Highlights
In the aftermath of the Presidential election, I feel inspired to visit galleries and museums more than ever. Not only am I feeling a conviction to support these now-endangered organizations, but I am finding respite in their halls and holdings. Regardless of your political leanings, this is a tender time for artists and art institutions, as well as for the curators and Directors who organize exhibitions. Obviously, what’s on view this month was curated before Election Day, but now that we’re in a new world, all of it seems singed by the results and potently relevant for the time. Hugh Hayden’s exploration of public education reminds us that the Department of Education may be gutted, and J Rowen O’Dwyer’s portraits of Trans people show us a vulnerable population that’s now even more susceptible to the threats of an angry and fearful nation. It’s a sobering time, but one that calls for art and artists to persevere.
About Time at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston @icaboston
On view through: March 16, 2025
Featuring: Charles Atlas
The Charles Atlas retrospective at the ICA, Boston, is an indulgence for the senses. The multi-gallery survey of Atlas’ long career is full of audiovisual artworks displayed as installations. His large-scale video projections envelop the visitor and inundate them with imagery and sound from bygone eras of the 20th century. Atlas, who is no stranger to critical recognition, is enjoying another closer look. The ICA show features multiple works from Atlas’ time as a resident filmmaker with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the 1970s and 80s when he collaborated with Cunningham’s choreography to produce experimental movies. Watching some of the videos made me feel like I was back in New York City in the 1990s, seeing young people (who are now old) showing off their fashion, performing in drag, dancing to New Wave, and waxing poetic about society and politics. The kids on-screen improv and riff on a variety of topics that range from the profound to the vapid. Life is art, and art is life. Remembering the George HW Bush years, I’m struck by the cognitive dissonance of how quaint everybody sounds. The Clinton years are here too. Socially more progressive but still archaic by today’s standards. Atlas did a lot to challenge the conventions of society and celebrate queerness in and out of the art scene. I wonder if he knew how important his contributions would be decades later or how potent the work would feel in a changing political climate.
Home Work at Rose Art Museum @roseartmuseum
On view through: June 1, 2025
Featuring: Hugh Hayden
Hugh Hayden’s gorgeous and extensive exhibition at the Rose Art Museum is exceptional. The exhibition takes you through multiple galleries, all delivering brilliant works of art from the past ten years of Hayden’s career. His facility for material manipulation and craftsmanship is seductively masterful, and the objects themselves are sensational. One large site-responsive piece titled Hedges, made especially for the Rose, combines a house structure with tree branches and mirrors to immerse the viewer in a world that feels fantastic and enchanted. It’s an homage to the idea of home ownership and the fantasy of the American Dream. Hayden uses his materials to challenge perception and deliver a message.
A pair of intertwined, spiky helmets exemplify how athletic gear that’s meant to protect us also harms us. Home Work reflects Hayden’s upbringing in Texas as a young, gay Black man who had to contend with heteronormative expectations and assumptions around domesticity, sports, and education. The American Dream is a central theme in Hayden’s work, analyzing its elusive and fictional nature. Multiple sculptures of childhood school desks invite the viewer to consider how accessible education is for people of different economic classes, races, and genders.
He’s interested in how education can be used to “transform a person.” As an artist, Hayden uses his vast knowledge of tree taxonomy, woodworking techniques, and displaced objects of culture to scrutinize American history and imbue meaning and provocation within his objects. The show is poignant, relatable, and powerfully confrontational of the assumptions and expectations we might otherwise hold.
DEVOTIONS, to a dirty queer home at Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts @boscenterforarts
On view through: December 7, 2024
Featuring: J. Rowen O’Dwyer
J. Rowen O’Dwyer has created a gorgeous body of work for his solo show at Mills Gallery. The work highlights O’Dwyer’s personal life as a Queer Trans person. There are dozens of paintings in the show – an impressive amount of work – and all of it centered around the body. The viewer is situated as a witness while O’Dwyer sets his sights on friends and lovers to create an intimate autobiography that is playful and proud. The Queer body is celebrated, fetishized, and objectified in these paintings, accentuating the central role it plays in his subjects’ identity.
The artist is also reclaiming some of the archetypes and cliches of art history to remix familiar motifs with contemporary LGBTQ+ sexuality. A Trans version of Gustave Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde” strikes me as a brilliant homage. It joins Mickalene Thomas’ version of a Black vulva in upstaging the original. In formalistic terms, O’Dwyer isn’t doing anything groundbreaking as a painter but instead relies on proficiency and mastery of a familiar mode of painting: bright chroma fragmented into dark and light values. It’s showy and delicious. And it’s a wonderfully descriptive style to use as the vehicle for human vignettes.
Similar figurative painting that uses bright hues and savvy paint application can be found in the works of Jenna Gribbon, Rebecca Ness, Chelsea Gibson, and many other painters today, an apparent lineage for O’Dwyer. I love it but am familiar with and accustomed to the aesthetic. Regardless, his skills are laudable and help to create a vivid portrayal of his personal life and friendship circle. It’s a privilege to get a glimpse into it. Queer and Trans-body-positivity and sex-positivity are in full view here, reminding us that Trans health and Queer life are in danger of being attacked by a newly elected right-wing government that wants to reignite the ignorance of the 1980s. In this, O’Dwyer’s work is an act of bravery and rebellion, facing an unknown future of new and familiar threats.
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