Odd Spaces
Odd Spaces Performance Art Event and Panel Discussion will launch the MFA’s new performance art program, involving the Boston arts community in a discussion on this new initiative, and the role of performance art in museums today.
The increased presence of performance art at the MFA shifts the relationship between spectators and art to one of social exchange. While performance art often references visual art and art history, it also has a firm grounding in the present, in everyday life, and in human-to-human interactions. Where, then, is performance art’s place in a museum environment? How can performance art expand the ways we experience and define art?
Participating artists Marilyn Arsem, David Levine, John Gonzalez, Sandrine Schaefer and Philip Fryer probe these questions by performing in places where art might not typically appear at the MFA. Odd Spaces is imagined as a conversation in which diverse voices resonate across physical space. Kate McNamara, Tony Schwensen, David Levine and Sandrine Schaefer will engage in a discussion moderated by Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art & MFA Programs, Liz Munsell, at 7pm in Alfond Auditorium following the performances.
Funded by the generous support of The Contemporaries.
Panel discussion co-presented with Big Red & Shiny.
This is a FREE event. Wednesday nights after 4pm admission is by voluntary contribution. Photo credit: Sandrine Schaefer Ghandi’s Flame, 2012 photo by Daniel S. DeLuca
See mfa.org for more information.
Press:
Raphael Montañez Ortíz - WHAT DOES FLUXES HAVE TO DO WITH IT
MARCH 27, 2013 at the Museum of Fine Arts
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Remis Auditorium, 161
FREE
Since the late 1950s, Raphael Montañez Ortíz has directly engaged with the violent and destructive tendencies of society through found objects and action-based art. A veteran of Fluxus and the Destruction Art movement of the 1960s, Ortíz is best known for his piano destruction concerts, but his practice encompasses film, video, sculpture, and subtler forms of performance art. At the MFA, Ortíz invites Boston-area performance artists, students, and the audience to engage in a new performance,WHAT DOES FLUXES HAVE TO DO WITH IT, 2013, which will be followed by a video screening of several rarely seen works.
This is a FREE event, from 7-9 pm on Halloween night. Visit the facebook event page for more details. Wednesday nights after 4 pm admission is by voluntary contribution. Arrive early to explore the galleries and visit Slippery Surfaces, a video art exhibition in the Krupp Gallery (264) that includes a mesmerizing laser scratch video by Ortíz: The Kiss, 1985.
Funds provided by the generous support of Carolyn Fine Friedman and Jeremiah Friedman.
Organized by Liz Munsell, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art & MFA Programs
Image: Raphael Montañez Ortíz, Henny Penny Destruction Concert, 1967
For the event page, visit Raphael Montañez Ortíz at MFA Boston
on/sincerity
808 Gallery, Boston University (808 Commonwealth Ave, Boston)
OCTOBER 26 – DECEMBER 16, 2012
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 6-8PM
While social and cultural life seems increasingly dominated by cynicism, superficiality, and disengagement, the artists in on/sincerity cultivate transparent, open, or charged relationships within their artistic practices. By consciously seeking to narrow the distance between the viewer and their artwork, these artists generate honest and meaningful connections that resonate throughout the exhibition space.
The theme of sincerity is approached through four fluid narratives to engage a few of the myriad readings of this commonplace yet enigmatic term: Artists who describe their collaborative processes and interactions with materials as both the means and the content of their work; artists whose work serves to build relationships and community through generosity and exchange; artists who employ their own bodies as expressions of intimacy, vulnerability, or the complexity of human relations; and artists who appropriate the manipulative visual languages of mass-media to create self-reflexive forms of communication.
Artists are Magda Archer, Ivan Aragote, Juan Betancurth, Davis/Cherubini, Charles Gute, Jessica Gath, Kalup Linzy, Institute for Infinitely Small Things, Jesse Kaminisky, Carlos Martiel, Rob Matthews, Anne McGuire, Taylor McVay & Jordan Tynes, Laurel Nakadate, Platform2, William Powhida, Jordan Tynes, Analia Saban, Wayne Stokes, Douglas Weathersby, and Suara Welitoff.
Curated by Lynne Cooney, Exhibitions Director, School of Visual Arts, and Liz Munsell, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and MFA Programs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Related Events:
Saturday, November 3rd, 6pm
Platform2 & the Institute for Infinitely Small Things present:
Failure Support Group
An evening to share failed creative projects and eat cookies in a supportive environment.
Wednesday, November 14, 8:00pm
For You I Feel Lucky
A participatory performance by Jessica Gath
Wednesday, December 12, 6pm
Gallery Talk
with Curators Lynne Cooney and Liz Munsell
Ongoing through December 16, 2-4pm every Saturday and Sunday
Jordan Tynes’ Radio Context project, a radio portrait of the exhibition broadcasted and recorded every weekend in 808 Gallery. See radiocontext.com for the archives of interviews and more information.
PRESS:
Krupp Gallery - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
June 2012 – July 2013
Curated by Liz Munsell, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art & MFA Programs
An image is not a physical thing – Can it be stretched, rolled, melted, or scratched? Our culture teaches us to immerse ourselves in the content of moving images – the seamless sequences they depict and the stories they weave together. But since the modern era, artists have increasingly questioned this uncritical form of looking. The videos in Slippery Surfaces make us notice the screen’s surface as much as the images themselves. Representing different generations, cultures, and visual media, these artists draw our attention to the delivery of their imagery’s content by interrupting the picture plane and disrupting the passage of time. Joan Jonas skips her own footage on videotape through a delayed recording, while Raphael Montañez Ortíz physically scratches a vintage film on laser disc, and Takeshi Murata transforms digitalized movie frames into oozing “electronic paintings.” In doing so, they each heighten our awareness of time unfolding, and expose the ideologies behind images as complex – and slippery – subjects.
Review of the Havana Biennial - Bomb Magazine »
Ángela Ramírez, No hay tal lugar (There is no such place), 2012
Curated by Liz Munsell
Featuring: Jessica Mein, Daniela Rivera, María Rondeau, Johanna Unzueta, Ingrid De Aguiar Sanchez
In 1979 the Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld created the “art action” A Mile of Crosses on The Pavementby intersecting the dotted lines of a Santiago street with sections of white tape. In doing so she disrupted any ambivalence to the forces that direct movement in the city, and refused a singular reading of even the most innocuous of signs.
Everyday Angles is an exhibition of five Latin American women artists currently living in Boston and New York. Like Rosenfeld, they each incite visual re-readings of public spaces and ordinary architectural elements. Inspired by yet removed from their cities of origin, a distancing from the familiar enables their fresh-eyed, critical perspectives. Mein’s billboards works, Rivera’s knit street line, Unzueta’s felt hardware, Rondeau’s tactile cityscape, and Sanchez’s hand-printed walls all borrow their forms from the organized architecture and grids of urban environments, but they engender the ominous authority of such commanding structures with evidence of human touch.
