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

CAMPUS BEAT MIT Museum/5000 Moving Parts

John Douglas Powers, Haliades, 2012

Guest Curator: Laura Knott

The PR Buzz:  "The exhibition looks at the wide range of kinetic art being made now: from work that's concerned entirely with motion and unpredictability, to sculptures that engage with contemporary political topics, to work that brings ancient myth into contemporary life."

Recommended For: the kind of quirky inspiration you can expect from the MIT Museum

The Experience:

Less than a week since the last time, I was again hustling through chilly Central Square on my way to the MIT Museum. They must be doing something right, right?

As you turn the corner into the entrance of 5000 Moving Parts, your ears are met with the pervasive squueeeeeeeeeee! of the moving sculptures. Trust me, do not turn and walk away. Thanks to the fabulous label writing of curator Laura Knott, this sound will have a very different meaning for you by the end of the show.

The introduction rightly locates the show on a continuum from Marcel Duchamp's 1913 Bicycle Wheel and its modes of meditating and commenting on the "kinetic world of material life." The selection of works in the show eloquently demonstrate these voices of critique.

It is a good choice to begin the show with the very interactive Please Empty Your Pockets by Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmel.  This deceptively-simple illuminated conveyor belt uses a magical/mechanical form of intrusion to bond together one of the hidden spaces we all carry around with us. As Knott puts it, Lozano-Hemmer "misuses technologies of control" to relate us to each other.

A cluster of works by Anne Lilly, To Caress (which was heartbreakingly out of order), the mesmerizing Eighteen Eighteen, and To Conjugate anchor the center of the gallery. To Conjugate, with its antique fire engine fly wheels brings visitors expressively back to Duchamp's quote in the introductory text, "to see that wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of other avenues than material life of every day..."

At one end of the gallery there is a collaboration, or perhaps symbiosis might be more appropriate, between pioneer Arthur Ganson's Machine with Breath and Christina Campanella's BREATHE.  I found Campanella's soundscape of Ganson's work is worth spending some time with. Listening to the headphones as I watched Machine with Breath, the layers of mechanical rhythm expanded until they gave the impression of great physical volume and distance.  It was an uncanny sensation.

It is Knott's label writing for John Douglas Powers's seductively sinuous Haliades and deeply hypnotic Ialu that transform the dissonance of the gallery into the purposeful groan and squeal of ocean-going ships and the skirl of seabirds. Sound impossible?  Come experience it for yourself! I have to say that I have rarely experienced an exhibition in which the label text adds as much to the experience and appreciation of the objects across to board as in 5000 Moving Parts. Knott's clear and eloquent voice finds details and connections that enhance the power of the objects themselves without crowding them or coming across as overly didactic. These wonderful mini-essays are helped greatly by the placement, size and design of the labels themselves. Well done, Laura and MIT Museum!

If I have one critique of 5000 Moving Parts (other than the one sculpture that was out of order), it is that the show should have been mounted in the Epstein Innovation Gallery on the ground floor so that these works could have beckoned through the windows to the "kinetic world of material life" passing on Massachusetts Avenue.

-Vident Omnes

While You're There: See Stanley Greenberg: Time Machines reviewed by me here.

CAMPUS BEAT: MIT Museum/Stanley Greenberg Time Machines

Bubble Chamber image by Stanley Greenberg

Link to the Exhibition Website: http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/greenberg.html

The PR Buzz: "New York-based photographer Stanley Greenberg has long entranced viewers with his stunning black-and-white photographs that provide unparalleled access to objects and places ordinary prople might otherwise never see- from New York's century-old water system to the hidden infrastructure of some of the world's most impressive architectural works. In this exhibition, Greenberg turns his lens on the unfailingly strange world of nuclear and particle physics."

Recommended For: a unique cross-over of art and science.

Curator: Gary Van Zante, Curator, Architecture & Design, in collaboration with Dr. Janet Conrad, MIT Professor of Physics

The Experience:
Brrrr, it's getting chilly in the Hub! I hustled along the breezy sidewalks of Central Square to the MIT Museum on Mass Ave and made my way up the stairs to the second floor galleries.  The Kurtz Photography Galleries are tucked in the far back corner, so you have to make your way through a number of other exhibitions to get to the Greenberg show. This is hardly an imposition. I got to pass through 5,000 Moving Parts, an exhibition of kinetic sculpture, while it was under installation.  It opens Nov. 21st, and I can't wait to see it.

Time Machines is attractively installed in the Kurtz galleries. Greenberg's silver gelatin prints look just right on the walls and encompass the mind-boggling array of inscrutable geometries- from retro scifi to angularly futuristic-  involved in the engineering of subatomic inquiry.  The prints are devoid of human presence so the scale of what you are looking at is often ambiguous and requires careful study to figure out.

The photographs are accompanied by fascinating, but excruciatingly small labels. Less dedicated label readers than I will miss some of the more compelling descriptions. For example; did you know that there was a neutrino observatory at the South Pole that is installed in a cubic kilometer of clear Antarctic ice? Or that Argentinian cows once upset the observation of cosmic rays? Or that a subatomic detector at Stanford was made from steel recycled from a ship sunk at Pearl Harbor because the immersion of the metal meant that it was less radioactive than new steel produced today? Or the dizzying alphabet soup of acronyms including  LIGO, TRIUMF, IceCube, CERN, ATLAS, KEK, DESY, OPERA, MINOS, LHC, KLOE, CMS, KamLAND, CEBAF, SLAC and SNO. And then if you're a really careful reader you'll also find ZEUS, which is actually a physics joke, and a reasonably funny one at that.

You  would also miss this compelling quote from Greenberg himself about film negatives used in the observation of the results of particle collisions, "Just as most physics experiments have shifted to electronic and digital representation of particle collisions, the photographic world has largely abandoned film for digital media. The idea that the photons from particles actually touched the substrate reminds me that film has an unparalleled tactility that has never ceased to work visual- and scientific- miracles."

By now, you probably get the fact that I liked this show.

-Vident Omnes

P.S. If you ask nicely at the desk, you can get a free booklet entitled Backstories: The Physics Experiments Behind Stanley Greenberg's "Time Machines"

While You're There: I bookended my visit with stops at Central Square's Mariposa Bakery and Cafe Luna, both highly recommended!

TGC Wheel, CERN, 2006