Highlights
There are many excellent art exhibitions to visit in and around Boston this summer. Museums and galleries have created an abundance of programming that’s playful and profound. Dance parties, concerts, salons, and festivals supplement what’s on view, making summertime feel even more celebratory for the arts community. A visit to the Cape and Islands is a must for a reprieve from the heat, but also a great place to see brilliantly curated shows and satellite exhibitions. Within the city you’ll find most galleries foregoing their beach time to maintain regular hours and offering a rich selection of dynamic shows. Here are some highlights.
Firelei Báez at The Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston @icaboston
On view through: September 2, 2024
Featuring: Firelei Báez
Boston’s premier contemporary art museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, hosts the first North American survey dedicated to the exceptional work of Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Dominican Republic). The show will travel to Vancouver and Des Moines in 2024 and 2025. This sprawling exhibition showcases some of Báez’s best work, including paintings, drawings, and two installations reminiscent of her immersive site-specific installation from 2021 at the spacious Watershed annex across the channel in East Boston. Báez’s work is both figurative and abstract. Her materials are masterfully employed to create an aesthetic that looks illustrative and expressive. In some paintings, she uses inkjet print on canvas to create a graphic image of blown-up maps and illustrations that were made during the colonial rule of the Americas. She then paints over the graphic print with her stylized imagery, offering a critique of Caribbean and Atlantic basin history and recontextualizing both images. The effect is alluring and poignant. The paintings are stunning.
La Toilette at LaiSun Keane gallery @laisun_keane
On view through: August 25, 2024
Featuring: Isabella Higgins, Jenny Olsen, Kyra Gregory, and Salome Rigvava
Across town in Boston’s vibrant SoWA arts district, check out a wonderful painting group show at LaiSun Keane Gallery referencing the classical subject matter of women bathing, washing, and grooming. The implications of art history’s hegemonic stance on femininity, intimacy, and the male gaze are all on view. The exceptional work of Jenny Olsen takes it a step further by doubling the references of art history – painting portraits of women inspired by Japanese Edo prints of the 17th and 19th centuries by using an “Impressionistic” style – to acknowledge the popularity of Edo prints among European artists in the 19th century.
A Roll of the Dice at Bromfield Gallery @bromfieldgallery
On view through: July 28, 2024
Featuring: Susan Morrison-Dyke
Also in SoWA is an excellent solo show of Susan Morrison-Dyke’s paintings at Bromfield Gallery. Morrison-Dyke’s paintings (all from 2023 / 2024) are buoyant in their color and form. They are at once joyous and dark. Using the language of geometric abstraction and allowing the materiality of paint to play a central role in the work’s surface, titles like Coney Island Park and Queen’s Mate hint at something more subversive. At close inspection, the use of collage is visible, creating a pentimenti of information that invites the viewer to consider its meaning. The mood of Morrison-Dyke’s paintings is brilliantly orchestrated through the use of color theory, art history, and an intuition about rewarding the eye.
Shaping Fragments at Praise Shadows Gallery @praise.shadows.art
On view through: August 10th, 2024
Featuring: Chloe Alexander, Polly Apfelbaum, Jeffrey Gibson, Yaron Michael Hakim, Crystalle Lacouture, Louise Nevelson, Yuri Shimojo, Frank Stella, and Yu-Wen Wu.
Praise Shadows Gallery in Brookline never ceases to amaze viewers, and their current group show of prints and multiples is no exception. Visitors will encounter young contemporary artists alongside old masters. A print by the late Frank Stella, complete in its 1980 plexiglass box frame, has reached the secondary market in this show, alongside a gorgeous Louise Nevelson multiple that seduces the eye in its black monochrome. Other standouts include works by living artists Polly Apfelbaum, Crystalle Lacouture, and Yu-Wen Wu, whose prints revel in a dynamic – and mostly harmonious – conversation with the oldies. “Shaping Fragments” is beautifully curated and a pleasure to peruse.
All photos courtesy of Andrew Fish.
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