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Over the past decade, Chakaia Booker has become one of America's most important contemporary sculptors. Chakaia Booker: In and Out is the largest and most comprehensive museum exhibition of this African-American artist's work to date, and represents the wide range of Booker's practice from the mid-1990s to the present. The exhibition includes monumental outdoor sculptures, indoor sculpture in a wide variety of formats and sizes, drawings, and photographs.
Chakaia Booker is best known for the material and process that characterize the majority of her work: cut-up automobile tires that are reassembled on wooden or steel armatures to create abstract sculptures. This recycled material, and the surface patterns that it creates, reference African textiles and body decoration to evoke issues of black culture, identity, gender, and environmentalism. Formally, Booker's work is engaged in dialogue with the history of Western sculpture, from the ancient and classical tradition of the human figure through the Modernist non-objective sculpture of the twentieth century. What sets her work apart, and significantly expands upon the history of sculpture, is her ability–with rubber tires–to create surfaces on objects that resemble skins, feathers, scales, spikes, armor, or attire. These surfaces, in concert with their underlying forms, serve as metaphors for a potent range of emotions and psychological states. Booker's sculptures can seem alluring, threatening, encompassing, vulnerable, majestic, humorous, ominous, or tender. In and Out refers simultaneously to the indoor/outdoor placement of the sculptures, the complex dialogues among surface/structure and mass/volume/void in each work, and also to the sexually suggestive images in some of Booker's work.
Chakaia Booker: In and Out is supported by a generous grant from the Lois and Richard England Family Foundation. The accompanying exhibition catalogue has been supported in part by Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY.
Barbara Norfleet's interest in Americana and social history has taken many forms over the course of her 50-year career as photographer, curator, professor, and social scientist. Barbara Norfleet: Landscapes of War highlights the Cambridge-based artist's most recent work in photo-collage alongside her seminal 1990 portfolio, The Landscape of the Cold War, from which the newest series stems. For this new work, Norfleet juxtaposes found, hand-painted photographs of botanical specimens with cropped test prints of her poignant black and white images of high-security, Cold War military sites from the 1990 portfolio. The constructed triptychs are at once formal studies, historical records of U.S. war preparation, and meditations on the environmental issues that confront us today.
Both the recent collages and the Cold War portfolio are products of Norfleet's larger sociological study, the Aesthetics of Defense, by which she documented the effects of the Cold War on the American landscape and people. During the Cold War (1945-1991) the U.S. military commandeered thousands of miles of land in the West to build, test, and power weapons in the name of national security. In the late-1980s Norfleet traveled to sites like the White Sands Missile Range and Holloman Airforce Base in New Mexico to photograph the armed landscape and interview the people living in these military zones. The resultant photographs became the raw material for Norfleet's later photographic series and the larger project culminated in an unpublished manuscript of the same name, selections of which are on view in the exhibition.
By collaging photographs of the Cold War sites with floral postcards in her recent work, Norfleet opens the images to new interpretation. The photo-collages speak to the life of images as objects that can be included in institutional and personal archives as records and as art. Through the process of collage, the images are reborn into new conversations and integrated into alternate archives and histories. As an amalgam of visual material collected over the span of 50 years, the collaged images also represent an archive of the artist's practice. In line with Norfleet's multidisciplinary practice as artist and sociologist, Barbara Norfleet: Landscapes of War presents the artist's newest series as a subject for interdisciplinary study.
The 2010 deCordova Biennial exhibition is the newest iteration in deCordova's long history of showcasing contemporary art in New England. Beginning with the Artists/Visions exhibitions in 1989, which became the long-running deCordova Annual, deCordova has been committed to showcasing the works of regional artists for twenty years.
Now occurring every other year, The deCordova Biennial provides a sample of New England's contemporary art scene, emphasizing the quality and vitality of the art being made in this region. Occupying almost every gallery, nook, and crevice of the Museum—from our elevator to the rooftop terrace—this Biennial is the largest the Museum has ever undertaken. The seventeen featured artists this year—selected from hundreds that were considered—work across media and also span generations, acknowledging the rich and often overlooked history of our local producers.
While the show is not organized around a theme, there are some commonalities that emerge. Following the intergenerational make-up of the exhibition, time emerges as a prominent theme—either referring to the temporality of process or in the form of history as a cultural construction. Other artists address issues of politics and power, whether imaged in protest or in architecture. The built environment lurks in a number of sculptural installations and videos as emblematic of our recent economic crash and stand-ins for human culture, as other artists address the natural environment and our increasingly complex relationship to it. A maximalist, or complex visual aesthetic, seems to loom large over much of the painting and installation on view, although quiet nods to art's minimalist past appear throughout the galleries.
These are just a few of the threads that weave in and out of this exhibition, and many more will emerge over the course of the exhibition. It is the goal of this Biennial to showcase just a sliver of the talent, vision, and variety one can find in New England today.
The 2010 deCordova Biennial was organized by Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch, with the assistance of an Advisory Board:
Mark Bessire, Director, Portland Museum of Art
George Fifield, Director, Boston CyberArts Festival
Jennifer Gross, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Gallery
The 2010 deCordova Biennial has been funded by the Deborah A. Hawkins Charitable Trust.
Featured Artists:
Greta Bank
Ross Cisneros
Georgie Friedman
Paul Laffoley
Philip Lique
Xander Marro
Christopher Mir
Liz Nofziger
Oscar Palacio
Otto Piene
William Pope.L
Randy Regier
Ward Shelley
Laurel Sparks
Mark Tribe
August Ventimiglia
Karin Weiner
Watch August Ventimiglia install his chalk drawing in the Museum lobby.
San Francisco-based painter and installation artist, Eric Hongisto creates theatrical experiences with imagery derived from geography, physics, biology, and numerical data. For PLATFORM 2, Hongisto will create Black Swan Event, a site-specific installation that transforms deCordova's Window Gallery into a space for experiential immersion and reflection on current events. From November 10th through the 20th Hongisto will be on-site to install an expansive, multi-surface wall painting based on abstracted financial graphs and charts. Hongisto's playful distortions create landscapes of nonsensical data that raise questions about the analytic, financial, and communication systems we use to understand an inherently disorderly and chaotic world.
The title of Hongisto's installation references an influential book written by economic philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2007, which given recent economic events seems eerily prescient. Taleb posits that our understanding of the world and economic models are fraught with fallacies and omit important information. As his example, Taleb relates that in the eighteenth century Europeans had only seen white swans, leading them to conclude that all swans were white. However, the "discovery" of a black swan in Western Australia belied this conclusion and demanded a revision of knowledge. People now use the phrase "black swan event" to describe the unlikelihood of individuals and markets to accurately assess the possibility of events and information we cannot imagine or have never encountered.
As part of the PLATFORM program series, Black Swan Event engages deCordova's unique architecture, physical location, and the current social environment. Featuring early and mid-career artists from both the New England and national artist communities, PLATFORM shows are intended to serve as a support for creativity and expression of new ideas and as a catalyst for dialogue about contemporary art. Black Swan Event is Hongisto's first project to overtly use the visual language of economic and financial systems, and in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008 the installation fosters a timely discourse about art, museums, and the socially constructed fabric of economic, communication, and knowledge systems.
PLATFORM 2: Eric Hongisto is organized by Koch Curatorial Fellow Nina Gara Bozicnik and is accompanied by a full-color exhibition brochure.
The 2009-10 PLATFORM series is funded in part by James and Audrey Foster.
In collaboration with one of Boston's premier venues for photography, the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University (PRC), deCordova has invited their former curator and now independent curator Leslie K. Brown to organize an exhibition from the Museum's extensive photography collection.
In addition to touching upon the history of photography portfolios as it relates to photohistory and the history of collecting multiples, Out of the Box highlights the history and strengths of deCordova's permanent photography collection. DeCordova's holdings offer a unique opportunity to explore this topic as nearly one fifth of the photography collection's over 1,400 prints are from portfolios.
Selections from eleven portfolios will be featured, ranging from the very first photographs to enter deCordova's collection in 1980—an abstract portfolio by Calvin Kowal—to well-known leaders in the field such as Larry Fink and Neal Slavin. In addition to the most recently acquired photographs from 2009—a portfolio by Jo Sandman—Out of the Box will also highlight the entire PRC Portfolio, published in 2008, including luminaries such as Emmet Gowin, Laura McPhee, Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Abelardo Morell, and Patti Smith, among others.
This exhibition also initiates a new curatorial program: inviting guest curators and artists to explore deCordova's collection and bring to it new viewpoints. This offering is coordinated by Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch.
This exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from the Lois and Richard England Family Foundation.
Boston-based artist Andrew Mowbray inaugurates the PLATFORM program. Mowbray investigates the life of objects through a mixture of sculpture and performance, questioning the boundaries between body and object in the process. For PLATFORM 1, Mowbray presents Tempest Prognosticator, a series of works that explore our contemporary relationship with weather. The title of this exhibition is derived from an ornate Victorian device created to forecast weather conditions using leaches. Mowbray uses the controlled conditions of the gallery as a lens for observation, comparing its supposed sterile, objective nature to a scientific laboratory. He literally interjects his body into the process by using it as an instrument of measurement—wearing a human-scaled anemometer or over-sized umbrella. This exhibition includes sculpture, performance video, and drawing. As a response to deCordova's site as the highest point in Lincoln, Massachusetts, Mowbray has created his largest drawing machine to date for the Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Roof Terace. Please be sure to visit it on the 6th floor. Organized by Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch.
PLATFORM is a series of solo exhibitions by early- and mid-career artists from both the New England and national arts communities. These shows focus on work that engages with deCordova's unique architectural spaces and social, geographical, and physical location. The PLATFORM series is intended as a support for creativity and expression of new ideas, and as a catalyst for dialogue about contemporary art. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color brochure.
The 2009-10 PLATFORM series is funded in part by James and Audrey Foster.