Issue 10: Recall—Preview

MAGAZINE

CONTE

Curators’ Corner: Coming and Going with Camilo Alvarez, Anthony Greaney, and Lucy Kim by Anthony Greaney

Intimate and Familiar: Revisiting the Boston School by Lynne Cooney

How the Boston School—Thirty Years Removed— Helped Me Find My Way Through Boston by Leah Triplett Harrington

MUSH8NASH: Reclaiming Our Waterways by Tess Lukey (Aquinnah Wampanoag)

Why

by

CONVERSATIONS

Passing the Torch: Edmund Barry Gaither and Danny Rivera on Organizing and Keeping the Faith introduction by Alula Hunsen

Entering a Third Space: In Conversation with Estefania Puerta by Maya Rubio

A Film for Transient Archives: In Conversation with Georden West by Jasper A. Sanchez

PROFILES

Visits and Vigils: Crystalle Lacouture’s Material Memories

by Jessica Shearer

Transcendent Touch: How vanessa german

Transformed an Archive by Kéla Jackson

REVIEWS

ARTIST PROJECTS

Mapping Obsessão by Lyle Ashton Harris with interview by Jameson Johnson

A Hand as a Page by Body & Forma with interview by Kaitlyn Ovett Clark

“Jace Clayton: They Are Part” at MassArt Art Museum

by Toby Wu

“Nafis M. White: Freedom Is My Favorite Position” at Central Contemporary Arts

by Kendall DeBoer

“Mitsuko Brooks: Letters Mingle Souls” at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center by Marcus Civin

“Spirits: Tsherin Sherpa with Robert Beer” at the Peabody Essex Museum by

Sarah Baker

“Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum by

Karla Méndez

I didn’t expect the process of reflecting to be something I would procrastinate, but it took until the night before Issue 10: RECALL was going to print to put pen to paper on my own recollections. Maybe I struggle with anniversaries—or maybe I just struggle with deadlines—but I do know that sometimes it’s hardest to say something when there’s everything to say.

As we entered our fifth year of publishing, the Boston Art Review editors were eager to look ahead. Our team had recently expanded, we were settling into operating as a nonprofit organization, and we were kicking off our art writing fellowship program, a new partnership with Praise Shadows Art Gallery designed to mentor the next generation of art writers in Boston. This momentum felt validating and empowering for a magazine whose volunteer team spent the first four years working on my living room floor and in coffee shops across the city. In discussing BAR’s earliest days, we recognized the importance of looking back before we could look ahead, both for ourselves and for the magazine’s thematic explorations.

Mark Morrisroe, Dismal Boston Skyline, 1986. Vintage chromogenic print (negative sandwich). © The Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection) at Fotomuseum Winterthur. Courtesy of CLAMP, New York.

There are a thousand different directions this issue could have taken. In creating an issue that contends with the past, important questions arose: Whose histories could we cover? Which histories have been overlooked? What histories have been silenced or poorly documented? How can we examine our recent histories in concert with our more distant pasts? How do we write about change without a misguided sense of nostalgia? How does memory inform our cultural zeitgeist?

I am grateful to have spent a moment with artist Ngoc-Tran Vu, who stopped into the BAR office as I was alternating between writing this letter and applying for a grant that might help us secure funding for our first full-time staff member. Vu reminded me that this issue’s themes are connected to the spirit of Sankofa, the Ghanaian word for “retrieving” that is embodied through practices of bringing the past into the future. I’m grateful, too, for the phone conversations I had in the early days of developing this issue with Demita Frazier, a founding member of the Combahee River Collective, who asked me tough questions and who reminded me that there is so much work to be done in untangling the historical systems of power that permeate the cultural landscape of our present. There are many people whose memories and ideas informed this issue, whether shared briefly as we crossed paths at an event or in a quick fact-checking text exchange.

In lieu of pieces that might lead to broad historical conclusions, these pages are filled with mentions, footnotes, and asides that I hope might inspire your own researching of the past or documenting of the present.

The issue is bookended by two features that invited community members to reflect on how they found their way through Boston’s art scene. We kick things off with our Curators’ Corner, where Camilo Alvarez and Lucy Kim discuss the early days of running art spaces that cleverly pushed at the commercial gallery model. Heather Kapplow, meanwhile, engages with five artists who revisit younger versions of themselves and lend advice to the next generation of movers and shakers.

Elsewhere, in an intergenerational dialogue, Edmund Barry Gaither and Danny Rivera delve into the history of the National Center of Afro-American Artists and hold a frank exchange about the very real barriers to entry in cultural organizing, especially for BIPOC-led initiatives that challenge the status quo. Lynne Cooney looks at how the Boston School influenced the photographic medium and what it means to make art in Boston. Tess Lukey writes about how the recent revitalization of mush8n building traditions is connecting Indigenous communities across New England. Jasper A. Sanchez and Georden West discuss how the figures that enlivened queer spaces of the past can be reimagined and memorialized in the present. Kéla Jackson digs into the practice of vanessa german and explores how an entire collection of archival objects can be transformed through touch. And my conversation with cover artist Lyle Ashton Harris illuminates the messy and beautiful layers that emerge when cataloging our own personal archives within the context of broader cultural moments.

Taken together—and maybe with your own memories and experiences interwoven—the pieces in this issue begin to tell a textured story of how we all fit into the tapestry of our local cultural landscape. In Issue 11: EMERGE, we’ll be more or less back to our regularly scheduled programming with an issue that takes what we learned from Issue 10 and invites our contributors to look ahead. We hope you’ll join us.

Thank you for an incredible five years together,

Jameson Johnson Founder & Editor-in-Chief

CURATORS’ CORNER:

Words by Anthony Greaney

Coming and Going with Camilo Alvarez, Anthony Greaney, and Lucy Kim

I opened my gallery space in Boston in 2008 after working at galleries in New York and Los Angeles. I was drawn to the idea of a gallery in Boston because the spaces that were most influential to me were in Boston: Mario Diacono Gallery, the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Rose Art Museum, the old ICA on Boylston Street. These were places where you could see important and interesting work and think about it at your own pace.

When I moved back to Boston, I opened my gallery where it seemed most logical to begin— the SoWa district. People who visited seemed excited but confused; the work was considered distinctly “not Boston,” although a lot of the artists were connected to or from the area. We leaned into the tropes and signifiers of the art gallery—white walls, ambitious programs, good documentation, accompanying texts. I felt it was important to present the work and the artists in the best possible way and in a manner that was understood by the larger art world. We had great shows and introduced a lot of great artists. The openings were attended by a vibrant milieu of artists and thinkers and people just out for a look or a conversation. Many of the artists I exhibited went on to work with big-name galleries, including Kasmin, Paula Cooper, The Pit, and Good Weather.

After five years in SoWa and a longer-than-intended hiatus, I relocated to my present location at 438 Somerville Ave. The gallery is now located inside an old studio building with rickety stairs, slanted hallways, and a view that looks out onto a tiny cemetery. It’s a very Boston DIY space, but in photos, it looks like it could be anywhere. To enter, you walk through my friend Sam Tager’s sculpture studio, but once inside the small gallery, the oddities slip away, and you just see the art.

I’m interested in the physical histories of gallery spaces—how the legacies of past exhibitions are present in every new show. And I like the challenge of trying to make it in Boston—it requires a mix of self-help and personal growth. At times the challenges can seem insurmountable, but it’s something I have grown to accept and even relish. I’ve been able to keep at it largely because I can proceed at my own pace in my own way.

Installation view, “Pure Smoke Culture” curated by Nick Kramer with Sarah Braman, Sarah Conaway, Sean Kennedy, Anya Kielar, Bill Jenkins, Jedediah Caesar, Justin Beal, at Anthony Greaney, 2012.

Photo courtesy of Anthony Greaney.

When approached to take on this issue’s Curators’ Corner, I was asked to speak with people who have also run art spaces or programs in Boston. Loads of places came to mind, but I landed on my friends and colleagues Camilo Alvarez, director of Samson Projects (which became Samsøñ), and Lucy Kim, a member of the project space kijidome. To me, they were two people whose spaces and collectives were pushing the boundaries of what art in Boston could look like at a particular moment. How do you put your finger on cool? I’m not entirely sure. But I do know that what these spaces brought was cool and, most importantly, needed. It was inspiring and competitive and, in my opinion, a gift to the city.

The following conversations have been edited and condensed.

for a couple of years—the lovely offices in Union Square, Maine for the summer, and healthcare!

Camilo Alvarez, Founder of Samsøñ

There’s no straight path that leads to opening a gallery. How did you get your start?

Camilo Alvarez: I was born in New York, New York, and lived in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, during my teens. My parents had come to the US seeking a better life. They were trying to escape what the US wrought on their island but they quickly realized they were being taken by, you know, capitalism. They knew they could afford a better education for me in the Dominican Republic, plus they didn’t want me incarcerated or killed in 1980s NYC. My dad worked as a taxi driver and my mom was a seamstress before that dried up.

Early on I knew I wanted to be in a creative community. When I moved back to New York City it was the club scene at night and museums during the day. I studied art history, thinking I wanted to be an art historian. I was interning all through college and worked at Exit Art and at the Met upon graduation. I decided I didn’t want to work with dead mostly white male artists. Exit Art was so vibrant, and my first exhibition working there was a group show of artists who were living in the gallery actually making work—Susanna Coffey, Nicole Eisenman. I was there for a couple of years.

For a bunch of years in New York City, I literally had a different job every day of the week. I worked for installation crews at blue chip galleries, museums, other nonprofits; I worked for art delivery companies; I worked for artists’ studios. I had a 10,000-square-foot space in Bushwick where I’d throw parties and put together exhibitions. Then I started working at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. I was a program associate there

I left New York (I think everybody should leave their hometown) and moved to Boston. I had never worked in the academic art world, which is a whole other beast. Jane Farver, rest in peace, was the director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center. I had been an intern of hers at the Queens Museum, because her husband, John Moore, was a professor of mine as an undergrad at Skidmore. Bill Arning was the curator there at the time, and I had previously helped him install some shows at Thread Waxing Space in New York. I quickly saw the bureaucratic intricacies of working in an academic art institution. I didn’t want to work in academia. I realized I could open my own gallery.

AG: So what ultimately led you to opening a gallery in Boston? I got to SoWa a few years after you, what were your early days like?

CA: Samsøñ—then Samson Projects—opened in 2004, and it was scrappy in the beginning. I didn’t want to represent artists because I knew it would be heartbreaking and problematic with the close proximity to New York City. I was trying to bridge that commercial and nonprofit feel.

When I first opened, I can’t say I considered that area a gallery district. They had started calling it “SoWa.” Really, the South End was where the queer community and all the artists lived, and I thought it was appropriate for me to live there and also open this “commercial space.” I didn’t want to work for any other galleries. I didn’t want to work in a museum. And I had the wherewithal and luck to get some money to have a down payment and open up a space. And GTI, the property owners which we joked stood for “Gone to Italy,” weren’t very receptive. Luckily, Bernie Toale’s gallery was there then, and he was enthusiastic about having this new dude around.

AG: You put on amazing exhibitions, but also amazing performances and happenings. What were some of your favorite moments?

CA: There were so many favorite moments. I always like to say my favorite show was the current show. I had a hard time closing shows, and those first few years were so inventive and super important.

VISITS AND VIGILS

Words by Jessica Shearer

Crystalle Lacouture in her Wellesley studio.

Photo by Carlie Febo for Boston Art Review.

On a wet day in February, I met artist Crystalle Lacouture in Wellesley. Bundled in our coats, we strode into the sodden suburban wilds of Wellesley College’s campus, her rescue terrier-mix Moo making sniffing loops ahead and around us. Though a quick walker myself, I struggled to keep up; Lacouture’s long, swift lope is a lot like her paintings and prints: sweeping, seemingly automatic but also thrumming with intention, marked by direct lines and unexpected turns.

We had come to walk the labyrinth. Marked out in handlaid stones, the maze looked old, though it was constructed by the college just a few years ago after its predecessor, formed by split logs, started to decompose. Lacouture watched from the edge as I took a dizzying pass on my own, then joined me, so as we talked we coiled around each other, our eyes trained ahead on the narrow twisting path. Revolving, we discussed rituals ancient and modern, the physical and existential processes of grief and healing, and how Lacouture’s art practice—be it through painting, assemblage, photography, or all of the above—works to consecrate the familiar by asking us to recall what is essential in our lives.

Recalling differs from remembering; rather than focusing one’s attention or behavior on the memory of something past, it is an active engagement—a summoning back, a revival into form, be that ephemeral or concrete. For the last three years, Lacouture’s work has centered on articulating her recollections of her beloved mother, who died of Stage IV lung cancer in 2022, and in opening up avenues for others to commemorate their own loved ones. With her MAMA paintings, Eleven Months (Touching the World) photo series, and Lullaby Archive project, she’s been illustrating the power of maternal relationships and clearing out connective paths much like the one we were walking.

Later, back at her studio, I studied her 40" by 35" oil painting Scissors on the Curves (2023) and was struck by the interplay of fresh tonality and archetypal design. The piece is dominated by interlocking rings mapped out in daffodil yellow and pale mint. Within them, pink and salmon circles, their centers bifurcated with angled lines, draw the eye to the center where Lacouture has arranged four ellipses in a murky mossy green, each sporting an unblinking orb—which can’t help but call to mind the evil eye of antiquity. Their pointy ends and daubed dots suggest the fish of Christian iconography or, if you follow them around the contours of their rings, the snakes and eels of more primeval theologies.

Though the palette is solidly contemporary, with shocks of chartreuse and bands of lemon yellow and cornflower blue, the piece feels rife with secret symbols and accentuates the skilled hand of the maker—Lacouture doesn’t use tape or other masking techniques to preserve her shapes. Standing there, I feel as though I’m looking at a twenty-first-century Book of Kells, a codified vocabulary that—like the illuminated texts from the Middle

Ages—promises entry into an intimate and enigmatic world. The kinship with dark-age ciphers is merited: Lacouture studied medieval art history while getting her BFA in painting and printmaking at Skidmore College in New York, and she is drawn to disciplines that privilege rigor and sacrifice.

“Art always felt urgent to me—painting, writing, all of it,” said Lacouture. “I was the first generation from either side of my family to go to college, and I chose Skidmore because I wanted to be at a place where people were serious about many things, people whose drive was inexhaustible and matched my own.”

This sensitivity to the artful in the everyday is something she picked up from her unorthodox upbringing, which saw her shuttled around North America by her French chef father and American mother, a woman skilled in creating warm and welcoming experiences, and who would later go on to become a globally respected herbalist and wellness advocate.

“There was a constant ‘high/low’ style to my childhood that I think informs many of my interests in art and presentation,” she said. “We might have had a terrible, rusty car but our meals were extremely gourmet. Everyone in my family is creative.”

Crystalle Lacouture, Scissors on the Curves, 2023. Oil on canvas. 40" by 35". Photo courtesy of the artist.

After college, Lacouture spent a decade or so in New York City, working at the Lower East Side Printshop and training with the celebrated installation artist Phoebe Washburn and the legendary Nancy Spero and Leon Golub. These relationships showed her how to channel her passion and drive into a focused and sustained way of living.

“It was a very intimate experience being with Nancy and Leon every day. Sadly, Leon died while I was with them. It was my first experience with the death of a loved one,” said Lacouture. “He would draw pictures in his hospital bed describing how he wanted me to find scissors to cut him free of the tubes and wires and break him out of there. I think it was probably from that point on that I felt like my work had to be about more than just formal things. It had to be about something and do something.”

And so it does. With projects like her Memory Quilts, printed photo collages of her children’s outgrown clothing, or Flags to Fold in the Pocket, large amuletic banners made of hand-printed and dyed shikishi paper, Lacouture captures essential aspects of our collective experience through moments of private inspiration or family bonding. At her studio she flits from in-progress project to in-progress project, piles of wood-block prints and heaps of bells waiting to be strung into tinkling strands of “house jewelry” testifying to her protean method of making. She likes to have multiple

pieces going at once, she tells me, as every work informs the others. As they evolve together, they accrue layers of context and meaning, which color, but do not obscure, the pure joy and wonder that lies at the heart of Lacouture’s practice.

“There’s just always been an instinctive need to create, an internal engine that propels the need to work first and then explore ideas and feelings more deeply,” she said.

“I think that’s maybe why I’ve always loved outsider art. Howard Finster, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Bill Traylor. The directness of style and the desperate, obsessive need to make even without an ‘art world’ audience. I relate to that.”

In October 2020, her practice and its ideal audience narrowed drastically as she contended with her mother’s tragic lung cancer diagnosis. She would survive less than two years, passing in February 2022, enduring the entirety of her treatment during COVID quarantine. To cope, Lacouture concentrated her art practice into a daily vigil, painting bright, glyphic messages to her mother on archery targets she found at a sporting goods store, imbuing the geometric abstractions with the full force of her adoration, and titling, or signing, or addressing them, in blocked, almost childish capitals: MAMA.

“Practices of repetition and accumulation have always felt devotional to me,” she said. “The act of making

A selection of photos from Crystalle Lacouture's Eleven Months (Touching the World) series hang in her studio. Photo by Carlie Febo for Boston Art Review

small drawings at my desk rather than big paintings on a wall felt radically and physically different. Because the papers are already charged with language and designs that imply violence, speed, and action, and the shapes have intense directionality, I thought I could manipulate that innate power and redirect it towards her healing. A bit far-fetched maybe, but when you’re faced with uncertainty and loss, you’re willing to suspend disbelief.”

The commitment, the routine, the evocation—all of this calls to mind the story of one of Lacouture’s favorite artists and influences, Hilma af Klint, whose large abstract paintings claim a sisterhood with her own in terms of vibrant palettes and biomorphic imagery. But where af Klint’s practice required her to act as a receptive conduit for larger outside forces, Lacouture’s demands a conscious distillation of her active attention, anchoring rising pyramids and blooming arcs to the canvas with strong bands of color and pattern, parameters that fasten the pieces starkly to the present. While this duality has been evident in her paintings for years, the daily ritual of the MAMA series has strengthened the immediacy and urgency of the work.

“I do think the MAMA series contributed to a change in my paintings. I started to think about the paintings as objects that related to bodies, or bodies in spaces,” she said. “Working with centrally focused, often symmetrical compositions, I try to create a highly focused station in which to engage with color, shape, and possibly sound—a mutual vibratory relationship.”

With the Eleven Months (Touching the World) series, she situated that station on the tip of a finger. For the eleven months following her mother’s passing—the traditional length of time set aside for mourning a parent in Judaism—Lacouture kept a heart painted on her left thumb (her mother was left-handed) and took photographs of that same hand touching objects that she wanted to share with her mother. One snapshot finds the marked digit plunged into the pulpy insides of a pomegranate that she’s washing in her kitchen sink; in another, the hand rests on the forehead of her sleeping child. The series has only recently been completed, with the artist planning to collect the resulting 355 images into a book.

“No one had taught me anything about grief,” she said. “It was overwhelming, and this project helped me organize it into little daily parcels. In each of these casual, possibly unremarkable moments there was a real pause in remembering her. The heart was visible to others but private to me, though every two weeks when I went to the nail salon, I had very beautiful and gentle exchanges with the woman manicurist, who would talk to me about my ‘Mama heart.’”

Such exchanges are what, ultimately, compel Lacouture to the studio. As in the medieval iconography she’s so fond of, her practice revolves like an ouroboros, giving and receiving in order to give again. Going forward, she hopes to expand on the connective qualities of her work by generating further opportunities for collaboration with projects like her Lullaby Archive, a crowd-sourced collection of songs that live within, and can be played from, a dedicated website. Late last year, she kicked off the project by mailing hundreds of postcards to friends and colleagues. The front of the card depicted her mother nursing an infant Lacouture, her face angled away from the camera and down to gaze at her child; the back invited anonymous submissions, encouraging folks to submit the songs that were sung to them as children, or those that they themselves sing to their loved ones. For now, the archive is online only, but Lacouture can imagine future lives for the project, possibly recording the songs herself or even transmuting the collection into live performance.

“When my mother passed, there was a moment during the private viewing when my family gathered around the casket, and my sister and I—without discussing it in any way—both stood up and began to sing. The whole room took on a resonance,” she said. “I want to create those moments for others, to help people navigate into the center of a shared experience.”

There are two kinds of labyrinths. The first, made famous by Theseus and his Minotaur, is a multicursal maze; the second, possibly even more ancient and adopted as a symbol of many faiths, is unicursal, with one route in and one route out. These mazes have been laid into the entryways of monasteries and cathedrals since the Middle Ages. Rather than a riddle of false starts and bewildering branches haunted by a monster, they are a single, sinuous

In her studio, a selection of Crystalle Lacouture's MAMA series hang. Photo by Carlie Febo for Boston Art Review

path leading you exclusively to the center and, in many traditions, to God. In February, Lacouture and I walked the latter, and I couldn’t help but recognize the kinship between the diagram and Lacouture’s practice: the steady traversing of sacred dimensions, the dedicated, rapt absorption given to the task, and the resolution to find the available blessings in every boundary. //

Jessica Shearer is a senior editor at Boston Art Review.

Crystalle Lacouture in her Wellesley studio.

Photo by Carlie Febo for Boston Art Review .

“There’s just always been an instinctive need to create, an internal engine that propels the need to work first and then explore ideas and feelings more deeply.”

Portrait of Estefania Puerta inside of her studio in Burlington, VT.

Photo by Ashleigh Howard for Boston Art Review

I visited Estefania Puerta’s studio in Burlington, Vermont, the day after time slipped. We all lost an hour of sleep. Daylight savings time is a slippery passage—a little surrealist, a little “Earth-fi,” as Puerta’s turn of phrase goes. Puerta’s work digests these sorts of cosmic questions and transmutes them into sculptures and vessels. Foraged objects, earth matter, and gestural postures all enter Puerta’s assemblages, generating a sensual language of body and nature. Works like Coyota (2022) reveal Puerta’s interest in ancient tablets and haptic language. The aluminum-leafcovered panel holds materials like mugwort, bristles, an excerpt from Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, shells, and quartz. The tablet seems to exist in an ancient future, transcribing primordial forms with an air of mysticism. Puerta relates her work to seed banks, offerings that carry forward cultural, familial, and personal memory, which begets questions: What is carried, how is it carried, and what becomes of the material that leaks out?

Puerta was two and a half when she and her family moved from Colombia to East Boston. She attended a Catholic middle school in the suburbs— which, she said, was her first visceral experience of otherness. That’s when she stopped believing in God and started listening to Slipknot. Growing up undocumented and dreaming of imagined families and lands (she visited Colombia again for the first time at age twenty-four) are personal histories deeply embedded in her work. Massachusetts audiences may have last seen her work on view in the “New England Triennial 2022.” Puerta exhibited four pieces, including Madre Pétalo Ala (Para Gloria) (2022), a soft, wall-mounted sculpture that resembles a monstrous claw or mossy, pillowy orchid. Sprouting from the tips of the fronds are glass bulbs with inky mushrooms inside. On the floor below the sculpture are Colombian shot glasses filled with aguardiente, a popular Colombian liqueur. The piece conjures a love offering to Colombia and her mother (again, blurring the lines between earth and body). Medicina Fantasma (Ghost Medicine)The act of healing (2021), another sculptural assemblage on view, evokes an operating table. A beehive-like foam body rests atop the table—from it, ghost pipe tinctures and plants protrude. Many of Puerta’s pieces defy categorization, thus occupying an unfixed, abject world that opens up simultaneous meaning.

Puerta has many exciting presentations on the horizon, including ones at NADA New York, Proyecto N.A.S.A.L. in Mexico City, Micki Meng in San Francisco, and an outdoor installation at Lyles & King in New York. Clay eggs and talons lay in progress in her studio. She is also preparing for a voyage, as she just received the Rome Prize, a research residency hosted by the American Academy in Rome. Together in her studio, we flipped through the Voynich Manuscript and discussed slippery language, worldbuilding, and maintaining the mystery.

The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

Entering a Third Space: In Conversation with Estefania Puerta

Words by Maya Rubio

Estefania Puerta: Before we begin, if I start rambling or trailing off…

Maya Rubio: I love it. It’s so interesting sharing things out loud. The impossibility of translating what you feel. Writing’s nice, because you can control it better, but it also becomes annoying, because you can refine it forever. Your visual work really embraces that untranslatable quality. A lot of it seems to reside in a linguistic gap, which opens up a ton of meaning.

EP: Have you read “Grids” by Rosalind Krauss? It’s this really wonderful investigation around how structure helps organize chaos. The grid can be a really spiritual form because it’s holding everything all at once instead of it seeping out constantly. I feel like language is also holding something that is usually seeping. I’m really interested in how we can organize and hold that excess.

MR: Your Instagram caption for Madre Pétalo Ala (Para Gloria) says leaky bodies make the world. That sculpture feels like a webbed hand, leaking with glass bulbs full of inky mushrooms. I love how you describe your sculptures like bodies.

EP: Yeah, not only human bodies, but mushroom bodies. It’s the leak that then creates the thing.

MR: Which is why we love rambling. It is the leakiness that creates the thing.

EP: Yes. And you’re never going to say it all. I always say that too with artwork. You’re never going to make one piece that encapsulates everything you’re thinking about in your work. Every piece holds a thing. But it can’t hold it all.

MR: You did a lot of early performance work that looks so fascinating. You were on America’s Got Talent. I would love to hear about how that started.

EP: As someone who felt like I had to live in the shadows a lot, putting myself out there in this gregarious, absurdist way felt like a really important act of empowerment and self-actualization. It also felt really exciting to collaborate with other people.

MR: There’s so much chance encounter that happens in performance. It’s such an exciting exchange.

EP: Totally. There’s always a call and response, if it’s with an object or another person. And then

I met someone who was a puppeteer and we became a performance art troupe. We traveled around Latin America and in the US and did a lot of street performance. I got really interested in that tension between what is a functional thing and what’s a sentient being. My interest in that transcended anything to do with my body being a part of it. I’d rather walk away and have someone else activate these pieces by just existing with them or having the pieces demand their own performative space.

MR: I love expansive concepts of performance and theatricality, how an object resonates vitality, or spaces that have an energetic charge within them.

EP: The question around what’s visual and what’s an experience is interesting to me. When you can see touch. I trip out a lot on how making art is touching something into existence. Like you touch it so many times that all of a sudden one day it activates. I’m really interested in the indexical history that objects can hold, which, in some ways, are permanent performances.

MR: I saw Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart on your shelf, which I’m slow reading right now. I read five pages and then I reread them, like, did I read this before? It feels totally different. It’s amazing.

EP: Yeah. I think that’s also because of the way she shifts her voice so much. You can follow so many different stories or different consciousnesses happening all at once. Which is what I love about Lispector. There’s this impetus to want to define yourself or have conviction. But I feel like conviction sometimes gets conflated into thinking that you can never be ambivalent. And ambivalence is such

a deep aspect of being a human. I just love the way she writes something and then undoes it in the next sentence or questions it in a different voice. There’s something about it that’s just that feeling of truth.

MR: It maintains the mystery. It really is not so much about finding truth necessarily but the general processing of it. Questions without answers.

There was a line in the book that made me think of you: “the first truth is in the earth and the body.”

Your work uses earth matter and thinks a lot about gestural forms and performative objects. I’m curious how you connect earth and body.

EP: I’m interested in how those lines can continue to get blurred. Because in some ways there’s no such thing as earth and body. It’s the same thing. Right? Or thinking about the earth as a body. I’m really interested in the biomorphic ways in which the earth and the body have a call and response to each other.

Inside Estefania Puerta’s studio in Burlington, VT.

Photo by Ashleigh Howard for Boston Art Review

P 65

INTRODUCTION

PP 66–67

TYPOGRAPHIC POSTERS, 2022–23

PP 68–69

A HAND AS A PAGE

PP 70–71

GLOSSARY

INTRODUCTION

Body & Forma is the collaborative design and publishing practice of Chen Luo and Chuck Gonzales. Their work focuses on researching, writing, and unlearning strategies that reevaluate and reconnect with cultural tradition, often involving collective publishing and sharing. Chen proposes and demonstrates a new interplay of activities and interrogative exercises with a focus on the relationship between the body and graphic design. Chuck examines Filipino domestic design tendencies, including the humor evident in written and verbal communication. Body & Forma was launched in 2022 and has since worked alongside Draw Down Books and Radical Characters and participated in design panels, and workshops at art book fairs, and design symposiums.

[2 ↑] The name Body & Forma is an amalgam of their theses in graduate school, where the two first met. Chen’s thesis is called On/Off/In/Between: The Body in Graphic Design, and Chuck’s is called Pro Forma Unlearning strategies are the central themes that link their practices together.

[3 ↓] Body & Forma primarily works remotely. Chen is based in Boston, while Chuck is based in New York.

REVIEWS

116. “Jace Clayton: They Are Part” at MassArt Art Museum

120. “Nafis M. White: Freedom Is My Favorite Position” at Central Contemporary Arts

124. “Mitsuko Brooks: Letters Mingle Souls” at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center

128. “Spirits: Tsherin Sherpa with Robert Beer” at the Peabody Essex Museum

132. “Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Words by Toby Wu

Forty speakers stand in an ellipse. Two openings allow you to pass through the ensemble, along two benches, toward a waist-high wood plinth where aux cable, lightning cable, and Bluetooth enable you to conduct this chorus. Resting on custom birch stands, the speakers are positioned at eye level and angled inward, no longer transmitters and amplifiers of sound, but attentive bodies awaiting your input.

This silent anticipation is a central conceit of Jace Clayton’s 40 Part Part (2022), an interactive installation featured in the North Andover–raised artist’s first institutional exhibition in Boston. Clayton invites the public to coauthor this work, relying on the ready-made soundtracks available through their connected electronic devices. Staging un-playing “instruments” in a gesture recalling John Cage’s 4'33" (1952), Clayton seems as interested in the viewer’s experience of silence in awaiting action as he is in composed sounds. The silence of inaction, or more precisely in this work, before action, is still populated by noise—museum goers shuffling about tentatively, reading the wall labels and instructions

engraved on the plinth, unsure of committing to filling the room with their music.

Clayton cultivates boldness, empowering a museum goer to subject strangers in this capacious open space on the MassArt Art Museum’s second floor (and its neighboring galleries) to a personal playlist. In semi-private settings, both real and virtual, music is curated through the contemporary mixtape, Spotify playlists and the like. 40 Part Part invokes these social transactions in the semi-public square, asking you to share before you receive. Instead of an eight-track playlist, visitors have a singular choice of song to interrupt the silence.

What does Clayton himself offer in this open proposition of plug and play? Drawing on his practice as a DJ, Clayton programs this installation with an unseen algorithm that modulates, compresses, and distorts the electronic input provided. The No. 1 hit in the museum goer’s device enters the world transformed, often vocalized first in a random corner before quickly traversing counter-clockwise across

“Jace Clayton: They Are Part” at MassArt Art Museum

the congress of speakers. This spatialization of private sounds is immediately reminiscent of a cinematic experience, but noticeably more directionally hyper-specific as Dolby 7.1 is upgraded to forty parts. While surround-sound setups are often engineered to cleave environment from space, enclosing a viewer in a sonic womb, 40 Part Part remains intentionally porous. The track freezes, skids, skips; it passes through the thinnest high-pass filters, breaks down into the equivalent of 8-bit sounds of game over, never coalescing into an overwhelming tidal sonic wave. Without contorting the source material beyond recognition, Clayton’s algorithm injects the tracks with an animated ecstasy that experiments with every available frequency. The participant who offers this track undoubtedly fills in the blanks, continuing its melodies in their head when the speakers offer only delays and harmonies. Crucially, the title of the work itself recognizes that even the amplification of a singular track across a chorus of speakers is still yet a sliver of the fabric of sounds one experiences at any point in time; forty parts are still a part of an unruly whole.

Yet, one wonders whether 40 Part Part is truly social and connected to its larger environment or perhaps still forms a unilateral exchange between the artist and members of the public. On the lazy Sunday

afternoon when I experienced the work, I watched as seven individual strangers fumbled to connect their devices, frowning quietly at choosing the perfect classical piano recording, flamenco accompaniment, and pop vocal ballad. Having become familiar with the connecting options, I helped when needed, listening and somewhat uncomfortably lingering on one of the two wooden benches. On a whim, I asked to connect my phone through the lightning cable while someone was broadcasting their song by Bluetooth. Although one more person could have conceivably joined us by aux cable, the two-track playback was pure chaos, the algorithm mutating from elegant contemplation into enraged rebellion. 40 Part Part wasn’t entitled 40 Part Parts for a reason.

While these chance encounters are indeed ephemeral, Clayton’s commitment to polyvocality is evident in this exhibition. First presented at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) as a commissioned work by the FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art and the New York Philharmonic, 40 Part Part accumulates its own history of sound despite having no predetermined output. Originally conceived after Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet (2001) in the CMA collection, where a similar forty-speaker setup played a recording of Thomas

Jace Clayton, 40 Part Part, 2022. Forty speakers on stands, wooden benches and plinth, electronics, custom software. Courtesy of the artist and MAAM. Photo by Mel Taing.

Words by Kendall DeBoer

“Nafis M. White: Freedom Is My Favorite Position” at Central Contemporary Arts

I lost a pink tooth gem biting into a thick and sticky piece of licorice. It was probably the fourth or fifth piece of licorice I had eaten that evening, an offering from artist Nafis M. White. She brought me and other visitors to her Self Portrait (2020–present), which consists of numerous glass jars laid out on a long wooden table—each jar full of a different variety of licorice. She encouraged us through a tasting of sweet, salty, bitter, and mild flavors.

Even as she welcomed and invited our participation, I felt hesitant. On a sensory level, I know that I am not a huge fan of licorice. On a more philosophical level, White, in calling the work Self Portrait, had already identified her personhood with the licorice, and I felt like eating the licorice would be violent. I vocalized this feeling, and White reiterated that

the candy is an invitation, an offering, and because I enjoyed White’s company so much, I participated. I wanted to be a part of her work.

Participation, spatial perspective, environment, atmosphere, time, and attendees are just some of the many variables that influence the aesthetic and thematic resonances of White’s work. It is fitting that White altered the atmosphere of the exhibition space itself by coating the gallery’s windows with over two thousand rainbow-colored cellophane squares. This patchwork of plastic foregrounds a sense of connection between artworks, space, sensory experience, and human beings; it is a deliberate dissolution of the barriers that demarcate “art space” from “non–art space” or “exhibition” from “neighborhood.”

Nafis M. White, Self Portrait, 2020–present. Installation view, Central Contemporary Arts, 2023. Black licorice, glass jars. Courtesy of the artist and Cade Tompkins Projects.

Like high-artifice stained glass, the windows project affective tones in the exhibition space, with moods that mediate sunny and overcast days into differing, shimmering color-plays. The confectionary checkerboards also transform the surrounding environment outside the bounds of the building itself, especially in the evening, when the indoor lighting turns into a kaleidoscopic beacon for neighbors and passersby. Cellophane becomes a conduit for joining outside and inside, a bridge between an enclosed building and the community that surrounds it, and also a means of emphasizing ongoing and continual change.

Self Portrait, with its many consumable licorice components, is one of many works in the space that synthesize pleasure and pain, plenitude and loss, and affirmation and negation as they negotiate ephemerality and Black queer femme experience. Walking through the space, I was entranced by a wall full of various sculptures from White’s Oculus series. Twisting, serpentine, effulgent, blooming hairworks—in colors ranging from

chocolate browns and raven blacks to magenta, emerald, cyan, scarlet, and lime—constellate with one another, sometimes including zippers and leather garments from White’s own closet as a nod to kink and queer culture. The artist describes her materials as “synthetic hair, embodied knowledge, ancestral recall, audacity of survival, and bobby pins.” Each Oculus is its own accumulative, abundant mass of conjoined fibrous bunches woven into braids and meticulously sculpted floral forms.

Though exuberant and joyful, the works also suggest absence and mourning, along with persistent communal survival and care. The Oculus series remixes nineteenth-century Victorian hairwork, a meditation on death and remembrance that attests to women’s creative faculties and dedication to relational bonds of intimacy in friendships, families, and communities—even amid mass death. These Victorian constructions, made from traces and remains from loved ones, take on a different and powerful inflection with racialized materials and the specter of racial violence. White’s work

A selection of Oculus works (on wall) and All In (After Tony Feher) (floor piece). Installation view, Central Contemporary Arts, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Cade Tompkins Projects.

“Mitsuko Brooks: Letters Mingle Souls” at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center

For her solo exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Brooklyn-based artist and archivist Mitsuko Brooks’s epistles hang from wire or nestle in lattice-like ribbon arrangements suggestive of decorative bulletin boards or letter racks from another age. Tacks and pins hold the ribbons taut. A sign lets you know it’s OK to slide these hardbacked postcards out from behind the ribbon and off the wall to look at both sides, as long as you wear white gloves and return everything to where you found it.

Words by Marcus Civin

Brooks’s correspondence as art is melancholic, diaristic, and sincere. In mail art, as in music, there can be sad, haunting songs. Brooks’s body of work is full of letters that resonate like songs—such as Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas singing about selfimage and being there for each other in “everything i wanted,” 2019. They sing, “As long as I’m here, no one can hurt you.” Brooks’s self-soothing, warmtoned collage Mail to self postmarked 5/23/2020, includes an apology and statements on her hopes for herself: “My wish for you is to make peace with your violent childhood and re[ach] forgiveness to your alcoholic white father and Japanese mother. I am sorry your primary caregivers were/are shells of adults and cannot love and care for you the way you wanted and needed. You are already on your way to heal, building back your self-esteem, being your own parent.”

The show’s title, “Letters Mingle Souls,” is a quotation from a seventeenth-century poem, “To Sir Henry Wotton,” by John Donne. The phrase appears on US stamps commemorating the foundations of the global postal system. One of those commemorative postage stamps features a painting by the famed hyperrealist John Peto, Old Time Letter Rack (1894) in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which shows letters stashed in a rectangle of pinned-up pink strips. Donne, like Brooks, relied on letter writing to pursue spiritual connections. “To Sir Henry Wotton” laments the state of the world and attempts to put Donne and Wotton’s friendship on an intimate plane above ordinary life.

The works on view here often appear to have been sent and then retrieved. They’re all about the same size—the smallest measuring roughly three by five inches, the largest roughly ten by twelve. Many feature Brooks’s handwritten capital letters in cursive and with curlicue serifs. These letterforms run edge to edge on cast-off book covers and on top of found images showing toy horses, trees, floral patterns, and the like. Brooks has shown similar works widely in solo and group exhibitions in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Oregon. For When you feel alone, 2022, over an image of the heavily fortified main tower of Osaka Castle in Japan, the artist wrote the reminder “there are so many people around you that love you.” For Mail to self postmarked January 4, 2019, she wrote to her future self at age forty-seven about hoping the older Mitsuko was highly successful as an artist, still worked in a library, and had by then saved money, fixed her teeth, and found an antidepressant that “doesn’t make you gain weight and feel flat but allows you to really let go of social anxiety.”

In another letter, Mail to Andrea Sisson postmarked Sept. 11, 2020, the artist asks questions as a check-in on her friend, then shares that she wants to loosen the unhealthy hold she feels objects have on her. This letter seems to have started as typewritten text on paper that Brooks then glued to a brown book cover. In the middle of the second

Mitsuko Brooks in the exhibition “Letters Mingle Souls” at Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. Photo by Josh Steele.

paragraph, it appears she stopped typing and switched to stenciling letters, perhaps to highlight a couple of the items she was thinking of letting go: her father’s music box from Japan and a spoon from her parents’ house in Maryland. Brooks grew up with pen pals and has been writing letters as art for more than ten years. In the last year or so, she’s started making large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas that reproduce and enlarge one side of her earlier postcards, though none of these paintings are on view here.

In the gallery, there is a desk with a short stack of blue paper and a cup of markers and pens. Visitors will find the invitation “If you have lost someone and wish to write a note or letter to them, please use the paper provided and add your note to the installation by tucking it into the ribbons.” One note in the gallery the day I visited said, “You never gave up on me. I guess I wish you hadn’t given up on yourself.”

Next to this note, another work, Mail to Forrest Borie postmarked 2018, hangs like many of the others, within a rectangle of ribbon. A marbleized pattern on the former book cover consists of orange, crimson, and blue striations encircling what resemble geode-like gray bubbles. Brooks embedded in this surface a typed quote from Marie-Louise von Franz, a twentieth-century Jungian psychologist: “If one lived quite alone, it would be practically impossible to see one’s shadow because there would be no one to say how you looked from the outside. There needs to be an onlooker.”

Do there need to be onlookers and survivors? As part of a statement introducing the show, Brooks describes herself as someone who has lived with suicidal ideation, was diagnosed as bipolar, and has experienced domestic violence. The show comes with a content warning issued by the museum. Suicide prevention resources are available on-site and online. In addition to writing to herself and friends, as a

(above) Installation view, “Mitsuko Brooks: Letters Mingle Souls,” Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, 2023. (left) Mitsuko Brooks, Mail to self postmarked January 4, 2019, 2019. Postage stamps, book cover, typewriter ink, rice paper. (center) Getting to know you, getting to know all about you, 2018. Book cover, vinyl letters, paper. (right) When you feel alone, 2022. Postcard, watercolor, paper, stamp. Courtesy of Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. Photo by Erin Jenkins.

(below) Installation view, “Mitsuko Brooks: Letters Mingle Souls,” Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, 2023. (left) Mitsuko Brooks, Mail to self postmarked 5/23/2020, 2020. Book cover, paper, watercolor, stamps, typewriter ink. (right) To Ye, 2022. Book cover, stamps, typewriter ink, gouache, paper. Courtesy of Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. Photo by Erin Jenkins.

“Spirits: Tsherin Sherpa with Robert Beer” at the Peabody Essex Museum

Spirit (2009), a mixed-media work on paper, is part deity, part human. The blue face, stylized orange hair, and crown are that of Mahakala, protector of the dharma and the Kathmandu Valley. Normally fierce, here he crouches, the backs of his hands resting on the ground; he’s naked except for a loincloth. With a wide-eyed stare and open lips, he looks unsure, even bewildered. His skin is mottled with photos the artist found on the internet when he googled “Tibetans in the diaspora.” The picture has the colors and precision of a thangka painting, but this figure is not in his grid. He seems vulnerable, exposed, and maybe even a little lost—the way many people feel when they leave their homes to live elsewhere. This being carries his homeland in his face, but his body is something else, somewhere else.

Spirit appears near the beginning of the beguiling exhibition “Spirits: Tsherin Sherpa with Robert Beer,” a show whose works amaze, enchant, and evolve from inwardly focused and autobiographical to externally connected. It is a mid-career retrospective for Sherpa (b. 1968), considered one of the most important Nepali artists today, and originated at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) adapted it to focus on migration and immigration and how one balances multiple identities when living in a new place. In 2009, when Sherpa began the Spirits series, he was living in the diaspora, in Northern California, and was remembering his grandmother’s tales of the spirits of the Kathmandu Valley, where he grew up. These spirits inhabited the rivers, the valleys, the mountains, even the marketplace. He wondered what happens to them when they have to leave home.

Sherpa is Tibetan but was born and raised in Nepal.

From age twelve years on, he learned thangka painting from his father, Urgen Dorje Sherpa, a master in this rigorous and meticulous art form, and studied philosophy and Buddhism at the monastery across the street from his childhood home. Thangka is a style of painting on cotton or silk usually depicting a deity or scene from Buddhism. Originally thangkas were created for meditation and instruction, so the deities needed to be exact.

Words by Sarah Baker

Artists use grids, specific colors, strict measurements, proportions, and body positions determined in Buddhist scripture.

To show the precision of this work and the context of Sherpa’s art education, PEM interspersed hand-drawn works by Robert Beer throughout the exhibit. In the 1960s, Beer moved from the UK to Kathmandu to study the symbols and motifs of Tibetan Buddhism. He mastered the technique of thangka painting and created The Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist Symbols, which, not surprisingly, is found in many tattoo parlors today. Beer drew these works with a thin sable brush, “most of them taking fifty to two hundred hours to complete,” says Lan Morgan, assistant curator at PEM. He worked around the clock for six weeks, for example, to make his grid drawing of the Thousand-Armed Avalokiteshvara (1980). The works are so flawless, they could be machine-made. Beer’s work has become a touchstone for scholars studying Buddhist art.

Sherpa, firmly rooted in this tradition, has busted his deities out of their grids. They strut, they pose, they dance, they question. On to the old symbols and motifs, he layers the new: dripping paint, bubblegum, briefs, and butterflies. (“Sherpa is fascinated by the phases of a butterfly’s metamorphosis because he had lived in so many different kinds of environments,” says Morgan.) The show is East meets West, old meets new. The spirits are fierce and vulnerable.

In 1988, Sherpa left Nepal for Northern California, finding work as an artist at a Buddhist center in Sebastopol. There, he was exposed to different modes of art, including Andy Warhol, whom he found a “particular alignment with because of the way Warhol uses images and manipulates them,” says Morgan. His practice started to evolve. To make some extra money, a friend commissioned him to paint a truck “Nepali style”; Jamba Juice hired him to illustrate some ads. “That [Jamba Juice] commission was something that sort of gave him permission to start playing with Buddhist symbology,” says Morgan. He became interested in consumerism and questions about economics.

SARAH BAKER

In Oh My God-ness! (2009), made with gouache, acrylic, and gold leaf on board, the young spirit’s crouched body wears only polka-dotted briefs, referencing Damien Hirst’s spot paintings. A halo behind his head is a cacophony of logos and symbols: Coca-Cola, Air Jordans, DVD, a soccer ball, yin-yang. How does this displaced spirit handle and make sense of all of those influences, all of that noise? It’s overwhelming.

Many of Sherpa’s earlier spirits are uneasy and self-conscious. As the show progresses, the spirits become more self-confident, and the work less

autobiographical. Conqueror (Gangnam Style) (2013) is a reinterpretation of the deity Vajrabhairava and references a video Ai Weiwei made of himself in handcuffs dancing to the K-pop song “Gangnam Style” to protest his 2012 arrest by the Chinese government. Here, according to Morgan, Sherpa was aligning Ai Weiwei with the monks and nuns of Tibet who were setting themselves on fire at the time. And in Tara Gaga (2016), the first female deity Sherpa painted, he conflates Tara, one of Buddhism’s most beloved goddesses, with Lady Gaga, inspired by her performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards.

Tsherin Sherpa (American, born Nepal, 1968), Tara Gaga , 2016. Gold leaf, acrylic, and ink on cotton. Private Collection of Nassib Abou-Khalil, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photo courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum.