Contemporary Art and Culture
Vojislav Radovanović’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, drawing, installation, video, and performance. His work touches upon themes of queerness, memory, the immigrant experience, spirituality, and the complex relationship between humans and the natural world. Influenced by his upbringing in Serbia during a time of war and social upheaval, Radovanović approaches art as a therapeutic space for healing and transformation. His process-driven works often combine recycled materials, vibrant color, and symbolic imagery to create poetic, emotionally resonant narratives. Through layered compositions and dreamlike logic, he invites viewers into a shared space of reflection, imagination, and emotional release.
Continue reading “Through the Kaleidoscope: Vojislav Radovanović on Dreams, Memory, and Finding Color in California”
Julia S. Powell, Kitchen Morning, 2024. Oil on canvas
MFA Boston Curator of Painting Katie Hanson visited the studio of the landscape painter Julia S. Powell. The resulting interview gives us an insight into Powell’s artistic process and her concept of a “fiction painter,” one that creates work at the intersection of abstraction and realism. Besides references to contemporary Impressionism, the interview addresses creating thickly-layered artworks that inspire introspection and acceptance of previous experiences—especially the unwanted ones. These layers serve as metaphors for embracing past struggles without regret. Powell’s work also provides an emotional refuge as a response to a chaotic and increasingly anxious life.
Yuan Goang-Ming, known as the ‘father of Taiwanese video art,’ chose Abby Chen, the curator of contemporary art at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum to curate his presentation at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Everyday War. In the Palazzo Priccioni, a space that once served as a prison, his videos and installations poetically examined the unease of contemporary life, in works such as Dwelling, which presents an explosion in a living room, and Everyday Maneuver, showing the empty streets of Taipei during an air raid drill.
Continue reading “Everyday War at the Asian Museum”
Tsipi Ben-Haim started CITYarts because she saw how often young people—especially teens—are left out of important conversations. She believed that if kids had the chance to express themselves through art, they could inspire real change in their communities. The idea was simple: when young people create, they don’t destroy—they build, they imagine, they connect.
Continue reading “CITYarts: Murals of Shared Stories”
Evidence of the Unexpected at The Crown Gallery in Bridgeport, Connecticut combines the work of four artists who approach figuration and narrative in different ways. This group show considers the role of spontaneity in the studio—how works emerge through instinct, experimentation, and chance. The paintings and sculptures in this exhibition take shape when artists engage deeply with their materials and uncover something unexpected along the way. Curator Jane Dávila tells us about the show.
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Artist Adriane Colburn lived in San Francisco for over twenty years. That time was formative—personally and creatively. At the same time, she maintained a consistent presence on the East Coast. She’s from Vermont and has always spent summers there, with a lasting connection to that part of New England and its relationship to the land.
Continue reading “Adriane Colburn: Seeing by Mapping”
For decades, Dona Nelson has dissolved the formal boundaries of painting: refusing to apply pigment to just one side of the canvas, mounting the stretchers of her double-sided paintings on freestanding metal stands, and letting them occupy gallery floors like sculptural interlopers. In her current two-person show with Andrew Ross at Thomas Erben Gallery, however, the painter has ceded the floor space entirely, anchoring her three new works squarely to the wall.
Continue reading “The Bone and Muscle: A Conversation with Dona Nelson”
The North Dakota Museum of Art’s latest exhibition, Guy Nelson: Tales from the Understory, is a multidisciplinary solo show focused on the woodlands and prairies of the upper Midwest. Featuring sculpture, painting and video, the exhibition will be on display through July 20, 2025. This exhibition marks the tenth in the Museum’s Art Makers Series, an annual award for artists with connections to the region, which is underwritten by Dr. William F. Wosick of Fargo.
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Wherever I Lay My Head, now on view at The Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning , began with an invitation to Indira A. Abiskaroon to curate the culminating ARTWorks exhibition. The offer came from Program Manager Sherwin Banfield and was formalized in conversation with Director of Program Operations Wendy Arimah Berot. Abiskaroon’s first priority was to spend time with the ARTWorks Fellows—to learn how their practices had developed over the course of the program and to hear what ideas had been resonating in their weekly sessions.
Continue reading “Wherever I Lay My Head at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning “