My Year in (Art) Pictures
Through this strange, sad, beautiful, perplexing and exhilarating year, two things kept me going: love and art. Not just the love from my family and friends, though that tops the list, but love displayed in communities, schools, hospitals, shelters, non-profits, offices and athletic teams, over cups of coffee, virtual conferences and gallery tours, volunteer kitchen duty and Zoom meetings. It reminded me of the generosity humans are capable of, year after year, even in the most dispiriting times.
When that love inspires creativity, we get to experience the concerns of modern life through the language of art. This year artists - and the ecosystem of brilliant people who support them - helped me navigate thorny current issues of race, history, sexuality, identity, trauma, representation, toxic masculinity, nationalism and climate destruction as well as new ideas about line, plane, color and form. I wish I could get all my news from art.
Here’s a brief look at 2021 through the lens of the work that moved me, changed me, opened my eyes and got me through. In no particular order, with of course, much left out. Enjoy and share.
Happy New Year!
CRYSTAL BRIDGES
One of the art highlights of the year was my trip to Crystal Bridges with VIA, the innovative art fund founded by Bridgitt Evans. Read about Bridgitt here in the Misstropolis Visionary Series.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art was founded by Walmart heiress Alice Walton. An unstoppable force in the world of American art, Walton has created a sprawling utopia of art and nature that is free to all. Away from the nation’s art power centers of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami, Crystal Bridges stretches over 120 acres of pristine land in Walmart headquarters Bentonville, AK and has one of the best collections of American art anywhere in the world.
JEFFREY GIBSON
The plight of Indigenous people managed to pierce the national consciousness this year, at least as far as the recasting of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day and an unwavering obsession with Yellowstone. Obviously we have a long way to go, but I was happy to encounter Jeffrey Gibson’s work all over this year, from the ICA Boston to Crystal Bridges to The Nasher Museum at Duke and back here at the DeCordova in Lincoln. Gibson makes art in various mediums, including video, collage, beading, soft sculpture, textile and large scale installation. His work disrupts entrenched American identity markers using materials, practices and motifs from his Cherokee / Choctaw heritage, the Queer community and contemporary art. Exaggerated colors and camp aesthetics call into question the faux romanticizing of indigenous culture as well as demeaning and dangerous representations of the LBGTQIA community.
Gibson’s solo exhibit “Infinite Indigenous Queer Love” is on view at the DeCordova through March 13. GO SEE IT!
VIRGIL ABLOH
2021 was a year of devastating loss for so many. At the height of his stardom and the growth of his influence from fashion and pop culture into contemporary art, designer Virgil Abloh passed away on November 28 after a very private battle with cancer.
Abloh launch his label Off-White in Milan in 2013. He was the creative director for Kanye West and named Artistic Director of Louis Vuitton Menswear in 2018. Abloh successfully challenged the exclusion of black designers from the fashion industry just like he challenged the definition of what belongs in a museum show with his first solo exhibition Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech.” Figures of Speech came to the ICA Boston from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago where it was organized by Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, and his team. Like everything Abloh created, the show busted genres and blew minds, celebrating design, color, fashion, technology, collaboration and vision in a uniquely Abloh way. The exhibition saw record numbers and brought new audiences to the MCA and the ICA. Like Alice Walton, Virgil Abloh believed art must welcome everyone and artists must push beyond traditional ideas of what a museum is, who can exhibit and what can be shown.
EVA LEWITT
In April I felt the warm welcome of the city opening back up after a cold and lonely shut down. Eva LeWitt’s ambitious, graphical, color saturated sculpture made from industrial mesh was installed after a long Covid delay in the lobby of the ICA Boston. Tracing the upward movement of the lobby wall, stretching to the bank of windows and playing with the natural light, “Untitled (Mesh Circles)” felt distinctly Eva even as it called to mind the wall drawings of her father Sol LeWitt. “Untitled (Mesh Circles)” reminded Boston of the power of art to coax us out of our social and emotional bubbles and trust in common experience, as sprawling and colorful as we want it to be.
Read my article about Eva LeWitt’s work here.
THE ICA BOSTON
My art home away from home, the ICA Boston had a truly historic year despite it all. In addition to managing the endless responsibilities associated with the April 2022 opening of Simon Leigh’s historic exhibition at the Venice Biennale recently titled “Grittin,” the museum opened exhibitions including Firelei Bàez at The Watershed, Virgil Abloh, Raúl de Nieves, Deana Lawson, the James and Audrey Foster Prize and “The World We Make, Selections from the ICA Collection.” Always exploring ways to increase civic engagement and educational programming, they opened a new studio space for their expansive teen programming, and even hosted live events and performances when possible. Thanks to a never-give-up ethos, resourceful creativity and energetic collaboration, the staff kept the galleries filled with provocative, sophisticated work from an unexpected range of creators.
FIRELEI BÀEZ
I first encountered Domenican-American artist Firelei Bàez’s work at the Perez Art Museum in Miami with my art show partner in crime Becky, in 2015. In that exhibit entitled “Bloodlines,” Bàez’s multi media works exploring history, social and geographic boundaries, representation and identity through the lens of her heritage blew us away. Her velvet-fist approach to painting, sculpture and social commentary made a big impression. In 2021 Firelei again loomed large in my art immersion. She was featured at the ICA Watershed this summer with her largest installation to date, including “To breathe full and free…” a massive sculpture of Haiti’s San-Souci Palace imagined as if it was washed up on the Watershed floor. Her 225 piece installation “Man Without a Country (aka anthropophagist wading in the Artibonite River)” which stretched 106 by 252 inches across the gallery wall at the ICA, inspired me to reflect on what it means to manipulate, redraw and reframe images, to challenge collective assumptions and amnesia. See my self portraits inspired by her work, featuring the Misstropolis social media logo below.
MISSTROPOLIS FEATURED ARTISTS
This year I was lucky enough to study and write about a number of inspiring female artists including Eva Navarro, Eva LeWitt, Karen LaMonte, Kara Walker and Sand T Kalloch, as well as lighting designers Ayala Serfaty, Lindsey Adelman, Andreea Braescu and Paula Arntzen. Each one taught me something about the power of the work - the labor, the trial and error, the discovery and the surprises - that keeps their creative fires alive. This is the lesson I try to put into practice every day when excuses and procrastination threaten to derail my writing.
Eva Navarro, “Into the Wild”
A Karen LaMonte glass sculpture at Crystal Bridges
Sand T Kalloch in her studio
Other Highlights
HAPPY NEW YEAR
Let’s have a 2022 filled with creativity that heals, disrupts, unites and empowers. For me I’m starting the year with the words of the wise country-western sage Brad Paisley in mind: “[Today] is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one.”
