I’m Robin, Editor of Misstropolis.
I hope this site brings you some joy and some knowledge (or at least a nice distraction) during this surreal, enlightening and historic time.
I like to write about art, style and purpose. If you have ideas for stories or would like to contribute, I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for reading!
Misstropolis
Spirit & Style, Inside & Out
In our second guide to the Boston Public Art Triennial, we enjoy the Charlestown Navy Yard where four powerful works of pubic art respond to the historic maritime site with fresh perspectives on urgent issues including climate change, connection to nature, Black motherhood, and finding space for joy.
The inaugural edition of the Boston Public Art Triennial is here, the result of years of planning, collaboration and work. This once-every-three-years celebration of public art’s power to unite and lift up a city gives us multiple opportunities to see art in neighborhoods we know well and those we’ve yet to explore. Misstropolis has created a series called How to Triennial. In this edition, we take you on two art-packed tours of multiple Triennial sites, through Matappan, Dorchester and Fenway. Next up in the series: Charlestown Navy Yard and Downtown on a date.
April 30, 2025 is Denim Day. Recognized across the globe, Denim Day is a campaign against the persistent culture of victim blaming. Today, get dressed in solidarity with survivors of rape and sexual assault. Today your favorite pair of jeans are a powerful symbol of protest.
Frieze LA opened only weeks after the California fires which devastated Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Vielmetter Gallery's exhibition of April Bey's work was the salve Los Angeles and the art world needed.
A solo exhibition of papier-mâché sculpture and paintings by Haitian-American visual activist Fabiola Jean-Louis at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum presents a transformative vision of Haitian spirituality and culture. The artist talks with Misstropolis about why she chose paper, inspiring social change, and diving deep into the waters of the abyss in a search for freedom.
Two significant Boston artists—Eva Lundsager and Cicely Carew—exhibit powerful new work in a two person painting show at Philip Slein Gallery in St. Louis.
Petra Slinkard has devoted her career to educating the public about the role fashion and design play in the human experience. Through extensive cross-cultural research and partnerships with global leaders in the field, Slinkard has established herself as an expert-to-watch and helped make PEM’s innovative and inclusive fashion initiative into one of the best in the country. With storytelling as her magic power, she brings the past into the present in ways which capture hard-to-reach contemporary audiences. She is one of the women putting the Boston area on the map as a global cultural hub, and for all those reasons, she is the latest in Misstropolis’ Visionary Series.
An important new show opens at the MassArt Art Museum (MAAM) this Thursday, January 23. Curated by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox of the independent consultancy c2-curatorsquared, in collaboration with MAAM’s Director Lisa Tung, Future Fossils brings together the work of 20 international artists representing tremendous diversity of place, material, process, thematic concerns and career stage. The exhibition’s scale and themes make it one of the most important on Boston’s 2025 cultural calendar.
Sam Fields uses commonplace, feminine and domestic-coded materials to make art which arbitrary hierarchies of taste. Aesthetic distinctions impact class distinctions, gender identity and social power dynamics. Her art begs the question, “Who gets to decide what is good taste and bad?”
Nostalgia feels like the appropriate vibe when thinking about holiday gifts this year. Nostalgia for simpler times; for happier and sexier times; for times when headlines were less horror show and more same old evening news. Gift giving, when carefully considered, can be a deeply moving process for both the giver and the recipient. Let us help you make 2024 your best giving year yet.
Sneha Shrestha, who goes by the artist name Imagine, blends graffiti, geometric abstraction and traditional Himalayan design to create work that examines the sacrifice, longing and hope of the Nepali diaspora. In her paintings and soaring public murals, her audacious colors and balletic lettering speak to the resiliency and power of the human spirit.
Can those of us who feel shock at Donald Trump’s second election victory learn from our reaction? Can we embrace our shock as a teacher capable of illuminating the blind spots we stubbornly cling to and collectively nurture in our echo chambers and tribal communities?
Edra Soto mines the rich history of Puerto Rican vernacular architecture in her public installations and wall sculptures. An artist, curator and educator now based in Chicago, Soto brings an academic rigor and emotional authenticity to work made in the tradition of Puerto Rican ironwork called rejas, found in working class neighborhoods like the one where she grew up. She reveals the often ignored African foundations of post war motifs and challenges hegemonic erasure of Puerto Rico’s colonial condition.
Yng-Ru Chen is the visionary art world influencer transforming the art scene in Boston and beyond.
Documentary filmmaker Stephanie Johnes has received accolades, awards and standing ovations wherever she screens her latest film Maya and the Wave, which took over ten years to complete. This month, it plays at the Angelica Film Center's Village East location and you won't want to miss your chance to catch the wave.
Ubiquitous and seemingly benign, the common grid stealthly forms the basis for much of the way Western society organizes information, designs space and represents reality. Throughout history artists have used the grid as a guide in their representational work and as a form through which to comment on the aesthetic, ideological and personal issues of their times. Female artists especially have creatively co-opted the grid with great success. Here, we explore some of the artists who painted beyond words, tested infinity and exploded the grid and everything it represents.
Modernity's most intrepid symbol continues to inspire, provoke and spur artists working today.
Ina Archer collects, studies and reintroduces historical representations of blackness across various mediums. Her watercolors of racially charged cloth dolls pack serious historical-social commentary behind simplistic style and technique. Don’t be fooled, these paintings represent more than child’s toys. If she could talk, what would “Liberated Long Legs” say to me?
On the occasion of her first residency at the private print studio Stone Hill Press, Misstropolis talks with Boston area visual artist Linda Pagani about process, constraints and the power of quiet work in a noisy world.
In a new show at Gallery NAGA on Newbury Street in Boston, Powell Fine Art Advisory curates works by 18 New England artists who consider the contemporary implications and inspiration of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 19th century poem “Address to the Moon.”
Hew Locke’s ambitious, layered, often overwhelming installation “The Procession” makes its North American debut at the ICA Boston’s exhibition space The Watershed. Like the complex march of history, the figures in Locke’s strange parade charge on despite the atrocities and manipulations they’ve suffered, evidenced by the artifacts they wear.
