Issue 11: Emerge (Fall/Winter 2023) Preview

Issue 11: Emerge Tammy Nguyen

The artist joins in dialogue with friend and fellow painter Josephine Halvorson

Artist Residencies

Carolina Porras Monroy gathers perspectives on the impact of space to create

Bodies of Work

Cassie Packard on artists exploring reproductive technologies

CRYSTALLE LACOUTURE

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Contents

3

Letter

Artist Project

1

52

84

From the Editor

by Jameson Johnson

In Exchange

by Guadalupe Campos and Emily Rose Navarro

“Always Be Around: Corita Kent, Community and Pedagogy” at Cantor Art Gallery, College of the Holy Cross

by Maddie Klett

Features 18

The Magic of Artist Residencies with Lavaughan Jenkins, MAGNET, Danielle Epstein, and Dina Schapiro

by Carolina Porras Monroy

Canvases of Camouflage: In Conversation with Tammy Nguyen

by Josephine Halvorson

Bodies of Work: How Contemporary Artists Are Exploring Reproductive Technologies

by Cassie Packard

Alison Croney Moses's wooden sculptures are vessels of care. (front cover) Flame Birch Shell Small, 2023. Birch veneer, 18" x 13.5" x 11". (back cover) Walnut Shell Two, 2023.

Walnut veneer, 32" x 10.5" x 11".

Photos by Mel Taing.

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Introduction

by Boston Art Writing Fellows Fatima Swaray and Poppy Livingstone

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32

ON TH E COVE R

Special Section: On Care

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Restorative Vessels: Alison Croney Moses Holds Space for Healing with an Expansive Woodworking Practice

by Fatima Swaray 70

Documentation and Devotion: Archiving Boston’s Present

by Poppy Livingstone

40

74

Making Her Mark: In Conversation with Jo Ann Rothschild

by Michelle Millar Fisher and Anna Nasi

Now You See Me: In Conversation with Adam Davis

by Niara Simone Hightower

48

80

Community Voices: Artist-Run Projects Making Space in Their Own Neighborhoods

by Jessica Shearer

From the Circle: Storytelling in the Carceral Classroom

by Rebecca Oluwatoyin Thompson

Reviews

87

“Humane Ecology: Eight Positions” at Clark Art Institute

by Marcus Civin 89

“The Myth of Normal: A Celebration of Authentic Expression” at MassArt Art Museum

by Katherine Schreiber 91

“As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic” at Peabody Essex Museum

by Alisa Prince 94

“Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis” at Harvard Radcliffe Institute

by Laurel V. McLaughlin 97

“Faith Ringgold: Freedom to Say What I Please” at Worcester Art Museum

by Karla Méndez 100

“Cristóbal Cea: No Monsters, No Paradise” at Boston Center for the Arts

by Claire Ogden

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BOSTON ART REVIEW

GUADALUPE CAMPOS is a

LAUREL V. MCLAUGHLIN is a

MARCUS CIVIN was born in

KARLA MÉNDEZ is an arts

JOSEPHINE HALVORSON is

MICHELLE MILLAR FISHER is the

MADDIE KLETT is an art

ANNA NASI is a senior at

ontributors

queer multidisciplinary visual artist from Chicago currently based in Boston. Their practice seeks to represent queer and trans experiences outside of the acts of defining and identifying and instead through the community’s relationships with one another.

Boston and has written recently for Afterimage, Camera Austria, Full Bleed, Plus, DAMN, Maake, and BOMB. He is an assistant dean at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

an artist from Massachusetts who makes paintings, as well as prints and sculpture. She is professor of art and chair of graduate studies in painting at Boston University.

writer and researcher living in the USA.

curator, art historian, writer, and educator working as the curator and director of the Collective Futures Fund at Tufts University Art Galleries. She has published reviews, interviews, and features with ASAP/J, Art Papers, BOMB Magazine, te magazine, Burnaway, and C Magazine, among others.

and culture writer focusing on the histories of Black and Latin American women and their representations within visual art, literature, poetry, and performance.

Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she is working on “Craft Schools,” which took her on a train journey across all forty-eight contiguous US states.

Northeastern University studying art history, global fashion, and marketing. She maintains an independent creative practice, and after graduation, she aspires to continue working in museum spaces and researching contemporary art, fashion, and textiles.

CONTRIBUTORS

7

EMILY ROSE NAVARRO is a

ALISA PRINCE, PhD, is a scholar,

CLAIRE OGDEN is a freelance

KATHERINE SCHREIBER is

CASSIE PACKARD is a Brooklynbased art writer particularly interested in the intersection of visual culture and queerness, networks, and worlding. She has bylines in publications including Artforum, ArtReview, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, and frieze and has contributed to art books and catalogs.

REBECCA OLUWATOYIN

Puerto Rican American interdisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses paintings, installations, and repurposed objects and photographs.

Her work focuses on identity, memory, home, and healing through research, visual art, and performance.

arts writer, nonfiction film producer, and film and video curator based in Somerville.

She is the communications specialist at the Northeastern University Center for the Arts and holds a BA in anthropology and media studies from Brandeis University.

artist, and curator of visual arts and artifacts of the Black diaspora. She is currently a postdoctoral associate of the Society of Fellows in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Boston University.

a writer and artist based in Somerville. She writes about art, culture, and the connection between visual and verbal media. She holds a BA from Dartmouth College, where she studied studio art and literature.

THOMPSON is an educator,

writer, and MDiv student studying the nexus between spirituality and art at Harvard Divinity School. Her work gives attention to how people create networks of care in the wake of racial and gender violence.

CAROLINA PORRAS MONROY

(she/ella) is a Guatemalan American artist and residency facilitator who grew up in Florida. She is currently based in North Adams, Massachusetts, where she is studios residency manager at MASS MoCA. Previously, she was executive director at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, Colorado.

Photos: Jeff Weber (Marcus Civin), Sam Gehrke (Laurel V. McLaughlin), Freddie Rankin II (Carolina Porras Monroy)

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BOSTON ART REVIEW

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Canvases of Camouflage In conversation with Tammy Nguyen on the occasion of her major solo exhibition at ICA, Boston Words by Josephine Halvorson

Portrait of Tammy Nguyen inside her Connecticut studio.

Photo by Izzy Leung for Boston Art Review.

For her first solo museum presentation in the United States, now on view in Boston at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Tammy Nguyen has made two panoramic paintings and four large-scale portraits with corresponding artist books, each themed around a protagonist or event that is central to American and Vietnamese cultural identities.

This exhibition weaves together nineteenth-century American ideologies of ownership and nature with land reform programs in Vietnam during and after the war. Nguyen is interested in moral ambiguity, visualizing the way colonization sows the seeds of different belief systems while eradicating histories and hybridizing cultures.

Her work assembles the big storylines and buried ephemera of the past to bring to light the complexity of our present.

I first learned of Tammy from my partner, a historian at The Cooper Union, who was delighted that he had found an art student equally interested in history. I heard about her Fulbright Fellowship to Vietnam, and later, when Tammy was at Yale and I was her critic, I saw how her research into family history played out in epic mythological paintings and exquisite artist books. In the years since, I’ve watched her continue to comb through the tangles of the past and make sense of it through her rich, multidisciplinary practice of collage, painting, printmaking, and writing.

The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

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BOSTON ART REVIEW

together all these things, but aims to do so in a way where the world is one: not just through composition but through materiality.

JH: That density of disparate-

ness, the constant collage of imagery and points of view, is what makes your work so contemporary.

TN: I think that these paintings

are very of our moment—right now—because we live amidst so much information. This painting can only be made now because of the access I have to these types of historical and visual information.

JH: Tell me about some of the

archival information you’re using and the research you undertook for this body of work, which appears in both the paintings and the correlative books.

TN: So the show at the ICA

Tammy Nguyen, Ngô Đình Diêm, 2023.

Watercolor, vinyl paint, ink, screen printing ink, pastel, and metal leaf on paper stretched over panel. 100" x 60" (254 x 152.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. Photo

by Dan Bradica. 2023 © Tammy Nguyen.

is such a material word to me. It suggests the mixing and mingling of things, even those which fuse together to become one.

TN: Things really do derive from

disparate places, times, and histories. For instance, for the ICA show, I made Shot Heard ’Round the World, a fusion of the First Battle of Lexington and Concord with East Asian landscape painting and the propaganda cartoon that I found in the land reformation papers. And this is the Minute Man [statue] that’s in Concord. The painting stitches

was initially inspired by Tyler Green’s book Emerson’s Nature and the Artists. [Curator] Jeff [De Blois] and I talked about it a lot— he was a great person to banter with and gave me the freedom and time to follow the ideas that emerged through what I was reading. It’s amazing how Green draws a clear analogy between what is happening in the United States in the nineteenth century and how the Transcendentalist movement envisioned America, and how that is reflected in contemporaneous American landscape paintings. I started to think about Manifest Destiny as being present in American soft power. And then I started to think about the USAID and other projects led by the Department

of State related to the land reformation efforts in South Vietnam.

During my initial research I found out about a collection of papers in the National Archives and Records Administration located in Maryland. They were the files of J. P. Gittinger, who was the assistant agrarian reform specialist between 1951 and 1957. These papers were all related to the US land reformation projects in South Vietnam during the war. There were many different kinds of papers, and one thing I really liked were the budget sheets that listed all of the expenses, such as machinery and personnel that in theory would organize the land, which, in Vietnam, is a tropical wilderness.

Aside from the accounting, there were also propaganda, cartoons, handwritten notes, and folk songs, some of which I had translated and used in the artist books included in the show. The songs are beautiful and are intended to convince folks of this new way of thinking about making a living in this new economic system.

I used some of the papers in the paintings, like here in Three Vietnamese Officials Study Land Reform, which tells the story of Vietnamese officials who are sent to Thailand and Japan to study land reclamation. There’s a budget sheet which is used in the background. Over there is Ngô Dình Diêm, a portrait of the first elected president of South Vietnam, who really welcomed the United States and was later assassinated. The man lurking is actually the US ambassador at the time, who later became a senator from Massachusetts, which is a great coincidence. I sourced the image from a cover of a magazine.

TAMMY NGUYEN

JH: So you’re bringing

together the history of modern Vietnam—stories and documentation about the ways land was reclaimed and reformed after the war—with American ideas of ownership and liberty, concepts which have their roots in nineteenth-century Transcendentalism?

TN: Yes. I think that the jux-

taposition is valuable because it brings to light these different connections, if that’s the right word, between the two countries. Personally, it’s also exciting for me to explore these

29

issues of moral ambiguity and confusion because I’m interested in thinking about how my own mind was formed. Like how did I come to have the values that I have, right? Why do I think about individualism in the way that I think about individualism as a Vietnamese American woman? I’m interested in drawing these connections, because I’m trying to find some kind of meaning that elucidates my own mind’s formation.

JH: As artists, we are often

drawn to the histories and mythologies that create the

conditions for those of our elders. It’s as if we understand the lineage from those we’ve known personally, but what about those who came before, those just slipped out of reach?

TN: Well, we’re all trying to figure

out that same question we might have asked in high school; “Who am I? Where do I come from?”

JH: OK, I understand this

cultural hybridization you’re describing and visualizing of both Vietnamese and American cultural inheritances. But there’s one painting in this group that I

Installation view, “Tammy Nguyen,” on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston from August 24, 2023, to January 28, 2024.

Photo by Mel Taing.

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BOSTON ART REVIEW

Restorative Vessels Alison Croney Moses holds space for healing with an expansive woodworking practice

Words by Fatima “Tima” Swaray

When I first encountered Boston-based woodworker Alison Croney Moses’s pieces at Piano Craft Gallery last spring, I was in the height of finals at Emerson and in need of a nurturing space to release the pressure of the time. She had organized the show “Un-ADULTerated Black Joy,” a group exhibition by Black mothers and artists, which showcased how Black joy can be an act of resistance and live undisturbed. Her Walnut Shell II (2023) hung from the center of the ceiling, imbuing the room with abundance, while The Joy in Repair (2023) and works from her recent Unsewn series hung on a nearby wall. The room resonated with care, something that

Croney Moses brings both to her art practice and to her work as the associate director of the Eliot School of Fine and Applied Arts in Jamaica Plain.

In August, I spoke to Croney Moses as she prepared for her first solo show, “The Habits of Reframing,” at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery. We discussed her deeply enriching relationship with wood and how her practice of making has developed alongside her practice of care work in profound ways.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

ALISON CRONEY MOSES

FATIMA “TIMA” SWARAY: Starting

off with the “Un-ADULT-erated Black Joy” exhibition, I remember walking into the gallery and seeing this big, velvety walnut shell in all of its sheen and all of its glory. I had never wanted to touch a work so much in my entire life. You’ve said that is the “end goal” when you create an object: to create a piece that people want to touch and interact with. Can you pinpoint what attracted you to the sense of touch from an early age and made it important to your practice?

ALISON CRONEY MOSES: I think

it stems from a childhood desire and curiosity. I have these memories of being in small spaces often—feeling cocooned. Places like the closet, underneath the kitchen table, hiding under clothes racks in department stores. People forget you’re there. I would love to work large enough that you can walk or sit inside. I’m trying to

Alison Croney Moses in her Allston studio. Photo by Stefanie Belnavis for Boston Art Review.

65

incorporate those feelings into the pieces. I’m working to find those entry points for other people to engage with them.

you. What originally drew you to these shell forms, and what keeps you going back to those shapes when you’re creating?

FS: Why wood? What drew you to

ACM: When I was in school, I had

the material?

to make a traditional box, but instead I drew this pod. It was pretty complicated. I remember the professors really wanted me to simplify, but I kept pushing back. I really wanted this curved form. I was so excited that I had found this shape, and I couldn't get it out of my head. I ignored all the professors, made my “box” that was this pod, and I was so proud of it. When I learned bent lamination, I started to experiment with these vessel forms. The process really hooked me. You can get lost and spend six hours on each step. Nature automatically creates a shell-like form when you glue pieces together at these angles. It comes naturally and you see it in everything—in ferns, the way that they furl out, in some flowers and the shells at the beach.

ACM: My dad made furniture with

hand tools. It wasn’t his profession. He made small things around the house and designed them purely for function, painted them white. I have memories of being under his feet while he was doing that and trying to help, which— when I’m looking back—I’m sure was so annoying.

When I was in school, I thought I’d go into graphic design and make money while being creative. It sucked. I saw my friends in the woodshop and they were having fun and learning things, and so I switched to that major. I was in that time of my life where the decision wasn’t as weighted.

I think woodworking is different from other mediums in that it’s so much about this logic of making. You have to do this to do that. You can’t skip steps, and I think the process is really interesting to me.

FS: I love how you enjoy each part

of the practice. So many people are more focused on the end goal than the process it takes to create something.

ACM: It’s really gratifying. That’s

why when so many people retire, they decide to go into woodworking. It’s deeply fulfilling in a different way.

FS: You create a lot of shapes that

hold and allow space. To me, the curves and cradles are very caring.

They seem to receive and hold

FS: It’s beautiful how the shell

shape naturally emerges—always ending up as it’s supposed to, regardless of what you think the outcome should be. You also create wood panels where layers peel away from the surface. I was introduced to them through the Unsewn series. They encapsulate a particularly painful part of your life. What led you to those techniques?

ACM: Before the “Un-ADULT-

erated Black Joy” exhibition, I had pieces in the “Designing Motherhood” show [at the MassArt Art Museum], My Belly (2021) and My Babies (2021).

Those pieces were really the start of investigating my motherhood.

Review

BOSTON ART REVIEW

“Always Be Around: Corita Kent, Community and Pedagogy” at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at Holy Cross

by Maddie Klett

84 87 89

“The Myth of Normal: A Celebration of Authentic Expression” at MassArt Art Museum

91

“As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic” at Peabody Essex Museum “Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis” at Harvard Radcliffe Institute

97

“Humane Ecology: Eight Positions” at Clark Art Institute

“Faith Ringgold: Freedom to Say What I Please” at Worcester Art Museum

100

“Always Be Around: Corita Kent, Community and Pedagogy” at Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery, College of the Holy Cross

94

THE TEN MAXIMS OF the

“Cristóbal Cea: No Monsters, No Paradise” at Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts

Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules welcome visitors to “Always Be Around: Corita Kent, Community and Pedagogy,” an exhibition of prints by the late Corita Kent (1918–1986) alongside works by contemporary artists at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Created by Kent in collaboration with her students, the rules begin “Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while” and conclude with a quote by John Cage: “‘We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.’”

Situated in the campus art gallery, this syllabus-like first encounter may feel habitual to students, although the looseness of the decrees makes them far from doctrine. Kent utilized the rules to run an educational program of creativity, curiosity, and experimentation at the art department of the Immaculate Heart College (IHC) in Los Angeles in the 1950s and ’60s.

A Roman Catholic nun in the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM)

order during these years, Kent produced silkscreened “serigraphs” on paper in her own practice and with her students, integrating the language of social justice and reform with popular advertising. Her print enriched bread (1965) depicts the stripes of primary colors and sans-serif font characteristic of the Wonder Bread brand (“helps build strong bodies 12 ways”).

Within this graphic composition, Kent added a quote by Albert Camus in handwritten script: Some will say this hope lies in a nation; others in a man.

I believe rather that it is awakened, received, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works everyday negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history …

Nourished, here, is the thematic tie to the Wonder Bread sloganizing. Kent believed in culling content from what was ubiquitous in LA’s freeways and strip malls and elevating it with liberatory quotes or imagery. The work’s label, written by college junior Nathan Howard, shares that Kent saw Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962, which inspired her Pop art alignment.

Kent’s works from the 1960s, which largely comprise what is on view, are egalitarian in format and concept. Just as she incorporated commercial references that would resonate widely, Kent chose printmaking for its accessibility. She considered it a democratic medium that made visual culture available to those who could not afford high art.

REVIEWS

85

authorities led to the majority of the IHM sisters leaving the Church in 1970 and forming the Immaculate Heart Community.

Forces of cultural life in LA at the time, Kent and the IHM sisters liberally interpreted the Vatican II Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life, which encouraged members of religious orders to adapt their practices to the needs of modern times. They supported Vietnam War dissenters and contributed signage for various humanitarian protests.

The print phil and dan (1969) from Kent’s heroes and sheroes series reproduces a newspaper image of the Berrigan brothers, both priests, burning their draft cards (Philip Berrigan, the adjacent label notes, was a Holy Cross grad). The nuns bucked up against the conservative Cardinal McIntyre, who considered their liberal interpretation of the decree sacrilegious. This pressure from local ecclesiastic

Kent had already left the order at this time, moving to Boston in 1968 to lead a secular life.

Her reasons for departing were as much about burnout from a crazy teaching and art production schedule as burnout from the Church’s conservatism. The exhibition displays the moments series (1977) from her post-IHM era. The eleven serigraphs feature colorfields of rainbow hues interjected with blooming branches and overlaid with handwritten adages (“flowers grow out of dark moments”). The moments are far less typographic and politically pointed than earlier pieces and mark a shift that mirror Kent’s lifestyle change from campus renegade to studio artist with an abstract bent.

The selection of works by Kent in the exhibition hit these major periods in her oeuvre. For students and East Coasters not familiar with the work, it is helpful to see this retrospective-in-miniature.

Contemporary projects are interspersed throughout, and it is hard at times to understand the logic of the hang. A blown-up page of an artist book

by Mary Lum configures the lettering from the “Papers of Corita” archive at Harvard into a patchwork quilt of illegible cyphers. Inspired by Kent’s deviceful graphic design, Lum’s piece is clearly tied to her legacy.

However, by using the uniform typewritten pages of the archive, Lum’s interpretation

doesn’t formally recall Kent’s often askew, lopsided typography. While this is a completely understandable artistic departure, a topical connection in process or material would have better bridged the new with the old. Kent’s Rules could have been useful here, offering a structure to thematically tie Lum’s work to her vision.

Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo’s colorful wall murals provide a more legible connection to Kent, as the artist employed Kent’s finder method of focusing on one thing through a small cut-out to create letterform abstractions. Dispersed on a handful of the gallery’s moveable walls, the murals offer an exciting departure in scale from the modest prints

(left) Installation view, “Always Be Around: Corita Kent, Community and Pedagogy,” Cantor Art Gallery, College of the Holy Cross.

Photo by Michael Ivins, Holy Cross. (below) Corita Kent, phil and dan, 1969.

Serigraph. Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Los Angeles, corita.org.

WHERE BOSTON WHERE WHERE BOSTON ARTISTS CREATE. ARTISTS ARTISTS CREATE.

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