E-Mail This Article to a Friend Strong stuff Samson Projects opens in the South End BY RANDI HOPKINS

A little postcard humbly announcing the opening of the inaugural exhibition "SuperSalon" at Samson Projects (and identifying the venue as "Boston’s newest contemporary art space") created a big buzz in the South End earlier this spring. Turns out that Samson Projects founders Camilo Alvarez and Alexandra Cherubini, who moved here from New York last September, are a seriously art-grounded and business-minded pair, with innovative ideas and an inclusive philosophy about who they want to show, what they want to show, and how they want to show it.

Sitting in their cheerful quarters on the second floor of the South End’s hip 46 Waltham Street building (a maze-like warren of design firms, artists’ studios, and other creative commercial enterprises), Alvarez and Cherubini talk a bit about what brought them to the neighborhood. "Alexandra is from here, I’m from New York," Alvarez explains, "and we met four years ago, when I was working at Exit Art [an experimental, non-profit art space in New York]." The two had been commuting between the two cities for Cherubini’s business — she runs EquiFit, a Dedham-based company that designs and manufactures products for performance horses and riders — and they got tired of going back and forth. The horse thing may sound incongruous, but in fact, more than Cherubini’s sharp business sense has been honed in the course of running her horsy outfit, as I found out when the two started a spirited debate (obviously long-running) about the similarities and differences between the worlds of performance horses and the visual arts. "Both horses and artworks can be seen as commodities available to only a certain few," Cherubini points out. "But a horse doesn’t make me think," counters Alvarez. "It may be a beautiful horse, but that’s it."

Of the two, Alvarez has the artsier background. He studied art history at Skidmore, interned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was offered a paid position at the Met after graduation, as well as an unpaid one at Exit Art. "Of course I chose Exit Art," he says. "It was so much more my pace." After he’d spent three years as gallery manager there, Alvarez and Cherubini began to investigate their own curatorial talents, including building a huge screen on the roof of their 3000-square-foot loft in Brooklyn so they could show films. "Camilo’s obsessed with video," says Cherubini admiringly. "Now, he’s putting together a series of performative video, by artists like William Wegman, Vito Acconci, Carolee Schneeman, and so on, and is interested in showing them." "I think there’s room for us here," Alvarez adds.

Their newly opened second show, "An Accumulation of Convention: En Masse," is on view through July 30, and it brings together 14 artists who share a connection (birth, in most cases) to Massachusetts. "That means you have artists like Matt Rich, who just got his MFA from the Art Institute in Chicago, showing alongside James McNeill Whistler, which leads to a converging of different audiences," says Alvarez with a grin.

Samson Projects gets its name in part from gallery mascot Samson (a/k/a "Alexandra’s dog"), in part because Alvarez was born during the infamous Summer of Sam (that’s 1977, for those of you who didn’t live through it that year in New York City or see the Spike Lee movie), and in part because Alvarez, as he puts it, "loves hair," and liked the reference to Biblical lovers Samson and Delilah. His own personable dreadlocks don’t appear to be in any danger from Cherubini; the balance of power here is fairly shared between the two youthful art entrepreneurs, and that bodes well for the strength of Boston’s art scene.

"An Accumulation of Convention: En Masse" is at Samson Projects, 46 Waltham Street, Suite 203, in the South End, through July 30. Call (617) 357-7177 or visit samsonprojects.com.