Highlights
As Boston’s fall season unfolds, the city comes alive with a vibrant tapestry of exhibitions, from the creative heart of the SoWA Arts District to the bustling streets of Back Bay. University galleries join the celebration, offering a rich array of materials and themes that captivate and inspire. While the leaves change color and the evenings grow cooler, the art scene radiates warmth, keeping the city’s creative pulse strong and steady. Here are some standouts this month.
Maroon Mountains at Gallery Naga
On view through: November 2, 2024
Featuring: Bryan McFarlane
Gallery Naga is hosting an excellent show of large-scale abstract paintings by Bryan McFarlane. McFarlane uses brilliant color and quick and slow brushstrokes as a cipher for his feelings. His themes encapsulate personal identity and geographic location. Although the paintings are non-representational, many are about the Jamaican landscape. McFarlane was born in the Blue Hill region of Jamaica and sees the landmark as a symbol of time and place, past and present, calm and vibrant. McFarlane also calls Boston his home, interrogating the idea of belonging in both locales. Two of the works in the show, both from 2023, are imbued with the locations they were painted and are reminiscent of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings of the 1960s. McFarlane seems to channel the energy of art history and continue the tradition of abstraction through energetic brushwork, blasting his compositions with high-key color. I see a lot of my favorite painters in McFarlane’s work and admire the apparent references. The paintings are so beautifully big and fresh that they feel like celebrations of the history of painting while saying something completely unique and personal. They’re unincumbered with pretense and feel exuberantly generous.
Multiversed at RSM Art Gallery, Bentley College @bentleylibrary
On view through: October 20, 2024
Featuring: Jameel Radcliffe, Rebecca Greene, and Nygel Jones
Multiversed, an exhibition at RSM Gallery at Bentley College, features large-scale portrait paintings by Jameel Radcliffe alongside Rebecca Greene’s cardboard mask sculptures and weavings, and Nygel Jones’ sculpturally framed collages and paintings. The mixing of these three artists was a brilliant idea. Radcliffe’s beautifully rendered figures feel fortified by Jones’ dynamic wall sculptures. And Green’s masks occupy the physical space of the gallery while also peering out at you from the faces of Radcliffe’s figures. The identity of the portraits gives way to the identity of the masks, leaving the viewer to make personal references and interpretations of the characters they’re looking at. The three artists are friends, and their collaboration feels playful and poignant. There’s an edgy coolness to their combined aesthetic. Each artist has their own unique and personal goals with their work, but grouping them in this show highlights their similarities. All of them incorporate abstraction and representation, pulling images and ideas from pop culture and their observed worlds.
Signal to Signal at Trustman Art Gallery, Simmons University @trustman_gallery
On view through: October 25, 2024
Featuring: Crystalle Lacouture
Crystalle Lacoutoure’s beautiful exhibition at the Trustman Gallery at Simmons University in Boston is a feast for the senses. In her MAMA paintings, she uses high-key color to edit and alter shooting targets, which creates a cognitive dissonance for the viewer and accentuates the geometric abstraction of the work. Lacouture uses Score Keeper targets to address gun violence while recontextualizing them into healing mandalas. There’s beauty in the work, but also a provocation of their intended use and the questioning of gun culture in the US. In her monumental work of “House Jewelry,” she hangs long beaded strands on both sides of an entryway, reminiscent of a beaded curtain, as a way to adorn the space as people might adorn themselves. She believes that inanimate structures, like a doorway, are equally deserving of adornment. Visitors are encouraged to handle this artwork to activate its sounds and tactile features.
Empire of Dirt at 100 Chestnut, Somerville, MA
On view through: October 27, 2024
Featuring: Sharon Lacey
Sharon Lacey’s exhibition of recent paintings in the new project space at 100 Chestnut in Somerville, MA, is a wonderful collection of the artist’s signature brilliance. Each work draws you into a world rich in nuance and unsettling in imagery. Figures interact with landscape, and each other, in green hues that feel cloudy and distant, like a dreamscape. Lacey taps into a deep psychological space, creating an atmosphere of curiosity and unease. Her rich-textured surfaces pulse from within, and imagery emerges from a muted and dark color palette; figures are volumetric, and their flesh feels dense while their bodies collapse. One gets the sense that they’re looking into the past or distant future when technology has yielded to nature. Her luscious verdant tree lines are at once inviting and foreboding, like something from a Grimms’ fairy tale. There is a lot to see in this exhibition, and each painting is a glimpse into the artist’s unique world that celebrates the materiality of paint and the potency of an image.
Under the Spanish Sun at Childs Gallery @childsgallery
On view through: November 17, 2024
Featuring: Robert S. Neuman
Robert S. Neuman’s paintings come from the past, like cosmic time-travelers, to remind us of why we love the medium of paint. Neuman’s large-scale oil paintings of abstract compositions hail from a time when abstraction was the vanguard in painting. The surface of these paintings holds up decades later, continuing to transmit the artist’s intentions and desires. Neuman was a prolific painter who mixed inspirations and continued experimenting into his senior years. He passed away in 2015 at the age of 88. A long art career is a laudable thing, and Neuman made the most of it. His paintings are energized with a mixture of solid geometric forms and expressive passages, allowing the viewer’s eye to get excited in some areas and relaxed in others. Childs Gallery is known for exhibiting a wide range of art and artists from across generations and art movements, sometimes mixing contemporary art objects with antiquities. The Neuman paintings exemplify the gallery’s tradition of flattening the timeline of history to allow everything to exist in the present.
Re/Generation at Praise Shadows
On view through: November 9, 2024
Featuring: Yu Wen Wu
Yu Wen Wu’s highly intellectual work combines an aesthetic of material reverence with a focus on personal storytelling. Her Taiwanese heritage is at the core of her work, and her relationship with the natural world is central to her practice. A gorgeous collection of rock sculptures titled Artifacts is her homage to Scholar’s Rocks, or Gongshi. The rocks come from a growing collection of Wu’s that speaks directly to place. And her construction of the bases that support the rocks is masterful. Her craftsmanship shines throughout the exhibition, but in Artifacts, she foregoes the delicate materials found in her other works to create something timeless and permanent. The rocks are placed in the center of the gallery and feel devotional. There are several perched on small white pedestals that sit atop one large one. The effect is puzzling, but it works to create a sense of reverence for the sculptures. This is where Wu shines. Her sense of play and wonder peek out from the venerable quality of the rocks. Wu considers the natural world her muse, so it’s apt that these sculptures embody that.
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