See It All's Spring 2014 Preview

Well, it has been a great pleasure and privilege to see such a wonderful group of exhibitions this fall. My personal favorites would have to be the ICA Boston's Amy Sillman: one lump or two and MIT Museum's 5000 Moving Parts, with WAM's [remastered] close behind. The spring of 2014 has some exciting and varied offerings for See It All. Exhibitions featuring painting, installation, textiles, drawings and rare books and manuscripts will all be opening in and around the Hub.

The Shows

Fans of quilts and textiles can continue their exposure to amazing work started at New England Quilt Museum's The Roots of Modern Quilting by attending their follow-up show Quilting Japan, opening in mid-January.  Then, in April, the MFA mounts Quilts and Color: The Pilgrim/Roy Collection which should present a diverse and masterful array of examples of the quilting art.

Two very interesting examinations of the act and meaning of collecting can be seen by visiting the Currier Museum's collaboration with Andrew Witkin, Exploring the Currier Inside and Out: Andrew Witkin, Among Others. This meditation on collecting and collections can be followed up in April with the Boston Athenaeum's second installment of their Collecting for a New Century, featuring rare books and manuscripts (a personal favorite of VO.)


Another favorite medium of VO is drawing, which will be the subject of a show opening at the Portland Museum of Art in late January. Fine Lines: American Drawings from the Brooklyn Museum, will give New England audiences a rare chance to view these delicate works.

The ICA Boston will provide a dramatic shift from their Amy Sillman show by turning their West Galleries over to unique installation and sound artist Nick Cave, an exhibition that's bound to dazzle.

A deep and stimulating glimpse into a painter's love of place will be featured in the Addison Gallery of American Art's An American in London: Whistler and the Thames. The examination of an artist's treatment of a paricular subject is also the theme of VO's most anticipated show of the spring, PEM's Turner and the Sea opening in May. This show features representations of the sea in the work of England's renowned 19th century painter J.M.W. Turner.

See It All's Most Anticipated Show of Early-2014

PEM/Turner and the Sea opening in May

Enthusiasts for all things nautical can sate their appetite further at the MIT Museum's The Herreshoff Legacy about America's most famous yacht designer (and MIT's own,) Nathaniel G. Herreshoff.

Another show that I am anticipating eagerly is Knights! at the Worcester Art Museum, opening in March. This will be the lead-off public event in the integration of the beloved Higgins Armory Collection into WAM's galleries, collections and programs.  I am fascinated to see how the absorption of the Higgins collection by WAM will play out.  The loss of the Higgins Museum from the Boston-area community of museums is a sad event and I applaud WAM's dedication to making the processing of this collection fairly transparent.  More information on this can be found here.

See It Before It Closes

Closing Dec. 31, Higgins Armory Museum

Closing Jan. 5, ICA Boston/Amy Sillman

Closing Jan. 20, MFA/John Singer Sargent Watercolors

Closing Jan. 20, Gardner Museum/Inscrutable Eye

Closing Feb. 15, Boston Athenaeum/Collecting for a New Century: Painting and Sculpture

Closing Feb. 17, PEM/Impressionists on the Water

Closing March 23, Concord Museum/The Best Workman in the Shop

Closing March 30, MIT Museum/Stanley Greenberg: Time Machines

Spring Preview Links:

• Jan 11, Currier Museum/Exploring the Currier Inside and Out: Andrew Witkin, Among Others http://www.portlandmuseum.org/Content/8141.shtml
• Jan 16, New England Quilt Museum/Quilt Japan  http://www.nequiltmuseum.org/upcoming-exhibitions.html
• Jan 30, Portland Museum of Art/Fine Lines  http://www.portlandmuseum.org/Content/8141.shtml
• Feb 1, Addison Gallery of American Art/An American in London: Whistler and the Thames http://www.andover.edu/Museums/Addison/Exhibitions/WhistlerThames/Pages/default.aspx
• Feb 5, ICA Boston/ Nick Cave http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/nick-cave/
• March, WAM/Knights! http://www.worcesterart.org/Director/higgins-collection/
• April 6, MFA/Quilts and Color http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/quilts-and-color
• April, Boston Athenaeum/Collecting for a New Century  http://www.bostonathenaeum.org/node/153
• Spring, MIT Museum/The Herreshoff Legacy  http://herreshoff-legacy.mit.edu/

Most looking forward to:

• May 31, PEM/Turner & the Sea http://www.pem.org/exhibitions/163-turner_the_sea

ICA Boston/Amy Sillman: one lump or two

Amy Sillman, Unearth, 2003, detail

Link to the Exhibition Website: http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/AmySillman/

Curator: Helen Molesworth, Barbara Lee Chief Curator

The PR Buzz: "Through her dramatic shifts in style, sophisticated writings, and her role a the head of the painting program at Bard College's prestigious MFA program, she has proven that the basic building blocks of 20th-century painting are as relevant as ever."

You can read Sebastian Smee's laudatory and vocabulary-building review of the show here:

Recommended For: an art-induced rejuvenation on a gloomy winter's day.

The Experience:
I got to the ICA as the doors opened and made my way up to the fourth floor galleries. Sillman was not a painter I was very familiar with, so I was not really sure what I would be walking into. In the opening gallery, however, I was greeted by the compassionate and very human community of the Williamsburg Portraits (1991-92), disarmingly affixed to the gallery wall with push pins. Also in this gallery hung the killingly- and cuttingly funny Seating Chart (2006). Here was an artist, then, with a powerful connection with the messy, personal and embarrassingly honest trials of the human condition.

This unabashed, intimate voice carried through the rest of the exhibition, through grand-scale canvasses and ephemeral sketch work alike. In an introductory video on the ICA's website, Sillman describes her "devotion to a procedure of transformation."  The effort behind that devotion is evident in every clearly-defined brushstroke of her work. I came out of the show refreshingly validated for all my own foibles and neurotic idiosyncrasies- a rare accomplishment for an art exhibition.

A few works glowed in my mind after I left the show. Among them the regal Regarding Saturna (2003), the fearless series Shape that Stands Up and Listens (2012), the provocative juxtaposition of Sillman's "memory paintings" of romantic couples she was acquainted with and the abstract works those paintings engendered, and the pairing of the painting #841 with the digital print #841 that probes the very essence of painting.

Regarding Saturna, (2003)

The installation is what I'd call Contemporary Traditional- voluminous white boxes hung sparsely with work. The choice is  appropriate for much of Sillman's bold and vibrant work.  The labels are  discrete and low- to the point that I found them something of a challenge to read. One wall-sized installation of 30 drawings was somewhat compromised by the reflections of the walls and lights on the glazing in the frames. I understood from one of the gallery attendants that the glazing was stipulated in the loan of the works from the Brooklyn Museum and it is, in my opinion, a real shame that the drawings could not be allowed to "breathe." The sequence of Sillman's works through the show is loosely chronological.

After exiting the show and contemplating for a moment, I turned around and went through the show again from back to front, starting with the raw and insistent Draft of a Voice Over for Split Screen Video Loop (2012), and finishing with the camaraderie of the Williamsburg Portraits. And do you know what? I found the sequence of works even more satisfying in that direction! If you go through a chronological show backwards, does it become a show about memory?

While You’re There: See the soul-scouring LaToya Ruby Frazier: Witness, curated by Dean Daderko, Curator of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and introduced by Anna Stothart, ICA Boston Curatorial Associate