MAGAZINE
ISSUE 07: ROOTING 4
Sawool Kim, Index 13 — roots #3, 2016. Acrylic on canvas. 7” x 11”. Courtesy of the artist.
Boston Art Review is an online and print publication committed to facilitating active discourse around contemporary art in Boston and beyond. BAR seeks to bridge the gap between criticism and coverage while elevating diverse perspectives.
ISSUE 07: ROOTING FALL 2021 Founder & Editor-in-Chief Jameson Johnson Creative Director Julianna Sy Senior Editor Jacqueline Houton Editor-at-Large Leah Triplett Harrington Managing Editor Kaitlyn Ovett Clark Editor & Operations Karolina Hac Editorial Assistant Maya Rubio Design Assistant Nicole Whitted Photo Editor Logan Wilder Contributing Editors Abena Osei Duker Phillip Zminda Finance & Development Manager Sarah Valente Branding Byse Copyright All content and artwork © the writers, artists, and Boston Art Review.
Contributors Marcus Civin Paige Curtis Arielle Gray Elizabeth S. Hawley Raquel Jimenez Sawool Kim Julia Kwon Mary McNeil Olivia Moon Sheila Novak Cassandra Rodriguez Alli Salwen Shuchi Saraswat Sarah Shaw Michelle Stevens Mel Taing Joanna Tam Ilya Vidrin Marguerite Wynter Cover Images Gohar Dashti, Untitled, from the series Uprooted, 2019. Courtesy of the artist, © Gohar Dashti. Published by Boston Art Review Boston, MA © 2021 Boston Art Review bostonartreview.com ISSN 2577-4557 Issue 07 Submissions Visit bostonartreview.com/submit for submission guidelines. All submissions should be sent to submit@bostonartreview.com. Inquiries For general inquiries, including donations, advertising, and open positions, please contact operations@bostonartreview.com. 1
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CONVERSATIONS 20 “It’s My Infinite Indigenous Queer Love”: In Conversation with Jeffrey Gibson by Mary McNeil 48 Artist to Artist: Sawool Kim and Julia Kwon on Hybrid Rhizomatic Identity 70 Reflected Across Time: In Conversation with Eli Brown by Alli Salwen 23
SPECIAL PROJECTS FALL 2021
78 Beyond the Root: Musings on Mushrooms as Metaphors for Blackness by Arielle Gray 82 Shifting Contours by Joanna Tam 88 Can Our Gardens Create Change? The Story of CoVictory Gardens by Sheila Novak, illustrated by Sarah Shaw 81
REVIEWS 98 Roots of Revolution and Diaspora in Firelei Báez’s ICA Watershed Installation by Elizabeth S. Hawley 102 Connecting Histories: Glenn Kaino’s “In the Light of a Shadow” at MASS MoCA by Marcus Civin 106 In a Painterly Field: Tamara Gonzales’s Cosmic Recess at Providence College Galleries by Leah Triplett Harrington 108 On the Way: “A Thread, Extended” at Northeastern University’s Gallery 360 by Maya Rubio
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FEATURES 06 The Radical Act of Growing a Plant: “Garden for Boston” at the MFA by Paige Curtis 58 Dream House: How a Providence Collective Fashioned A Home For Art in a Storied Space by Jacqueline Houton 64 A Museum Minus the Hierarchies: How Two Artists Are Paving the Way for the Future of Art in Fall River by Marguerite Wynter
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12 Communing in Isolation: Rania Matar’s Window Portraits by Shuchi Saraswat 32 Choreographing the Personal: A Profile of Jessica Roseman by Ilya Vidrin 16
36 On Place, People, and Plants: A Visit with Gohar Dashti by Karolina Hac
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE 94 Historical Roots and Future Roots: Reflections on Efforts to Cultivate Culture in Boston by Raquel Jimenez
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ISSUE 07: ROOTING
PROFILES
“It’s My Infinite Indigenous Queer Love”: In Conversation with
JEFFREY GIBSON Words by Mary McNeil Studio Photos by Mel Taing
To ask Jeffrey Gibson about how he came to art-making is to hear a story about connection. Raised abroad, away from his Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee relatives, Gibson regularly made drawings to send to family members as a child. Upon returning to the States, he found companionship and mentorship among his high school and junior college art teachers. And as he attended the Art Institute of Chicago, the city’s house clubs that drew in other queer people of color allowed him to lose himself to the music on a caring dance floor. This history cannot be divorced from Gibson’s work. It is perhaps due to these early experiences of the arts as a mode of community building that Gibson’s most recent works stage important conversations about queer and Indigenous collectivity, belonging, and futurity. Since 2004, Gibson has gained tremendous acclaim for his bold multimedia and multidisciplinary pieces that have found homes in the most prestigious of private and public collections, from the Whitney Museum to the Smithsonian. As I sat with Gibson in the office of his schoolhouse-turnedstudio in Hudson, New York, he explained that with “INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE,” his fall 2021 solo exhibition at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, he is invested in revisiting, refining, and remixing the signature styles for which he is best known. Moreover, he explains that the fringe installations, paper works, and videos that comprise this recent body of work seek to push against the clean lines of a modernist impulse by forcing his viewer to be fully immersed in the sensorial. This summer, Gibson’s Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House made its way from Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City to the deCordova’s front lawn. The gargantuan sculpture, whose aesthetics pull from the earthen mounds of the pre-colonial Mississippian city of Cahokia, is presented as a deeply layered site that eschews notions of property. By inviting other artists to activate the sculpture through performance, Gibson also rejects the notion of singular artistic brilliance, foregrounding collaborative processes of creation and meaning-making. Paper, paint, and beads. Plywood, wheatpaste, and video. There is a lot politically at stake in the amalgamation of these mediums, which I discussed with Gibson two months prior to the opening of his solo exhibition. With this work, he invites viewers to consider better ways of being in relation with our world and one another.
Studio assistants work among several rooms dedicated to paper, painting, beading, or sewing.
The following is an excerpt from our longer conversation and has been edited for length and clarity.
Hand-beaded figures, patterns, and frames are present in many of Gibson’s works.
Mary McNeil: Is your work shaped at all by relationships to particular places of meaning?
the fact that it was created by queer men in their 50s and 60s—that was sort of their place. I really didn’t realize at the time what they were experiencing in terms of the AIDS crisis. They were always so kind to us. The importance of that community and that music to me at the time was kind of organic.
Jeffrey Gibson: Like locations? MM: Yeah. I’m especially thinking of that because Chicago—where you attended art school—is a huge house music city, right? And the title of your sculpture that’s now at the deCordova derives from a house song.
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JG: I guess music has always been important to me. I remember my mother listening to Motown and my dad playing Prince. And when I moved back to the United States in the late ’80s, the cliques in high school seemed to be connected by music. And all my friends were definitely sort of like punks and mods, which eventually evolved into the arty kids. We would go into Washington, DC, and we discovered this club called Tracks. Tracks was the way that lots of people describe their destination nightclub: “30,000 square feet of freedom.” And that’s where there was some house music going on. There was industrial music. There was pop music. But I guess just
Then, when I moved to Chicago, there was definitely a racial split between the clubs, especially gay clubs. There was Halsted Street, where everybody was white and muscled and “gym bunny.” And I was like, “This is not my scene.” And then there was a club called the Boom Boom Room and a spot called Red Dog. And it was just purely house music. I'm not someone who was like, “Oh, I’m into Chicago house.” It’s just sort of what I gravitated towards. [With Chicago house legends like] Frankie Knuckles and Derrick Carter, I remember their sets being joyful. I remember them being soulful. And I remember you could just kind of lose yourself. You could just put everything down and just go in and dance. And I always loved the kind of care that you had for strangers on a dance floor. You didn’t have to actually even know each other.
JEFFREY GIBSON
Details from unfinished works on paper that draw from collaged materials within Gibson’s multi-decade archive.
(this page & last) Portrait of Arielle Gray in her Hyde Park studio, which is shared with Cierra Peters for Print Ain’t Dead. Photo by Cassandra Rodriguez for Boston Art Review.
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BEYOND THE ROOT
Words by Arielle Gray
Musings on Mushrooms as Metaphors for Blackness
None of the women or caretakers in my family have a green thumb. I’m not sure where I inherited mine from. It’s probably a latent inheritance from my great-grandmother on my father’s side or my great-grandfather on my mother’s side, who toiled over their patches of garden to charm vegetables from the soil. My mother and her mother kill plants, even when trying to keep them alive. My father is more interested in his lawn, and his mother seemed to lose touch with her dreams of planting mango trees when she immigrated from Jamaica to the cold of the American north. I used to feel shame about the seeming disinterest in gardening in my family. It could’ve been because of the insistent, recurrent images of Black people as natural cultivators, as being inextricably entangled with the earth. I remember reading Alice Walker’s essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” and feeling a strange sense of loss by the end of it. Too young to see the garden as a metaphor, I asked myself, “Well, what if my mother doesn’t have a garden? What does that mean? Am I missing out on something?”
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When Cierra Peters and I first conceived Print Ain’t Dead, a literary organization and publishing platform centering LGBTQIA BIPOC voices, we unknowingly became unintentional gardeners of a fertile space. Our goal is the liberation of knowledge and the abolishment of barriers to accessing
REVIEW
98. Roots of Revolution and Diaspora in Firelei Báez’s ICA Watershed Installation 102. Connecting Histories: Glenn Kaino’s “In the Light of a Shadow” at MASS MoCA 106. In a Painterly Field: Tamara Gonzales’s Cosmic Recess at Providence College Galleries 108. On the Way: “A Thread, Extended” at
Roots of Revolution and Diaspora in Firelei Báez’s ICA Watershed Installation
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Since 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art has invited an artist to produce a site-specific work during the summer season in its Watershed gallery space in East Boston. Dominican American artist Firelei Báez was preparing a project for the summer of 2020 when the pandemic hit. The installation was postponed by a year, but if anything, the delay allowed the roots of Báez’s commentary on transnational revolutionary histories and Afro-Caribbean diasporic narratives to grow deeper. On entering the space, visitors encounter an enormous mural running fifty feet along a wide hallway that leads into the building. Báez produced this piece by taking an enlarged historical map of the New England coast and overlaying it with swirling sea currents whose roiling blue expanses threaten to obliterate the neatly delineated cartographic composition of the original document. Here and there, snippets of text peek through the waves, revealing instructions for how best to navigate treacherous American shorelines.
Words by Elizabeth S. Hawley
REVIEW
Northeastern University’s Gallery 360
To the left of the unfolding scene, one of Báez’s signature ciguapa figures floats resplendently above the seascape, her jewel-toned petals, verdant fronds, and soft feathers contrasting with the parchment and currents beneath her. Ciguapas are described in Dominican folklore as beautiful and terrifying female entities, and Báez reworks them into symbols of diasporic strength. In the mural the ciguapa disrupts neat narratives of colonial voyages literally—churning the waters—and figuratively, recalling Afro-Caribbean diasporas often subsumed in the archives where maps like this one might reside. Proceeding deeper into the cavernous, 15,000-square-foot Watershed facility, viewers are confronted by a massive stone structure that simultaneously registers as an archaeological ruin submerged in Boston Harbor and a stage set designed to look like such a scene. The stone is actually made of plaster, wood, and metal, and the overtly constructed quality of the installation reminds viewers that history itself is a construction—what and
who we remember, how we remember them, and the ways we link (or choose not to link) peoples, places, and events over time are deeply subjective narrative decisions. Báez is invested in resuscitating overlooked historical and geographic linkages. The soaring yet listing columns and archways in her installation reveal the splendor of a bygone place and time, pulled into the here and now of Boston today. The histories she conjures become a dazzling display of transnational revolutionary roots, as Báez, who is of Haitian as well as Dominican descent, explains that the ruins are inspired by Haiti’s Sans-Souci Palace.
The temporal collapse is heightened by an audio component; as visitors wind their way through the ruins, their movement sets off disembodied voices that emanate from each archway, describing contemporary experiences of migration. The speakers relay their stories in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Mandarin,
ELIZABETH S. HAWLEY
Sans-Souci was built in the early nineteenth century for Henri Christophe, a man of West African descent who was enslaved by British and French Caribbean plantation owners before he became a leader in the Haitian Revolution and subsequently the first king of Haiti. The castle was heavily damaged in an 1842 earthquake and has since sat in ruin, but it remains a monument to revolutionary histories. During the Haitian Revolution, Christophe and other self-liberated enslaved people threw off the rule of the French colonial government, eventually gaining independence and founding the first Black republic in 1804.
By locating the Haitian ruin along Boston Harbor, Báez links the revolutionary and abolitionist heritage of Haiti to that of Boston, a city celebrated for its role in the American Revolution and the national antislavery movement. Accounts indicate that Christophe himself may have served in a French regiment during the American Revolution, and the later liberation of enslaved people in Haiti served as a significant precedent for American abolitionists. If the map on the mural charts geographic distances, then the constructed palace remains collapse those distances. Báez has titled the project To breathe full and free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction (19°36'16.9"N 72°13'07.0"W, 42° 21'48.762" N 71°1'59.628" W), the coordinates referencing both the site of Sans-Souci and the Watershed, locating them side by side. Báez’s project is rooted in a liminal space that refuses the binaries of here and there, us and them, history and imagination, past and present.
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Kaitlyn Ovett Clark is the managing editor at Boston Art Review. In 2015, Clark earned an MFA at Tufts University in conjunction with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her ceramic work often highlights her experience working at a casino. She is currently the exhibitions and public programs coordinator for Tufts University Art Galleries.
Karolina Hac is a writer working at the intersection of art, design, and the built environment. She is an editor at Boston Art Review as well as the head of marketing at Höweler + Yoon. Her writing has been featured in Big Red and Shiny, Amadeus magazine, and Landscape Architecture magazine, among others.
MEET THE TEAM
Jackie Houton is senior editor at Boston Art Review. A former editor of The Improper Bostonian and managing editor of The Phoenix and STUFF magazine (RIP x3), she currently copyedits kids’ and YA books by day. Her writing has appeared in Big Red & Shiny, Bitch magazine, Boston magazine, Pangyrus, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. Jameson Johnson is a writer, editor, and independent curator based in Boston. She is the founder and editor-in-chief at Boston Art Review and the communications and development manager at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Her research practice is rooted in the exploration and preservation of narratives through contemporary information archives.
Maya Rubio works as an events coordinator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and an editorial assistant at Boston Art Review. She recently graduated from Emerson College’s Honors Program, earning a degree in the business of creative enterprises with a minor in art history.
Julianna Sy is a designer and creative director with ties to Boston, Los Angeles, and New Mexico. Her work prioritizes inclusivity and compassion and functions on the principles of artistic expression, mutual aid, and anti-oppression. Sy has been the lead designer with BAR since Issue 01. She is an editorial designer at Not A Cult Media, producing recent titles Zigzags by Kamala Puligandla and Grocery List Poems by Rhiannon McGavin.
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Leah Triplett Harrington serves as assistant curator for Now + There and editor-at-large for Boston Art Review. The founding editor of the publication and platform The Rib, Triplett Harrington also edited Big Red & Shiny from 2013 to 2018. Her writing has appeared in Flash Art, Hyperallergic, WBUR’s The ARTery, Big Red & Shiny, and The Brooklyn Rail. Nicole Whitted is a Black designer and creative with a strong belief that creativity is more than aesthetic—it is a powerful tool to use your voice and amplify lived experiences. In addition to her work as a full-time designer at Ritual, Whitted is a design assistant at Boston Art Review and has created work for Jr. Hi The Magazine, Girls in Film, and Parade.