Highlights
It’s the end of 2024 and a new year is upon us. As we go into the holiday season to celebrate, reflect, and make resolutions for a new year, let’s also remember to take time to see all the amazing art on view. In Boston, there are several knockout shows to catch while you’re out and about. Whether you’re gathering with friends or going to your favorite gallery’s holiday party, you’ll be spending time with family – chosen and inherited – to feel centered, grounded, and a sense of belonging. Family can be wondrously complicated and beautifully complex in its array of characters.
Support Art Spiel! Your tax-deductible contribution to the 2024 Art Spiel Fall Fundraising campaign ensures that we continue to give artists a voice and bring you the art coverage you love. Make your tax-deductible donation today and help Art Spiel continue to thrive.
The 19th-century painter Edouard Manet had such a family, and his circle of intimates is the subject of an excellent show at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Likewise, the family of OG graffiti artists that pioneered the Boston street art scene are assembled together at ShowUp gallery. And the unusual relationship between Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts. Here’s a closer look at these highlights.
Manet: A Model Family at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
@gardnermuseum
On view through: January 20, 2025
Featuring: Edouard Manet
This exhibition focuses on Manet’s immediate family, who made regular appearances in his work. It’s a fascinating glimpse into Manet’s relatives and how they factored into his success as an artist during his lifetime and after his death. There’s his doting mother and philandering father, his wife, who used to be the family piano teacher, and her son, who may or may not be the child of Manet’s father. I would argue that Manet’s family was much bigger than what is portrayed in this exhibition and includes fellow painters, muses, collectors, and dealers. Missing from Manet’s “family” is any mention (or image) of his favorite model, Victorine Meurent, who is featured prominently in his most groundbreaking paintings. I can’t think of Manet without thinking of Victorine. I also think of the painter Berthe Morisot, who was his sister-in-law and perhaps a former lover. Morisot is included in the exhibition, which accentuates the curatorial decision to make the examination of Manet’s family literal. Regardless, the exhibition will make you think about your own family, legacy, and how the art in your life will carry on, with its own life, long after you’re gone.
AEROSOL: Boston’s Graffiti DNA, its Origin and Evolution at ShowUp Gallery
@showup.inc
On view through: February 16, 2025
Featuring: Timmy “Zone” Allen, Thomas “Kwest” Burns, Barrington “Vex” Edwards, Ricardo “Deme5” Gomez, Shea Justice, Chepe “Sane” Leña, Rob Stull and David “DS7” Taylor. With archival photography by John Brewer.
This historical examination of a group of Boston graffiti artists highlights an often overlooked yet integral part of the Boston art scene. The exhibition was curated by journalist Jennifer Mancuso and featured nine artists who got their start tagging and painting burners on trains and buildings in the 1980s. Their styles were distinct, each showcasing a unique signature, yet they all contributed to enhancing Boston’s cityscape and enriching its cultural fabric. One of the artists in the show is photographer John Brewer, who was in the right place at the right time. Graffiti art runs the risk of being ephemeral, painted over the minute it’s put up.
Brewer documented works too large for a gallery and in jeopardy of disappearing, as well as the writers themselves deep in the process. Ricardo “Deme5” Gomez’s “Elevated” is a beautiful diptych of the elevated orange line train, almost pristine in its cleanliness, like a fresh blank canvas awaiting paint. Thomas “Kwest” Burns paints figures posing in front of burners and tagging city walls in a cartoonish style that looks playful and cool. And Barrington “Vex” Edwards’ marionette puppet of a graffiti writer is a wonderful compliment to his digital portraits. The puppet is part of a room-size installation devoted to video footage, street signs, and walls tagged with spraypaint. Visitors are invited to occupy the space, which looks like a cross between a nightclub back room and an artist’s sanctuary. If you’re a writer, you can add your tag, but you better make it good. These walls are no joke.
Subscribe to the Art Spiel Weekly Newsletter. It Matters to us!
SUBSCRIBE HERE
Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
@mfaboston
On view through: January 20, 2025
Featuring: Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore
A sculptor and a painter walk into a bar…
The current exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore seems like an odd pairing at first, but once you enter the exhibit, you immediately understand why the curators put on this show. Each gallery is organized to make contrasts and compliments between Moore’s hefty shapes and O’Keeffe’s light. The glow in one gallery made me squint before I realized it was only paint. There’s even an intimate look at both artists’ creative spaces through reproductions of their studios that imitate the kind of space and light they were working with. Every angle offers fresh juxtapositions between the works, and you often get a glimpse of an O’Keeffe painting through a Moore sculpture. Masculine and feminine sensibilities fluctuate and swap roles, harmonize, and become non-gendered. It’s a sexy show.
All photos courtesy of Andrew Fish unless otherwise credited.
Make your tax-deductible donation today and help Art Spiel continue to thrive. DONATE
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