Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in February 2025

Highlights
Constituent Parts at Boston University Art Galleries, Boston, MA

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.

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Keisha Prioleau-Martin: Recenter at Olympia

Self-Portrait, 2024

Recenter is a delightful return to Impressionism in many ways. Prioleau-Martin chooses for her subject matter decidedly impressionistic themes—moments at home, moments of introspection, and unrehearsed tenderness, all the casual yet poignant subject matter that marked painting’s initial move from the historic and fantastical to the everyday and human in the 1870s. She also employs the paint with a focus to capture the spur of the moment and the unexpected. Her small-scale ceramics, composed on the templates of stock sculptural types—odalisques, Rodin-like romantic poses, and busts, are, by virtue of their Lilliputian size and wit, Impressionist re-interpretations of dry classic forms. They start out as one thing and shift mid-stream into another: this is particularly evident in Prioleau-Martin’s bust Self-portrait (2024) which masquerades as a planter with fabric and wire vegetal tendrils emanating from her cranium along with her braids.

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Eileen Ferara at Guttenberg Arts

In dialogue

the Immense Activity of Being Alive II, 20 x 26 in, Lithograph with watercolor and colored pencil

During her time at Guttenberg Arts Residency (STAR), Eileen Ferara spent much time in the Gutten Garden, an urban community garden maintained by the organization. The plants—fruits we eat and companion plants we call weeds—became the focus of her drawings. She collected soil, seeds, and leaves, bringing bits of the garden into the studio to keep that connection alive. The Guttenberg Residency offers three months of access to professional workspaces for printmaking and ceramics. Eileen used goldenrod and indigo plants to dye paper for her prints. In the print shop, she worked through the process of stone lithography, gaining a hands-on understanding of the medium.

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Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in January 2025

HIGHLIGHTS
Naoko Serino’s Generating 9, in Japandi Revisited: shared aesthetics and influences at Wayne Art Center, photograph courtesy of Wayne Art Center

Out on the Main Line, the world of craft takes center stage at Wayne Art Center in two distinct but complementary shows. CraftForms 2024, 29th International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Fine Craft and Japandi Revisited: shared aesthetics and influences, together invite viewers to contemplate the power of form, material, and cultural aesthetics. In Old City, at the Museum for Art in Wood, Mark Sfirri explores the many definitions of family through his exquisite woodworking in La Famiglia. Cerulean Arts Gallery and Studio in Center City pairs the dreamy drawings and paintings of two Philadelphia artists, Gary Grissom and Louise Vinueza, in A Day in The Life. Together, these four exhibitions offer a diverse range of artistic viewpoints from the global scope of contemporary craft to the exploration of family and nostalgia.

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Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in December 2024

HIGHLIGHTS
“Shared Vision: Portraits from The CCH Pounder-Koné Collection at The African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP). Photo courtesy of The African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP) 

December is a gift of a month for exhibitions in Philadelphia. Those currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, African American Museum of Philadelphia, and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery are not to be missed. From macro scale celebrations to quiet personal yearnings in intimate moments, the works in these exhibitions explore the fullness and complexity of artists within and alongside Black contemporary life.

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Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions in December 2024

 Highlights
Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore at Museum of Fine Arts, Bosto

It’s the end of 2024 and a new year is upon us. As we go into the holiday season to celebrate, reflect, and make resolutions for a new year, let’s also remember to take time to see all the amazing art on view. In Boston, there are several knockout shows to catch while you’re out and about. Whether you’re gathering with friends or going to your favorite gallery’s holiday party, you’ll be spending time with family – chosen and inherited – to feel centered, grounded, and a sense of belonging. Family can be wondrously complicated and beautifully complex in its array of characters.

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Mindscape: Patterns of Identity at L’Space

A couple of men in a room

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Moran Kliger, Installation

In the group show Mindscape: Patterns of Identity at L’Space, people, animals, and places shift and juxtapose, coming together like pieces of a map—one that charts the shared inner terrain of memory, trauma, and identity. Curated by Noa Rabinovich Lalo and Carolina Werebe, with L’Space founder Lily Almog, the show, as Almog puts it, draws on “a shared Israeli heritage and a deep connection to the contemporary art scene in Israel, a country with a rich cultural history and traditions amidst ongoing uncertainty.” And it’s that sense of uncertainty that pulls everything together—voids and absences linger in the air. Even when the work seems rooted in specific places, the setting remains layered and elusive, offering more questions than answers. This is evident in Netta Lieber Sheffer’s sweeping charcoal drawing installation of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna clinic, where he lived and worked for 47 years before fleeing the Nazis in 1938.

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Shiva Ahmadi – Tangle at Shoshana Wayne

Installation view, Tangle
Installation view, Tangle

First thing that pulled me into Shiva Ahmadi’s Tangle exhibition were the pressure cookers. It took me a moment to recognize them: from a distance, they appeared as intricate decorative objects and archaeological relics simultaneously. While the vintage pressure cookers evoked associations of domestic warmth and memories of my grandma’s kitchen, their surfaces etched with Arabic calligraphy and floral ornamentation recall artifacts from a Persian or Arabic cultural heritage museum. The patience and meticulous craft of such engraving parallels the labor of generations of women who spent countless hours in the kitchen crafting their family’s meals.

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In and Out of Lineage: Tracing Artistic Heritage Through SUNY New Paltz Faculty 

Eva Zanardi, the guest curator of the group show—In and Out of Lineage: Tracing Artistic Heritage Through SUNY New Paltz Faculty—observes that many times in her life, art has raised her awareness and consequently even made her reconsider her point of view on important issues. Zanardi says that the prerogative that should belong to most art is to be thought-provoking; as the educator and activist Cezar A. Cruz says, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Eva Zanardi shared some of her curatorial process and gave us here a brief guide through the show.

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