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
All in ART
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.
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.
Jennifer Rochlin’s show “Paintings on Clay” at Hauser + Wirth brings materiality, color and frank storytelling to sculptural pottery. A show full of impulse, humor and poignancy, “Paintings on Clay” catapults the artist to new heights of significance at a time when writings on the body, about the body and empowering the body are of the most urgent significance to women.
The public art nonprofit Now + There announces their bold plans to rebrand and reframe the organization as the Boston Public Art Triennial. As the city of Boston celebrates a momentous opportunity to connect communities and spark conversations about historical misrepresentations and urgent social issues, the team behind the inaugural Triennial discusses their collaborative vision and how they will bring it to life.
Boston based multidisciplinary artist Yu-Wen Wu charts a course through some of the most complex and important issues facing our city and our planet today. Global migration, assimilation, identity, climate change, female labor and gaps left in the history of the Asian American experience all find elegant purchase in her work. Through drawing, painting, sculpture, video and site specific installation, Wu exposes new possibilities in the relationship between art and science and maps a way through longing toward hope.
From up-cycled and repurposed textiles, artifacts, and salvaged treasures, Brooklyn based sculptor and mixed media artist Tau Lewis creates otherworldy figures who populate a mystical imaginary realm. Using labor-intesive, time-consuming practices including hand-sewing, dyeing, carving, quilting and weaving, Lewis evokes ancient mythologies from the African diaspora to create a bold and hopeful future out of carefully collected remnants of the past.
Artist Gio Swaby uses age old materials to bring new life to portraiture. With thread and fabric, she sews, stitches and patterns empowered representations of the women and girls from her Bahamian community. Her solo show “Fresh Up” is on view at the Peabody Essex Museum until the end of November. Don’t miss your chance to see the work of this rising art world darling. Misstropolis talked with the artist about the importance of connection, her love for her home country and why she finds textile art enduringly exciting.
In her cheerful, unassuming studio in Somerville, MA, Zainab Sumu is fashioning a bridge to Africa. The artist/designer has been working on it for years, creating a multidisciplinary body of work that honors and reimagines various artistic traditions of west and north Africa with all the color, ingenuity and music the region inspires.
Monuments and memorials stand at the center of our country’s contemporary culture wars. A city’s public art says a lot about what that city and that country stand for. In response, some of the most significant artists of our time are creating new public work that challenges, counters and responds to politically charged monuments and memorials. Their questions are cast in bronze and carved in stone: who gets to be memorialized? Who holds the power to inscribe public space?
It seems spring is here at last. Let the season opener (Red Sox and otherwise) inspire you to get out and explore something new. Here are a few exhibition and reading selections to help you embrace the best of Boston and beyond.
Following a three month leave from Misstropolis to work on my book, I’m happy to be back. But in the time I’ve been away, the news has descended even deeper into depths of despair. Again and again, art gives me the courage to carry hope into the next day. Two things inspired this piece: Hank Willis Thomas’ instantly iconic Boston monument to Dr. Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King “The Embrace,” and the CDC report on mental health in the US, which found that suicide rates rose 5% for people between 25-44. My message? Embrace hope despite everything.
Ukrainian artists are using their work and platforms to defy Putin’s attempt to destroy their homeland, seize their country and erase their culture.
On every front, astounding courage. Now the upcoming Venice Biennale has become a meaningful stage on which to exhibit the immense solidarity, courage and pride of the Ukrainian people, as a small but mighty team transports a treasured sculpture to Venice, against impossible odds.
Almost seventeen years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, causing almost 1,800 deaths and over a billion dollars in damages, the impact is still evident. Add a global pandemic, a racial reckoning and a tumultuous political climate and New Orleans becomes a national site of change, creativity and invention. Prospect New Orleans, the Art Triennial which debuted in 2008 in response to Hurricane Katrina, seeks to address the racial, political, ideological and historical issues surfaced by the devastation and its aftermath. This year, after a year’s hiatus due to Covid-19, Prospect was back for its fifth iteration, titled Yesterday we said tomorrow.
