Current Exhibitions
Encircled: Stacy Scibelli & Judd Schiffman
Drive-by Projects, Watertown, MA, Sept -Nov 2024
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Circles, 1841
The artworks in this exhibition convey the reality that two things can be true at once. A circle is like this: it is both a noun and a verb, and where it begins, it also ends. To encircle is to draw a boundary, to frame, focus, to embrace. The artworks in this exhibition explore variations on the circle and its expansive meanings.
Stacy Scibelli’s Garb series are both abstract canvases and experimental garments. Their shapes, when worn, uniquely drape on each figure, with plentiful snaps welcoming innovative ways to encircle the body. The body and the art appear unique with each wearing, moving beyond gender norms and originating from sustainable inks and fabric. These are conscious choices by the artist, who cares deeply about how art-making might nurture rather than hinder the environment. Garb accentuates expressive gestures and expands the possibilities of how clothing both shelters us and helps us convey our place in the world.
Judd Schiffman’s sculptures are both stories and symbols. Made with fired porcelain, they are delicate while rigid; elemental while ethereal. His assemblages of plants and animals are made to hang on the wall, defying expectations for ceramics to be either functional or three-dimensional sculptures. Organic, meandering outlines surround each scene, like a vignette in a book, with leaves arranged, wreath-like, around words. The surreal arrangements focus us in realms grounded in time-honored emblems suggestive of spiritual experiences.
Together, Scibelli and Schiffman invite us to dwell in arcs of subtlety. These artworks generate reveries wherein one appreciates middle spaces beyond the binary.
off the pedestal
Emerson Contemporary, August - October 2024
off the pedestal is a group exhibition in the Media Art Gallery, comprising contemporary artists whose work addresses the national conversation around monuments featuring visual artists Laura Anderson Barbata, New Red Order, and Paula J. Wilson.
This exhibition is on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from August 1 – October 5, 2024. The exhibition is free and open to the public Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6 pm. This exhibition is part of Emerson Contemporary’s Regarding Monuments: Visualizing Hidden Histories, a multi-year initiative that includes exhibitions centered on monuments, several public art installations, and a technology incubator.
Curated by Distinguished Curator-in-Residence Leonie Bradbury and Curator of Special Projects Shana Dumont Garr, off the pedestal speaks directly to the national phenomenon of the removal of Confederate and other racist monuments in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Although monuments are generally presented as permanent, timeless, and expressive of universal values, this exhibition proposes that public memory could be more effectively addressed and activated through ephemeral expressions.
off the pedestal is supported by the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture (MOAC) program “Un-monument | Re-monument | De-monument: Transforming Boston.” It is a city-wide initiative that aims to transform the nation’s commemorative landscape to ensure collective histories are more completely and accurately represented.
off the pedestal is further supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Past Exhibitions
New England Triennial
Fruitlands Museum, 2019: Pastoral Present sought to creatively locate the role of Hudson River School painting at the nexus of communication, aesthetics, and history. Wilhelm Neusser’s patently new surfaces have a clear message within Fruitlands Museum’s paintings gallery: the works of art surrounding them were once as new. When paintings by beloved artists including Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and Asher B. Durand were first presented in the 1800s, they were met with a measure of astonishment. Many viewers did not yet know what to make of them because, although representational, they did not directly refer to a biblical or historical narrative. Innovative in their time, Hudson River School painters built upon past visual strategies, while also responding to concerns of their day, including the rapid changes of industrialization and the westward expansion of the United States. Then, over more than a century, as patina formed, the paintings lost the element of surprise and the potency of confrontation.
Jane Marsching: Utopia Press
Fruitlands Museum, 2020: Multimedia artist and environmental activist Jane Marsching developed a portable press for display and use at the site of the Fruitlands Farmhouse. She created dyes from walnuts, bark, and other botanical materials harvested in the old-growth forest that is part of Fruitlands’ 210-acre campus. Marsching led groups through the woods and led them on a meditation to create new phrases and make the banners together.
-
Wilhem Neusser: Pastoral Present
Unseen Hours: Space Clearing for Spirit Work, Allison Halter + Maria Molteni
Fruitlands Museum, 2021: This collaboration came from Molteni’s multi-year research of the museum, responding to the grounds, the Shaker collection, and the 1792 Shaker Office that was relocated to the museum grounds in the 1920s. Molteni and Halter, both practicing visual artists and witches, collaborated with filmmaker Gabe Elder to create a film and an installation about the ritual of Space Clearing.
Since its creation, the film Unseen Hours has been featured at GRL Haus Cinema, the Toronto International Women Film Festival, and the Nashville Film Festival.
deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum and Fruitlands Museum, 2022
The artwork in this installation, L-R: Brenda Garand, Sascha Braunig, Shaina Gates.
Greg Lookerse arrived as an artist-in-residence at Fruitlands Museum and The Old Manse in 2017. It was Fruitlands’ first full year integrated with The Trustees after over one hundred years as an independent organization. 2017 also marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau, a writer and naturalist whose presence looms large in this region of Massachusetts and beyond.
Lookerse spent time considering both places and creating art in response to them. His work provides a 21st-century perspective on the lives and stories of the writers, including Louisa May and Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who spent time at each place in the 1830s and ‘40s. Lookerse incorporates books, and sophisticated responses to their contents, in his practice, drawing inspiration from American literature and philosophical writings from throughout time. His artistic concerns bring equal measures of consideration to nature, spirituality, and expression.
Piecework: Resistance and Healing in Contemporay Fiber Art
Fruitlands Museum, 2018: This exhibition was an opportunity to make brave and vibrant suppositions, with humor and heart. Candice Smith Corby was truly the only person for the job. My opinion about that solidified as I watched her paint directly from the portrait of Mary Knight Prince Bishop (1842) onto a small, flat lozenge of porcelain to make Whose Fairest (depicted right). In Mary’s prim smile, Smith Corby saw more than was depicted. She drew upon echoes of her own ancestors, of her grandmother’s and her own moods, ones with which we might also identity.
This Land is My Land: Sue McNally
A New England State of Mind: The Pioneering Collector, Clara Endicott Sears, with Kirstin Lamb
Fruitlands Museum, 2020: An object map composed of nineteenth- century collections objects, including personal archives, of this unique museum collection primarily amassed by museum founder and Massachusetts socialite Clara Sears. Kirstin Lamb, a visual artist and curator based in Providence, Rhode Island, collaborated with me to create a compelling layout and print map. The map was made with digital drawings, each drawn by Lamb, that enabled viewers to identify each object without labels.
Greg Lookerse: Literary Soil
Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA, April -August 2021
On view at Fruitlands Museum April through August 2021, the group exhibition, Piecework: Resistance and Healing in Contemporary Fiber Art, features the work of four contemporary artists—Gina Adams, Alicia Henry, Andrew Mowbray, and Leslie Schomp—who work with textiles and stitching to share inventive, aesthetic approaches to critique and reconcile difficult aspects of American history.
Piecework was the museum’s first major contemporary art exhibition and prominently advocates for the role of fiber arts in contemporary art discourse as an innovative medium that can critique and restore society in equal measure.
Inhabiting Folk Portraits with Candice Smith Corby
Sue McNally is an established artist based in Rhode Island. To create her series This Land is Our Land, she road-tripped annually for over 25 years across the United States and painted alternately personal and iconic views of each state. For Ascutney Revisited, McNally created a painting in dialogue with the 1862 painting Mount Ascutney from Claremont, NH by Albert Bierstadt.
She traveled to find the same view that Bierstadt captured and create a painting is both a tribute and registers how much the view changed 150 years later, with vivid colors and forms contrasting with Bierstadt’s meticulous marks. Museum. In addition to the gallery exhibition, a new, large-scale, stained glass sculptures will echo the shapes of the distant mountain range outside of the gallery.
Image: Sue McNally, Ascuntney Revisited, Revisited, 68 x 80 inches
A New View: Landscapes from the Collection, with Rachel Campbell
Fruitlands Museum, 2018: Durham, North Carolina-based artist Rachel Campbell, originally from New Zealand, contributed three of her landscape paintings to create one of the first artistic interventions at Fruitlands Museum, to interrupt the nineteenth-century paintings otherwise on display in this gallery.