Boston art monoliths like the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum may satisfy the average artistically-inclined Tufts student, but for those who find themselves craving something that hasn't managed to sneak its way into a textbook, Boston has a few cures for survey-museum overload.
Though Boston's galleries have a conservative reputation, summoning up visions of seersucker more often than artistic freedoms, the Boston-area arts scene is quickly shifting. Rapidly growing arts communities like the Thayer Street community — located by the Broadway stop on the Red Line — are infusing some much-needed experimentalism into the air. This developing landscape offers a little something for everyone. Whether you're looking for artistic upstarts or well-known faces, here are a few highlights to get you started.
DTR Modern Galleries
DTR Modern Galleries, located at 167 Newbury Street, features high-profile artists to match its high-profile address. The current exhibit, "Salvador Dalí: Unveiling new suites from the legendary Salvador Dalí Collection," features a number of mixed-media drawings, watercolors and etchings from several series by the Surrealist master. The works provide an interesting lens into the rhyme behind Dalí's seemingly reasonless images, while Dalí's play of color, line and fantasy give viewers plenty to look at.
High-profile artists like Dalí are the norm for DTR, which presents museum-quality works by modern masters. Although the exhibits may be aimed at collectors with some serious buying power, the gallery is open to the average passersby, including students who couldn't afford one of Dalí's broken pencils, let alone a painting.
"This exhibit brings in a whole different group of people and a really varied crowd. Certain shows will bring in whole different audiences," Theresa Calabro, the gallery's senior fine art consultant, said of the show.
DTR provides a great opportunity to see museum-quality pieces in an entirely different setting. The atmosphere more closely mimics a really, really wealthy friend's living room than that of an average, sterile museum's.
Another bonus? You can bug the lovely individuals in the gallery for information without having to go track down the docent. They're selling the stuff, so they know it pretty well. Check out their exhibit "Dalí: Unveiling new suites," through Oct. 21.
Arden Gallery
Also located in Boston's upper-crust neighborhood, Arden's space at 129 Newbury Street features a slightly different range of works. Focusing less on big names, Arden seeks out a range of established contemporary artists.
The current exhibits, Sherrie Wolf: "Vessels" and Robert C. Jackson: "Seeing Things" show more light-hearted works that turn the lens on the examination of the everyday.
Wolf uses a layered technique featuring juxtapositions between the landscapes and still lifes of the 17th and 18th centuries and her own brand of hyper-realistic everyday objects. Jackson's playful assemblages of everyday objects sugar coat darkly ironic messages amid toys and baked goods (think children's blocks spelling out "Not long for this world" next to cans of soda and chocolate cake).
Zola Solamente, director at Arden, emphasized the importance of variety to the gallery.
"We feature contemporary artists employing various styles and all genres … we really try to have an eclectic mix of styles and subject matter — from rubber to encaustic to oil," Solamente said.
The makeup of Arden's audience matches the variety of its works; it embraces everyone from curious tourists to artists looking to study up on particular styles.
Solamente enjoys being part of a Boston art scene that caters to a wide range of audiences.
"There's really a broad mix of work," she said. "Boston has alternative spaces, traditional spaces — tons of artists' studios are open to the public … a lot of people feel Boston's art scene must be stodgy, but really there's something for everyone."
Check out Sherrie Wolf at Arden through Oct. 29 and Robert Jackson from April 3 to April 28.
Soprafina Gallery
Part of the SoWa gallery group, Soprafina Gallery focuses on contemporary artists in a range of media. Though Soprafina is home to a number of Boston- and New England-based artists, the gallery also features many internationally based artists.
Soprafina's current offering, "Soliliquies - New Paintings," features simply rendered, colorful oil paintings by Madrid native Eva Navarro. Navarro's eye-catching panels freeze strangers she has encountered in daily life and isolate their figures against a bold, single-colored background.
Navarro's insistence that her subjects remain anonymous prompts the viewer to read human emotion and feeling into form and figure, as opposed to assigning character to a face or expression. Her pieces become examinations of how the figures' movements can be read as expressions of human beings' passage through life.
The owner of Soprafina Gallery, Frank Roselli, worked as an artist out of Cambridge before founding Soprafina in 2001.
Of his choices for the galleries works, Roselli said, "I don't look for a specific genre or style … I come to business as a painter first, my wife as an interior designer. We look at artists we each find appealing for a number of reasons."
This inclusive approach allows the gallery to develop an aesthetic with a great deal of range. Still, there are certain continuities between Soprafina's choices.
When asked why he was drawn to Navarro's work specifically, Roselli cited the artist's use of color, the bold, graphic nature of Navarro's paintings and the balance point of her interest in the human emotional range.
Soprafina's light-hearted yet visually interesting works make for good viewing. View "Soliliquies" at the 450 Harrison Street gallery in Downtown Boston until Oct. 29.
Gallery Kayafas
Photography fans rejoice! Gallery Kayafas, also part of the SoWa group, focuses on contemporary photography. The gallery also shows complementary sculpture and works on paper from both emerging and established artists.
The current exhibit, entitled "Dystopian Dreaming," features the work of Boston locals Debra Weisberg and Judy Haberl. Weisberg and Haberl's photographs push the boundaries of image and its construction, relying on layered techniques that complicate the image-making process. It is left to the viewer to interpret the multi-layered works.
Weisberg's pieces explore the physicality of drawing, replacing line and graphite with a variety of objects. The medium-bending result is an explosion of energy rather than the depiction of concrete form.
Haberl's photography uses groups of organic objects, veiling them behind what appear to be foggy panes of glass. The gathering of disparate items, which substitute the foggy outlines of plants for drawings' lines, encourages the reader to construct an image through the haze.
Director Arlette Kayafas has been collecting photography with her husband — a photographer by trade — for many years and decided to make the jump into a gallery nine years ago. Kayafas said she enjoys working with a range of artists at different points in their careers and said that she often gives artists their first shows in Boston.
The balance of new and established artists gives the exhibits a range of fields, with works ranging from more experimental to more mature. As a result, the feel at Gallery Kayafas is markedly different than the one on Newbury Street, and you can expect to find more artists who are skirting the edges of both medium and institution. See "Dystopia Dreaming," through Nov. 26 at Gallery Kayafas' at 450 Harrison Street.
samsøn
Undoubtedly one of the edgier of the SoWa galleries, samsøn shows works that question the arts and social establishments. It features artists who take as their canvas our world's many assumptions and biases.
The gallery's current exhibit, "More is More," features the work of Mark Cooper. His is an ambitious, site-specific installation that fills the whole gallery space. Cooper's work does the exhibit title proud; it is a literal expression of excess in the form of thousands of objects that occupy the gallery's rooms. "More is More" also truly exemplifies a multimedia technique.
The works manifest Cooper's interest in cultural diversity and visual language, forcing us to rethink how we respond to artwork, while also addressing how we may need to expand that response in light of the hodgepodge that is our own global landscape.
The gallery's devotion to turning a challenging lens on modern society prompts it to feature a huge range of emerging and — perhaps willfully — unrecognized artists. As it is more of an artistic think-tank than a gallery, walk into samsøn expecting to have to turn a few wheels in your rusty, homework-sodden brain.
That being said, it's worth it. The gallery's desire to bring up issues rather than solutions is a refreshing alternative to the endless parade of exhibits with a morale to offer and also raises questions about the types of issues we can't — or shouldn't — solve. Check out Mark Cooper's works at the 450 Harrison Street through Dec. 10.
Further explorations
The quality of Boston's artsy chops is on display not just in its larger museums, but also sprinkled throughout the city in its smaller galleries. Newbury's refined and established spaces provide the opportunity to see established artists — and even some familiar masters — in an intimate setting. With a shade fewer tourists and a marked absence of screaming children being dragged along for an education, the long-established Newbury crew has much to offer arts enthusiasts.
The SoWa gallery group at 450 to 460 Harrison Street offers a markedly different feel both because of the experimentalism of its shows and its warm group mentality. This feeling of camaraderie highlights not just the offerings of a single gallery, but also the dynamic of an artistic community that is changing and growing as a group.
Still craving more? See Artmapboston.com for a complete listing of Boston's galleries' websites and locations.
