Pillow Talk: Intimacy and Animacy in “STUFFED”
Boston Art Review, 2023
There are few things more seductive than a cocoon. A silky encasement, plump from sheltering a mysterious, metamorphosing interior, the cocoon’s allure stems from the sense of something hidden, but also from its emphatic material presence: its ripeness, its bulging form, its proximity to a possible emergence. The artworks featured in “STUFFED” entice with a similar charm. The third collaborative curatorial project undertaken by friends Mallory A. Ruymann and Leah Triplett Harrington, this exhibition transforms Boston University’s Fay G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery into a surrealistic wonderland, somewhere between a down duvet and a padded cell.
Jewel-Encrusted Rats in Ecclesiastical Garb: Art and Treasures for You, Honey
Decorating Dissidence, 2023
In 1970, two counter-culture publications proselytize and promote the wonders of a multimedia environment installed in a tenement building at 266 East 4th Street in New York City. One appears in the newspaper Gay Power; the other is self-published, self-circulated. Both texts center explicitly Catholic and overtly queer content mediated through the working-class, chintzy, gilded florist foils and cellophane-wrapped rats of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, or Tommy, as most who know him call him.
Exhibition Review: Ceramics in the Expanded Field
The Journal of Modern Craft, 2023
Ceramics in the Expanded Field proposes a group of eight ceramics artists as rule-breakers. The didactic materials remind visitors of clay as “a medium once segregated from mainstream contemporary art” because of its proximity to the domestic, to marginalized identities including women and indigenous makers, and to the decorative. The exhibition hinges its stakes on work that challenges such “entrenched cultural and artistic hierarchies,” but I wonder if the artists included in the exhibition are operating with the same set of premises.
Lucy Kim’s Vibrant Matter Mystifies and Enchants in “Dead or Dormant” at ODD-KIN
Boston Art Review, 2023
“Dead or Dormant,” a monographic show highlighting Lucy Kim, is the latest exhibition on view in Kate McNamara’s delightful contemporary arts space, ODD-KIN. Situated in East Providence and established just over one year ago, ODD-KIN has hosted some thrilling, colorful group shows exploring themes like materiality, animate objects, artifice, nature, and play—which also happen to inform Lucy Kim’s work in the gallery’s debut solo feature.
Accessing/Assessing Fashion
Invisible Culture #35, 2023
Fashion functions to reshape the meaning of our bodies, whether that involves masquerading, veiling, or exposing. Fashion is a performance: it can be extreme or subtle, intentional or accidental, an individual choice or a collective trend. I selected and wrote up mini-essays on six different artists related to the theme.
Wedding Cake Toppers: Miniatures, Excess, and Fantasy
Dilettante Army, 2023
As someone who delights in studying overlooked objects in visual culture, I admit that the wedding cake topper, for all its ubiquity, is particularly niche. If cakes are like clowns, then wedding cake toppers are like clowns’ shoes; they’re even further removed from whatever constitutes the American visual-cultural “center” than the already-fringe entities they adorn. Decorative, diminutive, frilly, and frosted, wedding cake toppers are so far off the radar of mainstream scholarship that to say they have a reputation for being frivolous would be disingenuous—they scarcely have a reputation at all.
Aurélie Salavert: Secret Garden
mepaintsme, 2023
Inventive, evocative, and shimmering, Aurélie Salavert’s works sidestep categorical constraints and defy traditional modes of meaning-making. In fact, Aurélie declines to date her work, refusing to anchor her art to the confines of time. Why should she? Her interests lie beyond the scope of the demonstrable, the perceptible, and the legible, but not at the expense of her aesthetic attunement to simplicity and lightness.
Textile Politics: Newport Art Museum’s “Social Fabric” Remixes the Subversive Stitch
Boston Art Review, 2023
The Newport Art Museum is a patchwork sort of space. The institution sutures together a historic “stick-style” house from 1864 and a smaller, cube-like building from 1919 with an ornate ring of marble columns supporting a low dome. Linked by a small sculpture garden, these two buildings house curated galleries of art that are just as mixed in their displays of works. Walking through the nineteenth-century style hallways and staircases, one encounters constellations of art that span geographic and temporal distances, grouped around themes like “touch” or “protest.”
Kathy Butterly Interviewed by Kendall DeBoer
BOMB Magazine, 2023
I first encountered Kathy Butterly’s playful, colorful, bodily, and bizarre ceramics while working at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. There, her 1996 vessel Silk Worm mesmerizes and entices with fleshy tones and skin-like folds. Its title suggests a larva-cocoon-to-moth metamorphosis that’s animate, beautiful, sticky, gooey, destructive, and productive. To my delight, I would soon find that these qualities are characteristic of Butterly’s oeuvre, which spans decades.
Babes in Toyland: Gendered Dynamics “At Play” in Northeastern’s Gallery 360
Boston Art Review, 2023
I’ve recently picked up the descriptor “jewel box exhibition” from a beloved colleague. The phrase captures the essence of smaller-scale projects that dazzle, enchant, and offer a certain richesse. “At Play” is precisely this: a small jewel box of an exhibition, which presents visitors with a selection of artworks by five women artists who explore play.
Florine and the Three Worlds
Dilettante Army, 2020
Stettheimer’s worlds adapt within and transmogrify established cultural environments through the form of houses: art house, doll house, and her own house. All three freely blend the public and private; all three conflate interiors and exteriors. But the artworld and its public are too broad and expansive for Stettheimer’s highly particular fantasy; meanwhile, her miniature dioramas are too intimate and self-contained to convey the full sweep of her cellophane-draped universe. In the spirit of Goldilocks, I consider Stettheimer’s Beaux-Arts studio ‘just right.’
Judith Schaechter at Memorial Art Gallery
Cornelia, 2020
Eve is an origin. Biblically speaking, she’s the first woman to exist. As the original woman, she commits the original sin: at the behest of Satan-as-serpent, she eats fruit forbidden by God in exchange for expanded knowledge. Part of her punishment is the pain experienced while giving birth, her womb serving as a new site of origination in bearing children. Beyond the Judeo-Christian Book of Genesis, Eve serves as an originary archetype for deviant women. Curious and transgressive, condemned and reclaimed, Eve is the basis of countless cultural representations and interpretations.
Blake’s Afterlife: Howard Finster, the Backwoods Blake
Hell’s Printing Press, 2019
About one-hundred miles north of Atlanta, a colorful, otherworldly folk art environment stands in Summerville, Georgia. Self-taught artist Howard Finster (1916-2001) began work on his Paradise Garden in 1961, using materials such as glass, concrete, and discarded objects to create six sacred buildings. Today, the site remains as a monument to Finster’s prolific life, religious fervor, and distinctive artworks.
Finster believed himself in communication with the divine and drew inspiration from his visions. Recurrent in Finster’s oeuvre are images of biblical characters, Christian mythology, and apocalyptic monsters alongside more recent cultural touchstones, such as American politicians and capitalist consumer goods. Much of Finster’s artwork formally intertwines visual iconography with written text–often prophetic–to create hybrid objects.
“Stay the Course”: An Interview with Artist Joyce J. Scott
“Artist Joyce J. Scott’s work lives at the intersection of craft histories, contemporary art, figurative sculpture, storytelling, and political activism. With interpretive possibilities that are as interconnected and inseparable as the beads she uses in her peyote-stitch weaving technique, it’s no surprise Scott describes herself as thinking in multilayers.”
Blake’s Afterlife: Florine Stettheimer’s Visual Poetics
“New York saloniste Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) was born nearly fifty years after William Blake’s death. Yet this wealthy American woman produced a body of artworks that bear remarkable resemblances to Blake’s illustrations. The two share many qualities: both were equal parts poet and visual artist, both produced works with highly idiosyncratic pictorial styles, and both had reputations as unconventional individuals.”
Curatorial Fabulations: Difference, Subversion, and Exhibition-as-Form in ‘Outliers and American Vanguard Art’
“Attempts to highlight non-canonical artworks and their makers tend to fall into common traps. Some fetishize the identities of the artists; others gloss over identity in favor of formalist readings. Many erase narratives of inequality that the artists had intended to address with their reparative work.”