Highlights
February is the depth of winter in Boston, but there are still many ways to stay warm, including seeing some great art that thaws the senses and pleases the soul. Several exhibitions are in full swing at various galleries, museums, and university galleries across the city. These highlights focus on a few of the university gallery shows and a gorgeous new exhibition at the MFA in Boston featuring the late John Wilson, a Boston native whose work celebrates fatherhood and the rich tapestry of Black life in Boston and beyond.
Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
@mfaboston
On view through: June 22, 2025
Featuring: John Wilson
The artist John Wilson is a local hero in Boston. He passed away in 2015 but remains as vital as ever. Originally from the predominantly-Black neighborhood of Roxbury, he created work that celebrates Black life and the importance of family and community. A new exhibition of his work, on view at the MFA in Boston, takes viewers on a journey through different time periods of Wilson’s life and work. As a young artist enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts he absorbed his lessons with the unsettling observation that there were no Black figures in the art he was exposed to, and even worse, negative stereotypes of the Black people he did see. His early work tackles this by humanizing his subjects in classical form.
As a graduate, he traveled to Paris to study with Fernand Léger, which had a profound effect on his aesthetics and themes. He also spent several years working in Mexico City, creating a powerful wall mural of a lynching. Upon returning to Boston, he dove further into themes of humanity, community, politics, and race. Wilson also illustrated several books and used a multitude of mediums in his work.
His late work includes a beloved sculpture of a large head of a Black person titled Eternal Presence (lovingly referred to as The Big Head) and a series of etchings depicting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Both projects produced phenomenal results. I’ve always been curious about the print of MLK Jr. and the expression on his face. He seems equally curious about me. His head is tilted to one side and his expression is open and gentle, yet seems to be filled with the weight of his experiences. His simplified torso lacks detail about his attire, so I ascribe it to him wearing something more casual than his signature suit and tie. This makes MLK Jr. look relaxed and at home, as if Wilson is letting us see him as a father, a husband, and a man filled with the kind of hope in humanity that he spent his life fighting for. I don’t know of many other images of MLK Jr. that have this kind of power. It’s a masterpiece. The exhibition is co-organized by the Met in NYC and should not be missed while it’s on view.
Impossible Music at Tufts Art Galleries
@tuftsartgalleries
On view through: April 20, 2025
Featuring: Terry Adkins, Black Quantum Futurism, Nikita Gale, Sarah Hennies, Tom Johnson, Christine Sun Kim, Conlon Nancarrow, Aki Onda, and C. Spencer Yeh.
After visual art, my favorite artform is undoubtedly music. I have been enamored by music my whole life and even tried my hand at being a musician for a few years. I love all forms of music, from the atmospheric melodies of gammalon to the loud and thrashy guitars of metal, it always captivates me. One genre in music that I’m perpetually bemused by is called “experimental music”. This includes the sly meanderings of free jazz and the atonal intellectualism of artists like John Cage. It can be a shock to the system if you’re not ready for it, but beautifully impactful in its effects. Compositions that seem haphazard and random are actually full of intent and meaning. Experimental music is never thoughtless. Most of it comes from an artist’s desire to play with form, sound, and performance.
When I entered the exhibition at Tufts Art Galleries I was immediately captivated by Nikita Gale’s drum kit sculptures clanking and booming to the rhythms of water pouring over their surfaces. Working my way through the exhibition, I was delighted by a multi-level stage full of bells (activated by a performance on the opening night), another Gale sculpture that included a retro synthesizer, and several works on paper of written music, both whimsical and intellectually serious. One drawing illustrated a musical staff tied in a knot, the notes barely hanging on. It’s a really fun show to see and hear.
Trasluz / Translucent at Boston University Art Galleries
@buarts
On view through: March 7, 2025
Featuring: Juan José Barboza-Gubo and Michael Zachary
Inside BU’s expansive art gallery is a two-person show that investigates translucency and opacity in subtle and overt ways. The installation is beautifully laid out, allowing both artists to intersperse and intertwine their work. It seems like an odd pairing at first, but the progression of one work to another, and the exhibition as a whole, succeeds in making its point. Both artists are using the visual experience of looking as subject matter, almost as much as the abstractions and imagery itself. Michael Zachary’s time-intensive renderings of photo-realistic images, distilled into a matrix of light-corresponding color marks, bring to mind the work of Georges Seurat and Chuck Close.
Barboza-Gubo creates opaque and semi-translucent objects that appear to be flat like a canvas but then expand away from the wall and into the gallery as sculptures. The milky surfaces of these works are enchanting to look deep into and reveal color and form that appear trapped inside as if swimming under the surface of a frozen lake. Photography doesn’t do this work any justice, as the real payoff comes from being able to move around it, observing how the effects change at different angles. Zachary’s paintings have a similar effect but with the benefit of distance and close looking. His interrogation of photography takes you through a process of dissolving and rebuilding, culminating into a chromatic distortion that transcends its original source. Luminosity stares back at you while bold colors harmonize to produce an image.
Constituent Parts at Boston University Art Galleries / 808 Gallery
@buarts
On view through: March 7, 2025
Featuring: Cathy Della Lucia and Nicholas Anthony Mancini
BU’s 808 Gallery is exhibiting a two-person show that combines paintings and sculptures in a thematic dialog about the act of looking and the scientific way in which we take in visual information. This seems apt for the two artists on view, who have been in actual dialog for many years. Cathy Della Lucia’s finely crafted sculptures are seductive to look at. Their surfaces are hand-warn and offer a wide variety of patinas. Her materials fluctuate between natural and synthetic and intertwine to make compelling and sometimes humorously playful constructions. Some of her sculptures are hung on a wall, like relief paintings, and others sit on tables, while others stand on the floor. They are generous sculptures that allow the viewer to get lost in their nuances and marvel at their form.
Nicholas Mancini’s paintings add to the dialog by offering flat planes of three-dimensional objects, like open books, in rich and subtle hues. His paintings are calm and potent the way a Morandi painting is calm and potent. They’re extremely well-painted and lure the viewer into a state of meditation and contemplation. His muted palette is full of light, which is a nice counterpoint to the heft of his material application. His surfaces have a wonderfully rich earthiness to them that treat the eye to pastel tones and carefully considered geometry. Both artists experiment with scale, creating an effect that engages not only the eye but also the physical sensation of experiencing the work. Mancini’s small book pages on large-scale canvases hang next to Della Lucia’s small combines that protrude into space, interrupting and inviting you to interact with what you’re seeing, one glimpse at a time.
All photos courtesy of Andrew Fish unless otherwise credited.
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