work by Richard Serra, whose drawings exude the same physicality as his mammoth steel sculptures. Among the books are a volume that Conceptual/Pop/Fluxus Swiss artist Dieter Rot hand-illuminated in the centuries-old way and one that American sculptor Charles Long created with computer and inkjet.
Printed matter also matters at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education (CCAE), which occupies several historic locations around Harvard Square, including the Blacksmith House, where in 1839 the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow observed the famous village blacksmith at work under the spreading chestnut tree. Contemporary printmaker and CCAE teacher Selma Bromberg has created a group called the Blacksmith House Printmakers who’ll be showing a selection of miniature prints in CCAE’s Brattle Gallery beginning April 1. The exhibition coincides with an international conference of printmakers, the Southern Graphics Council, that’s coming to Boston in early April, and it’ll feature work that the group exhibited at the Dunderave Print Workshop in Vancouver last March as part of a cultural exchange. The theme of creating small-format work originally arose from practical necessity — the work being sent to Vancouver needed to be small enough to travel easily through the mail — but as is often the case, what began as a limitation quickly became an inspiring challenge.
" Visions and Revisions: Art on Paper Since 1960 " is at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, April 2 through September 21. For information call (617) 267-9300. " Blacksmith House Printmakers: Miniature Prints " is at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education’s Brattle Gallery, 42 Brattle Street in Harvard Square, April 1 through 13, with a reception April 11 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. For information call (617) 5476-6789.
