Highlights
Spring has sprung and many beautiful exhibitions are in full bloom across the city of Boston. Several exhibitions celebrating fiber art are on view along with multiple shows that highlight the season of rebirth. One of my favorite things about Spring in New England is seeing the trees awake from their dormancy and plants sprouting from the earth. The area thaws out and inspires a creative push toward summer. This means a lot of play, or spiel, for artists who experiment with unconventional materials and new media. This is wonderfully evident in the work on view this month as artists and galleries display playful and profound creations for a new season. Here’s some Art Spiel for you.
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Interwoven Narratives at TAG
@tagtheartgallery
On view through: April 27, 2025
Featuring: Aleksandra Azbel, Bayda Asbridge, Beverly Sky, Cindy Kennelly, Deidre Scherer, Elizabeth Stubbs, Emma Maclean, Francine Zaslow, Francoise McAree, Gail Skudera, Hadis Karami, Heather Schulte, Hilde-Kari Guttormsen, Jamie Scherzer, Jenn Levatino, Jo-Ann Morgan, Jodi Colella, June Krinsky-Rudder, Kimberley Harding, Kristina Goranso, Lisa Penny, Lu Heintz, Maritza Caneca, Mark Heffley, Martha Heller, Megan Chiango, Merrill Comeau, Mia Rodriguez, Mihoko Wakabayashi, Nirmal Raja, Olivia Hochstadt, Priscilla Carrion, Rebecca McGee Tuck, Sally Jacobson, Savneet Talwar, Sonja Czekalski, Sri Thumati, Stephanie Wenzel, Tori Hong, Uyen Thai Ngo, Xiang Li.
Multiple exhibitions and events launched this month to showcase the genre of Fiber Art; A loose term that covers a huge range of artworks that are 2D, sculptural, and installation-based. Multiple galleries participated in the initiative under the umbrella title of “Gather: A month-long exploration and celebration of fiber and textile art in Greater Boston” It kicked off with a symposium at Arts Collaborative Medford, and stretched across the city into neighboring towns as far as Braintree, where artist Destiny Palmer curated a gorgeous collection of work at Thayer Academy. It’s hard to encapsulate the richness and variety of the initiative in this brief highlight, so I will just strongly recommend that you catch as much of it as you can while there’s still time.
A good place to start is TAG in the SoWA district of Boston. TAG (The Art Gallery) has two large galleries full of brilliant artworks. The craftsmanship, concept, and poignancy of the work are exceptional. One of the galleries is dedicated to artists associated with the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where fiber art has blossomed in recent years. It’s a reminder that materiality can create its own narrative while being in service to an underlying story. Fiber and textiles hold their own history, like paint, and are imbued with cultural, societal, and political assumptions and characteristics that are universal and personal. It activates the creative mind on a different level and enriches the experience of looking. Go feast your eyes.
Beach Painting at Gallery NAGA
@gallerynaga
On view through: April 26, 2025
Featuring: Julia Von Metzsch
A wonderful reminder that summer is on its way, Beach Painting brings a beautiful collection of seascapes and the natural world. Von Metzsch is known for her bright colors and maximalist brushwork, creating atmospheres out of texture and finding a picturesque harmony in the chaos of detail. Like staring at the sea, the paintings reward longer meditation. Von Metzsch seems to find every color of the light spectrum visible to the human eye across the landscape. She works on-site in the tradition of plein air and exercises the tried-and-true illusion of impressionistic abstraction; From a distance, the landscapes beam with light and serenity.
Up-close, the material of paint is celebrated with the zeal of an artist in love with her medium. In making the work, Von Metzsch had to contend with the ever-changing light, cloud-cover, and movement of the water. Because of this, the paintings are more of a record of an experience than a rendering of a place. The paintings rock on a fulcrum between natural and unnatural representation. They’re beautiful pictures and brilliant paintings.
Spring at Alpha Gallery
@alphagallerybos
On view through: April 26, 2025
Featuring: Jill Grimes
Jill Grimes works in the tradition of floral still life painting. It’s a rich and storied tradition that is as old as oil paint itself. Grimes sets up her subject matter and works from observation. Many of the floral arrangements challenge the idea of what is seasonal. They’re also painted with a palette that disregards the flowers’ original, natural colors and instead plays with color theory. Grimes finds rhythms and harmonies in her color choices and builds images that appear graphic and technical. I was struck by the vibrations of hues, which are not easy to experience in reproduction, but allow the eye to dance across the surface, noticing value shifts and after-effects of their chroma. Silhouettes, outlines, and shadows of flowers stack behind and against the more rendered flowers in the bouquet.
The combination of simplified drawing and more fully-rendered illustrations in monochrome gives the paintings a technical, almost pop-art feel. It’s a combination of drawing and flat color that charges these paintings. They look eternal, like dried flowers do. Grimes is also into the symbolism of flowers in culture and how they range from signifying spirituality, wealth, rebirth, peace, and purity, while also symbolizing impermanence and change.
Selfhood at Danforth
@danforthartframingham
On view through: June 8, 2025
Featuring: Alice Dillon, Scott Foster, Kathryn Geismar, Lisa Tang Liu, and Keith Morris Washington
Selfhood is a show about identity. Each artist investigates ideas about personal identity and the historical, political, and societal complexities therein. Keith Morris Washington uses portraiture in combination with iconography to share stories about his family in a racialized society. His paintings vibrate with brushwork that interchange passages of multichromatic squiggles and flat color. The effect is that of a buzzy memory. Alice Dillon works with fabric and draws line, and text, with thread. The work is meticulous and masterful. Her imagery focuses on Queer identity and celebration. In one piece, she has created a grid of carabiners; a symbolic and humorous nod to Lesbians. Kathryn Geismar makes portraits of her relationship with her trans child, looking at femininity and familial ties. She uses the semi-transparent quality of Duralar to superimpose images of herself and her daughter.
The psychological implications are apt. Scott Foster’s beautifully photographed and richly colored portraits of Native Americans look both celebratory and rebellious. One literally shows two women flipping off the viewer; a sentiment we can all relate to these days. And Lisa Tang Liu creates wonderfully detailed artworks that use printmaking, photography, and collaged materials to address her Chinese heritage, her birth name vs Anglocised name, and her own sense of visibility in the world. One of the things I love about a show like Selfhood is that it’s on view for a long time, giving viewers the chance to catch this wonderful show, or go back for a second viewing. There’s a lot to see. … and feel.
All photos courtesy of Andrew Fish unless otherwise credited.
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About the writer: Andrew Fish is a Boston-based artist and educator. He studied at the School of Visual Arts in NYC and received his MFA from Goddard College in VT. His work has been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions in the US and abroad. Fish teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA. @Andrew_Fish_Studio