Hilary Irons finds a major theme of empathy and connection in the work of seven graduates from Maine College of Art’s MFA program, highlighting how artists are responding to the precarity and isolation of the world and setting out to change it.
Category Archive: Reviews
Julie Poitras Santos reflects on monument, labor, and silence in Daniela Rivera’s recent exhibition at the Fitchburg Art Museum.
Bianca Beck and Sascha Braunig’s two-person show at SPACE explores the political and feminist power of difference.
Grant Wahlquist reflects on Michael Figueroa’s commissioned dance work for SPACE and Portland Dance Month and asks, when is too much too much?
Megan Grumbling previews two short films by Mariangela Ciccarello and Philip Cartelli that trace geologic and migratory histories in the Mediterranean.
Writer and curator Ikram Lakhdhar looks at a selection of artworks in “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” an exhibition at the Center for Book Arts, to find her own histories emerge from the works on view.
Katie Vida suggests a multidisciplinary way of understanding photographer Tad Beck’s three series of work in Technique/Support at Grant Wahlquist Gallery.
In Somnyama Ngonyama, Zanele Muholi uses the performativity of photography to rewrite a Black queer and trans visual history of South Africa.
Flavor Profile eschews the romanticization and elitism of foodie culture to explore more tender, humanist relationships of food.
Mimicking the collaborative nature of the Biennial’s curation, five cultural producers in Maine gather in conversation to model the critical potential in slow looking, multiple reads, and shared dialogue.
Vivian Ewing reviews Second Sight: The Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art, an exhibition that addresses what it’s like to possess qualities that so much of the world is not built to serve: blindness and blackness.
Yoshua Okón’s multi-channel video blurs the lines between documentary, reality, and fiction, asking participants and viewers to engage in sociological experiments that reveal discomforting questions.
Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974–1995 at MIT’s List Center defines video sculpture, asking viewers to grapple with the spatial and social realities of video.
A rose is a rose is a precious symbol of optimism in these often dark times. by Julien Langevin.
In American Popsicle, Emilie Stark-Menneg evinces a tenderness for the digital: its connection to both the physicality of paint and illusory intangibility. by Julien Langevin
Performance artist Keijaun Thomas discusses notions of blackness, femininity, and materiality in her in-progress piece My Last American Dollar. by Julien Langevin
Bloodlines counters heteropatriarchic narratives of fluid and the body with work meditating on the reproductive body, emotional labor, and power. by Andy Johnson
Donna Haraway shows us we need new ideas and new ways of thinking, new kinds of stories to think with, because the old ones are failing us. by Julie Poitras Santos
Nothing is left to the imagination until everything is: when information is obsolete, or when there is strategic overflow. by Julien Langevin
Creating public art — and public art conferences — requires deep, internal work as much as it does communication, planning, passion, and dedication. by Jenna Crowder
Lustfully saturated with lucid color and lively tricks of the eye, Elizabeth Kleene’s Tadow Island at Gallery 49 allows viewers to experience an external oasis. by Julien Langevin
Terry Winters and Mark Melnicove collaborate on a suite of prints exploring the relationships between image and word in the physics of space and time. by Megan Grumbling
Chris Stiegler explores process, objecthood, and relationships in three exhibitions at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.
The intangibility of memory, the diversity of grief, and the anguish of remembrance are laid bare for the public in “Anguish: The Misgivings of Remembrance” at the ICA at MECA. by Veronica A. Perez
Lia Wilson reviews the site-specificity and flattening of time of S P E C T A C U L A R B L A C K D E A T H as part of the series A Long Wait.