13: Make Believe
Tomashi Jackson How place and social practice appear in her career retrospective
Revisiting Shaker and Spiritualist Movements Esoteric disciplines driving social justice then and now
Disability and Design Sara Hendren and Emily Sara on radical reimagination
TEAM
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Jameson Johnson
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Marcus Civin
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Sara Hendren
Erwin Kamuene
Soyoung L Kim
Maddie Klett
Deanna Ledezma
Maria Molteni
Zach Ngin
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Josh Rios
Anthony Romero
Emily Sara
Kate Schreiber
Grace Talusan
Michael C. Thorpe
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Robin Hauck
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Gloria Sutton
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Tomashi Jackson, Time and Space (1948 End of Voter Registration Line) (1965 LBJ Signs the Voting Rights Act), 2020. Acrylic, Pentelic marble dust, Ohio Underground Railroad site soil, American electoral ephemera, and paper bags on canvas and fabric, 89.375 x 83.75 x 8 inches. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Family Collection. Commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University.
Holding a Mirror to Heaven
How parallels between the Shaker Era of Manifestations and early Spiritualism movements might inform our present by Laura Campagna and Maria Molteni
Blueprints for Building Something Big Indigo Arts Alliance is supporting Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists in Maine and beyond by Jessica Shearer
48
A Lifetime of Layering
How Tomashi Jackson moves between history, place, and an ever-expanding practice by Alisa Prince
38
Bringing Accessible Design Thinking Out of the Classroom
In conversation with Sara Hendren and Emily Sara Intro by Jameson Johnson 62
Rendering the Self as Myth, Monster, and Muse
In conversation with Hakeem Adewumi by Erwin Kamuene 68
On Kinship with Land and One Another In conversation with Deanna Ledezma, Josh Rios, and Anthony Romero Intro by Jameson Johnson
86
“Alive & Kicking” at Colby College Museum of Art by Maddie Klett
90
“Barbara Bosworth: The Meadow” at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston by Kate Schreiber
93
“To a Returning Cloud: Inas Halabi” at Brookline Arts Center by Zach Ngin
96
“Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith” at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts by Karolina Hać
100
“Scandalous Conduct: A Fairy Extravaganza” at Great Friends Meeting House by Marcus Civin
104
At the ICA, Caribbean Artists Provide Portals to Other Worlds, But Who Enters? by Jordan Barrant
Profiles 24 Ripple Effect
Lani Asunción confronts colonial pasts while envisioning liberated futures by Grace Talusan
The Art of Stagecraft
Local theater makers offer a behind-the-scenes look at designs that work magic on stage
Intro by Jacquinn Sinclair
Project 72 Masks
Intro by Kaitlyn Ovett Clark by Soyoung L Kim, Laura Beth Reese, Michael C. Thorpe, and Beatriz Whitehill
“John Vo” at Worcester Art Museum by Toby Wu
106
“Displacement” at MassArt Art Museum by Shana Dumont Garr
Dear Friends,
Alas, no editor’s letter this issue, I’m sorry to say. We’re fresh out of editor’s letters. The editor’s letter has run dry. The editor’s letter factory has closed. The editor’s letter went on strike after years without a raise.
A stranger asked if the editor’s letter might change its name—it’s not so obvious, you know? What is the letter anyways? What if you called it an editor’s welcome? The editor’s welcome said thank you.
An advertiser asked if the editor’s letter had ever considered selling advertisements. The editor’s letter said yes, that’s why I’m contacting you. Would you like to purchase an advertisement?
The editor’s letter tried to be a screenplay. The editor’s letter used Courier New to make it real.
[EDITOR’S LETTER taps slowly at a keyboard.]
[A timer interrupts. Pomodoro complete. Editor’s letter turns off the whirring window AC and heads out of the room.]
The editor’s letter did not know how to be a screenplay. The editor’s letter could only be an editor’s letter.
Just try once again. Make believe it’s an editor’s letter! Pretend. Dream it. Act it out. Roll it around in your mouth. Spit it out. Is the editor’s letter ready yet? Did you reheat it? Did you take it next door? Can you wrap it up, actually? The editor’s letter will take it to go.
An investor advised the editor’s letter to use AI. It would only take a few gallons of water, a server, forty electric fans. Optimize! Innovate on such a tired form. Isn’t the editor’s letter extremely busy?
[The whirring sound of a large language model trying to be an editor’s letter fills the room.]
With gratitude for your readership, playfulness, and trust over thirteen issues,
Jameson Johnson Founder and Editor in Chief
My editor’s letter is based on very recent and very real interactions and was not made using ChatGPT. In lieu of summarizing the work you will soon encounter, I invite you to turn to the next page. For a more thoughtful overview of the inquiries and subjects that inspired this theme amid the bleakness of our current political, social, and climate upheaval, please visit our website.
JORDAN BARRANT is a Chicago-based writer, curator, and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the cosmological intersections of the ineffable, the South, and the Caribbean. Through oral histories, archival research and an ecopoetic practice, Barrant views the past as an invitation to imagine brighter, more loving futures.
LAURA CAMPAGNA is a writer, astrologer, tarot reader, and energy healer from Boston. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College and a BA in gender studies from Antioch College. Campagna believes in the power of storytelling to shape and save lives. They publish on the intersections between social justice, astrology, queerness, and magic.
MARCUS CIVIN was born in Boston. He received an MFA in studio art from the University of California, Irvine, and a BA in theater from Brown University. In addition to BAR , his writing has appeared in Afterimage, Artforum , Art in America , Art Papers, Aufgabe, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail , Camera Austria , Damn , Full Bleed , Maake, Plus, Prospect Art , and Sculpture, among other publications.
SHANA DUMONT GARR is a professor and curator at Emerson College and a doctoral student in art and philosophy at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Her research explores spirituality and technology as it impacts human relationships with other-than-human beings. She was the curator of Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts, from 2015 to 2022.
KAROLINA HAĆ is a writer working at the intersection of art, culture, and the built environment. She has been a contributor to Boston Art Review since 2018, and her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic , Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Big Red & Shiny. She currently leads marketing and communications at Höweler + Yoon Architecture.
SARA HENDREN is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Northeastern University. Her art and design works have been exhibited on the White House lawn, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Vitra Museum, and many others, and her work is held in the permanent collections at MoMA, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Cooper Hewitt.
ERWIN KAMUENE is an South African-born and Massachusetts-raised writer studying English, editing, and publishing at Emmanuel College. Kamuene was a 2024 Boston Art Writing Fellow with Boston Art Review and Praise Shadows Art Gallery. He is currently an intern at Beacon Press.
MADDIE KLETT is an art writer and researcher living in the US.
DEANNA LEDEZMA, PhD, specializes in the history and theory of photography, Latinx/e contemporary art, and life writing. She is the postdoctoral research associate and writing lab director of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative.
MARIA MOLTENI (they/them) is a queer interdisciplinary artist, designer, mystic, writer, and independent researcher. Since their first visit to living Shakers in Sabbathday Lake, Maine (2007), Molteni has worked in Shaker Village archives of Canterbury, Hancock, South Union, and Harvard/Shirley. Molteni holds a membership with Lake Pleasant Spiritualists and a seat on the board of the Golden Dome School.
ZACH NGIN is an art worker and writer based in Providence.
JOSH RIOS is a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he teaches courses in research-based practice. As a media artist, writer, and educator, he examines the histories, presents, and futurities of Latinx and Chicanx subjects and resistance to globalization and neoliberalism, highlighting intercultural contact.
ANTHONY ROMERO is a Boston-based artist, writer, and organizer committed to documenting and supporting Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. He earned his MFA in performance from SAIC and is an assistant professor of studio art at Dartmouth College. In collaboration with Matt Joynt, Rios and Romero are Sonic Insurgency Research Group.
EMILY SARA is a queer, disabled, neurodivergent artist, designer, and educator. Sara specializes in accessible design and a studio practice that critiques the medical industrial complex and societal control over disabled bodies. Sara is the founder of cripple, a
publishing initiative that is an extension of her art and design practice. Cripple exclusively supports the work of other disabled artists and designers.
KATE
SCHREIBER is a writer, artist, and designer based in Somerville. She is currently studying landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she’s exploring the blurry boundary between the natural and built environment, as well as the relationship between landscape, image, and text.
GRACE TALUSAN is the author of The Body Papers: A Memoir and teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University.
How Tomashi Jackson moves between history, place, and an ever-expanding practice
Words by Alisa Prince
SITTING DOWN WITH TOMASHI JACKSON IN HER studio in Somerville, I was looking up at the quadrant of ash, soil, and marble dust samples posted on her wall when she said, “I have these dreams. I have had these dreams since I was a very small child, and a lot of them have come true now.” Jackson has cultivated her own visual language combining painting, printmaking, photography, video, sculpture, fiberwork, and performance to alchemize her material layers into layers of time and space. The Cambridge-based artist has accomplished so much around the world throughout her career thus far, from artist residencies in Denver and Athens to exhibiting at the Whitney Biennial and publishing numerous books. “Across the Universe,” Jackson’s mid-career retrospective, is her first major show in Boston— on view at the Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) through December 8. The exhibited works reveal Jackson’s scrupulous analysis of her subject matter and the materials used to portray it. That’s what those earth samples on the wall were about.
Across the studio from her samples of natural materials, and sandwiched between handwritten notes on the wall, Jackson projected archival images onto her canvases. The varied light created shadows and highlights, shifting all the painted colors and adding depth to textures—just one method of forming layers in her work. A medley of soul, R&B, and dance music played on her speaker. She spoke to me about her process: “There is time,” she said, “to explore, study, create, exhibit, and rest.” Jackson finds balance within these actions by allowing her goals to guide her and learning from all that piques her interest along the way. She is grounded in every phase and has embraced this cycle from the start.
As a teenager, Jackson left Los Angeles to attend the San Francisco Art Institute. Upon her arrival she was enchanted by the action taking place outside of school, from the abundant colorful murals to the social justice events incited by the city’s self-organizing communities. Eager to pursue art that shared this vibrance and rigor that she was not finding in art school, Jackson deferred during her first year.
But she was a dreamer with a plan. Jackson outlined goals that were characteristically unbound
by discipline and material expectations, and indeed she accomplished all of them. She served as an apprentice to master muralists Juana Alicia, Susan Cervantes, and Emmanuel C. Montoya and participated in a two-woman show, “Soul on Rice,” at Togonon Gallery in San Francisco before moving back home to LA in 2001. There, Jackson completed her first mural, Evolution of a Community (2004), incorporating photographs of residents of the West Adams District where it was created, and met her longtime best friend, Nia Evans. Evans is now the director of the Boston Ujima Project, which organizes neighbors, workers, business owners, and investors to create a community-controlled economy in the Greater Boston area.
Jackson recollected sitting with Evans in Roscoe’s House of Chicken ’N Waffles in their twenties, drawing on napkins and thinking that they were talking about unrelated subjects of art and education. Jackson and Evans’s friendship is a remarkable paradigm of loving and supportive relationships between brilliant and ambitious women. Despite working in different fields, the two find important connections across their projects by way of Evans’s commitment to labor relations, education, and policy and Jackson’s insistence that we keep the history of all of those in focus through art as we consider our contemporary moment. In 2010, the two arrived on the East Coast.
During their early years in Boston, Jackson studied at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning while working as a nanny. Evans worked for the Boston NAACP and called Jackson in to document their joint effort with the Boston Lawyers’
The 2014 coalition sought to prevent school bus services for middle schoolers in public schools from being defunded. Cloaked in her own prismatic handknit garments, Jackson dove in and embarked on an extensive study of school desegregation focusing on the work of Thurgood Marshall.
Later, while earning her MFA at Yale University, Jackson continued to study school desegregation using the university’s law library. It was during this time she happened upon Josef Albers’s seminal 1963 text Interaction of Color. Back in the studio, she chuckles, recognizing that all of her art teachers had been influenced by Albers before she studied him. Albers’s admonition that color is not static stuck with her. She was intrigued to find similarities across the language used to describe de jure segregation and color: Both Marshall and Albers recognized that color is relative and its perception is dependent upon the color nearest to it. As such, no color is absolute, and there is simply no grounds for segregation based on color. Across her oeuvre, multi-tonal acrylic threads, inks, and paint attest to the artist’s exploration of this truth; Jackson’s work routinely asks us to reconsider how we interpret color—in art and society.
Haunted by the nationally covered acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer in Florida, Jackson turned inward at the complexity of her position as a Black woman caregiver for white children in Cambridge while Black children across the river in Boston faced the precarity of their safe transportation to and from school. Her days were marked with tearful meditations on the lack of protection for Black children and all that is endured before
adulthood sheerly because of the perceived color of our skin. She thought about how the world got to be this way and what contemporary audiences need to better understand it.
Resolved in eclecticism, and under the tutelage of artist Michael Queenland at Yale, Jackson developed a series of questions that guide her work: Can color be a vehicle of complex narrative? Can complex narrative be a vehicle for emotion? Can emotion be a vehicle for sound? Can sound be a vehicle for color?
When we met, Jackson drew a wheel on a sheet of paper and labeled each spoke with each of these questions to explain how one feeds into the next in a cyclical process. Light and the figure are at the center bore of this wheel. Jackson excels at open inquisitive thinking with signposts as she
treads through her work. A 2016 trilogy of works now on view at TUAG encapsulates Jackson’s commitment to layering histories, mixed materials, and colors: Color Study in 3 Reds, 2 Blacks, 2 Greens; Dajerria All Alone (Bolling v. Sharpe (District of Columbia)) (McKinney Pool Party); and Dajerria All Alone (Eric N. Mack).
Color Study might appear to be a tubular shawl or infinity scarf, but Jackson views it more like a painting. The piece uses multiple shades of the three colors associated with the Pan-Africanist triband: red, black, and green. As each color is added, all preceding colors shift. The different shades interrupt one another—a thin bright green line cuts into the black stripe at one edge while a more subtle earthy green passes through the other side of that green. Color Study is framed and folded such that its horizontal stripes intersect and overlay each other.
Located leftward on the same wall as Color Study, Dajerria All Alone (Bolling v. Sharpe (District of Columbia)) (McKinney Pool Party) illustrates Jackson’s quintessential method of layering within her works. The piece hangs like a scroll from a wooden rod eight and a half feet high on the wall. Hot pink dominates and two blue rectangles reminiscent of swimming pools punctuate its first and third quarters, the lower of the two encased in a linear red border that is partially covered by rectangles of soil sourced from Texas. With this mixed-media work, Jackson highlights
“Can color be a vehicle of complex narrative? Can complex narrative be a vehicle for emotion? Can emotion be a vehicle for sound? Can sound be a vehicle for color?”
some of the challenges faced by Black children in the United States by merging two historical events: the Bolling v. Sharpe case of 1954 and the infamous McKinney pool party of 2015.
One of five cases combined in the Brown v. Board of Education fight for school desegregation, Bolling v. Sharpe was unique in that it was a federal fight. While the other four cases used the Fourteenth Amendment, which grants equal protection of the law to all people at the state level, fifteen-yearold Spottswood Bolling’s case in the District of Columbia required another approach. In 2015, a fifteen-year-old Black girl named Dajerria Becton attended a pool party to celebrate the end of the school year hosted at the home of two friends in McKinney, Texas. The police received calls that the party was rowdy and against the rules of the area’s homeowners association. Upon the arrival of the police, Becton was violently tackled and restrained by white police officer Eric Casebolt, who also raised his gun toward the partygoers.
Jackson recognizes that the triumphant desegregation of schools and deplorable police violence toward Black women and girls are interrelated. She layers both immaterial concepts of time and space and physical materials like paint, dirt, canvas, plastic, and wood in the work. Photographic image transfers of the events surrounding the two historical moments sourced from archives and media outlets are placed throughout Dajerria All Alone. These
photographs usher real people into the abstract painting while the painting’s vibrant colors bring these people into the now. Jackson speaks to both physical and metaphorical baggage at the bottom of the work, where canvas pockets are filled with plastic bags—held over from her plastic waste studies in Belize—answering her question about a painting’s capacity to hold something.
Tethering these two artworks is a third, Dajerria
All Alone (Eric N. Mack) : a photograph of fellow artist Eric N. Mack wearing Color Study while posing before Dajerria All Alone. Jackson characterizes her work as being about “the perception of color and its influence on value in public space with emphasis on Black lives.” For Jackson, that Mack was the only person to ever wear and be photographed in Color Study before it was framed and made untouchable elevated its value. And this photograph of him wearing it refuses a facile interpretation of how color and value are intertwined. Overlaying a Black figure inside, yet emerging from, the knit color study with eyes open in front of a bold illustration of a deeply layered history of race, place, and color, Dajerria All Alone (Eric N. Mack) effectively marks what Jackson calls “a reclamation of existing narratives on color and value.” The work bridges Marshall’s and Albers’s conclusions, demanding that we see all of the nuance and myriad functions of color at once.
(right) Tomashi Jackson, Dajerria All Alone (Bolling v. Sharpe (District of Columbia)) (McKinney Pool Party), 2016. Mixed media on cotton and canvas, 101 x 72.375 inches. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York.
(opposite) Tomashi Jackson, New Money (Mary had a plot of land & so did Ms. Marlene), 2019. Screenprint, 19 × 25 inches. © Tomashi Jackson. Courtesy of Tilton Gallery, New York. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Print Committee.
Tomashi Jackson, Time and Space (1948 End of Voter Registration Line) (1965 LBJ Signs the Voting Rights Act), 2020. Acrylic, Pentelic marble dust, Ohio Underground Railroad site soil, American electoral ephemera, and paper bags on canvas and fabric, 89.375 x 83.75 x 8 inches. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Family Collection. Commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University.
A couple of years later, when Jackson exhibited in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, she took a similar approach, delving into the history of the displacement of Black and Brown people in New York City. Jackson followed the city’s use of the Third Party Transfer Program to target homeowners of color with forced foreclosures. She scoured city archives to learn about the Black middle-class community of Seneca Village that was destroyed using eminent domain in order to create Central Park in 1857. In New Money (Mary had a plot of land & so did Ms. Marlene) (2019) Jackson partially eclipses halftone photographs of present-day homeowners and archival images of Seneca printed in eye-catching hues of orange and blue. Their placement and color signal a pattern of oppression and cue a sense of urgency to hold space for history as we consider present predicaments.
Later in 2019, Jackson attended a summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, where she learned of the displacement of her own mother from LA to Bakersfield, California. She was brooding one evening when she realized there was a drag party planned for that night—a promising escape from her melancholy. It was there that Jackson emerged as her alter-ego, Tommy Tonight. He is the archetypal male R&B singer, ready to woo you with songs sung arms wide open while rocking a manicured goatee and sunglasses indoors. Music videos from Tommy’s group, D’TALENTZ, are showcased in
“Across the Universe,” granting visitors fun and comforting respite of well-loved slow jams.
Along with her own musical stylings, Jackson’s retrospective emphasizes that music is embedded in her practice, as many of her works, as well as the exhibition itself, are named after songs she loves. The Doobie Brothers’ 1978 album Minute By Minute provides the title for Jackson’s public outdoor mural at Tufts. The piece combines the last photographs shot by her late mother—tree studies made during the COVID-19 pandemic— with images that Jackson took of folks rejoicing in big gatherings post-lockdown. These symbols of isolation and reunion are printed in halftone and crosshatched together to collapse time.
“Across the Universe” showcases Jackson’s career of layering material and narratives across painting, performance art, photography, social justice, and research. She is ecstatic about showing her work at home here in Boston and expressed deep gratitude for the people in the area—those who she loves, those who have made her work possible. As we wrapped up our afternoon together, she turned to me, a knowing look on her face, and said: “We started off talking about dreams and here we are inside of one.”
The creature in Hakeem Adewumi’s Possession of A Recalcitrant Dream sits in a siren’s pose, a palm cupping their breast as if nursing a wound. Piranhas bloom from their neck like streamers, each one brandishing a razor-sharp smile. When Adewumi and I met over Zoom to discuss Possession—which was on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from June 4 until October 1—his surveying of the creature was more approximate than exact. The leeway his interpretation allowed created a sense of mystery to which the character seemed entitled, one that enticed the viewer to wonder exactly how this character survives.
Born, raised, and based in Texas, Adewumi is a Nigerian American photographer, filmmaker, and digital artist. In 2019, he started working as a graphic designer for The Theater Offensive, a Boston-based arts initiative run by and for queer and trans people of color. Since then, he has participated in a July 2023 residency at the Gardner, and he has now exhibited his first work in Boston with Possession of A Recalcitrant Dream, which was shown alongside other portraits of LGBTQIA+ subjects by Mark Seliger, Olivia Slaughter, Jaypix Belmer, and Ally Schmaling. Possession, like the rest of his work, is bursting with references, straddling the line between new and old, alien and familiar. A huge digital photo collage pasted on the façade of the museum, the work refutes any suggestion of smallness. It exists beyond our capacity to consume it in one glance, and the creature rests easily outside of our ability to categorize them.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed.
Words by Erwin Kamuene
ERWIN KAMUENE: I thought it would be great to start with Possession of A Recalcitrant Dream, the work you’ve had on view at the Gardner. It’s this large, gorgeous, hydra-like figure on the museum’s façade. Can you give us an overview of the process that went into its creation and presentation?
HAKEEM ADEWUMI: Yeah, I think it was responding to Mark Seliger’s work first and foremost. I wanted the commission to push against the boundaries of portraiture in ways I think queer artists have done for a very long time. Along with referencing mythology and monster culture, I had this desire to be irreducible to the camera while still wanting the camera to have some kind of value. I wanted there to be an obvious departure from the very predatory nature photography has for folks of color and queer folks of color especially, and to create my own world, whether it be real or not. But I wanted to at least try to challenge viewers’ expectations of portraiture.
EK: I love how you used the word “irreducible” to describe this idea of wanting your subject to be unbound. What did it look like creating this very detailed character while also highlighting their agency?
“Hakeem Adewumi: Possession of A Recalcitrant Dream,” Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, June 4–October 1, 2024. Courtesy of Isabella
HA: I love to read and research, and when I was looking up queer artists especially, I was led to the genre of queer abstraction: these artists who were leaning toward the abstract form as this undefined world and really began to contribute to a new art canon. I kept seeing Édouard Glissant’s essay “For Opacity”
referenced, which was really influential, and I was also reading Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which talks about resisting the social order we’re conditioned to live in. There’s a beauty in the spaces that we’ve had to be confined to, and I wanted to honor that as well as show the terror, desire, and repulsion. Self-portraiture for me can be a very erotic experience, but as a person who is queer and was nude while photographing myself, I needed to try and offer some kind of intervention.
Much of this work is about reclaiming a myriad of emotions related to Blackness, queerness, rage, protest, beinghood, and a troublesome history toward equality for trans people. I wanted to evoke candor, sensuality, rage, and the noticeable threat of violence. As well as arousal, curiosity, and uncertainty—some of the emotions that surfaced while I was researching an insurgent trans history. I wanted myself and the viewer to sit in the emotional aftermath of this social confrontation, and it’s my hope to display how we are forever transformed and transfigured by these encounters.
EK: That’s a beautiful response. It sounds like monsters have a different connotation in your work. Do you view this character as a monster?
HA: The hydra is obviously something that is known as a monster in mythology, and I think that taking ownership of this mythological creature is a part of that world-building process. It’s also where we get to shift what meanings are. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
has a beautiful theory about monster culture and how our understanding of monsters is that they are these big scary things that are here to kill people. And I’m just like, okay, this is a very reduced way to understand what monsters really offer us. I think so much of our world is being reduced within the imagination, and for me, I’m like, this is actually where we need to really play and stay for a while. There’s a direct correlation to increased police presence, this very fascist state that we’re moving toward, and the book burning being employed to reduce our imagination. All of this is being used systemically to oppress us, so I think there is an important way to use mythology to tell stories of ourselves.
EK: Going back to your point about how photography has been used to marginalize queer and trans folks of color, I’m wondering how your awareness of that reality factored into the creation of this work?
HA: There’s an element of playfulness in this piece. The camera that’s featured in the work has its own arms and its own autonomy in some way, and there’s a spirit figure that playfully suggests pressing the shutter. The camera is facing the audience, so there’s obviously a play in understanding that we’re being watched but also that we’re photographing and surveilling the people watching us too. So there’s an interesting kind of play in removing that wall if we could. There was also a journal entry
by the writer Anne Tagonist that was going around in the 1990s that I found while researching this transgender archive. The story literally starts out saying, “I don’t want my human rights, I want my inhuman rights.”1 And I was so drawn into it. It’s like, I want you to feel the very mundane things that we as queer people, specifically trans folks, kind of have to fear. Very, very small things. I think that’s such a powerful and beautiful entry. The grandness of becoming a powerful being is where I think art is useful.
EK: Possession of A Recalcitrant Dream is also the first time your art is being shown at the Gardner and in Boston as well. Can you talk a little bit about how it’s been presenting your art in a new space?
HA: Yeah, the collaboration with the museum actually came through my job at The Theater Offensive. There was an offer for an artist-in-residence to come in last year, and there was an offer to do a commission late fall. I’ve been to Boston several times, but I had never gone to the Gardner
“There’s a beauty in the spaces that we’ve had to be confined to, and I wanted to honor that as well as show the terror, desire, and repulsion.”
Museum before that. It was a great invitation and I thought it was absolutely fantastic.
EK: How did you adjust to the residency?
HA: I really love the space they give artists to dream and conceive and to have access to the archives. That’s something I haven’t heard of from friends and colleagues who have done residencies before. Just the sheer time that you need is such a valuable asset that I don’t think we really give a lot of value to. They’re so generous, and I think there are institutions that do certain aspects really well and some that don’t, but the Gardner’s residency program is really well run.
EK: Could you talk a little more about your position at The Theater Offensive, which is such a great resource for queer and trans people of color in Boston?
HA: I’ve been working with The
Theater Offensive since 2019. I initially came on as a graphic designer, but as of now I’m a co-director of marketing and communications. It’s always done so much beautiful work, the only difference now being that we’re more focused on queer and trans folks of color. We have a new building that’s going to be opening in Fenway. It’s our first actual space that we’ll own, and there’s a lot of beautiful energy that’s going toward the art that we’re continuing to make in the space we’re going to take up in the city. So we’re really excited.
EK: Physical spaces are so important. It sounds so small, but that’s such a big milestone, especially now.
HA: Absolutely. All of our cities are facing this really dismal kind of future with space. Our spaces have always come with this looming surveillance, even though we do have spaces, right? Stonewall was a riot for a reason. So we’ve
always had to negotiate space that we’ve had, but now we realize that we need our own space that we can feel safe and protected in, not just space that’s available. There’s still this looming fear of surveillance, and the threat of violence is still violence, and we don’t want to have that anymore. In creating this space we’re also learning where we need to invest our time and our efforts for design. There’s so much that’s going into the intention of how we move, what we create, what we do as an organization.
EK: About moving with intention, I wonder how having traveled through various places with differing representations of Blackness and queerness has affected your own representations of those things in art and life?
HA: I think every trip abroad has made me more untethered to what it means to be Black, queer, gay, all these identities. My mother’s from Texas and my father’s from
Nigeria, so there’s this beautiful nexus of identity that I wanted to not necessarily solve, but try and figure out through art. I think there’s so much evidence that I was seeing in that work manifesting through my work over the years. I was like, I need to keep traveling and keep making work around Blackness and identity and sexuality.
EK: What’s on the horizon after Possession of a Recalcitrant Dream?
HA: I’m actually traveling to Martinique for a couple of weeks on a travel grant that I got from the Dallas Museum of Art, because again, I’m going back to Édouard Glissant, who’s also from Martinique. I think he’s viewing the world in a beautiful poetic way that I would really love for my work to center around.
Juneteenth House is another ongoing experimental project that I’ve been working on. I’ve kind of
seen it as an expansive way to think about Juneteenth and not limiting it to a specific holiday or the memory of emancipation because I don’t think we can actually receive emancipation. Right now I’m doing some programming out of Freedmen’s Town here in Texas and inviting folks to see some work, talk about the work, and create some new conversations around it, so I’m excited.
EK: You’ve talked a lot about world-building and its importance to queer and trans art and artists. As a Black queer artist who’s still very attached to Boston, how do you go about curating a community for yourself and what do you dream it could be?
HA: Great question. In 2019, The Theater Offensive commissioned artists and cultural workers to create this guide map for institutions and people to understand the aesthetics of queer culture. And that has been a beautiful framework to understand what
world-building is because, as with most queer folks of color, we don’t have access to institutions that have been built by extraction. So we’ve kind of had to use fragments of oral history. In a beautiful way I think that fragmentation is showing up in a lot of my work and how I view spaces, because everywhere you’ve been, you kind of bring with you.
Our cities are made up of so many things that we don’t see. I think people really want to rely on the ease of finding those things, but they’re not really easy to find anywhere. So I think it’s really about arming yourself with access and knowledge of these spaces. If you consider yourself an ally and really want to contribute to those spaces, I think Boston’s doing that work.
1 Anne Tagonist, “Transexual! A Horror Movie,” Unapologetic: The Journal of Irresponsible Gender, December 1997, 16, https://www. digitaltransgender archive.net/ downloads/ df65v807h.
“Alive and Kicking” at Colby College Museum of Art
“Barbara Bosworth: The Meadow” at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
“Inas Halabi: To a Returning Cloud” at Brookline Arts Center
“Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith” at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
“Scandalous Conduct: A
Extravaganza” at
“John Vo” at
Gladys Nilsson’s Rounding Rosie’s Ring: Dance, You Fools, Dance (2024) bisects the broad, trapezoidal gallery of Colby College Museum of Art’s downtown outpost in the small post-industrial town of Waterville, Maine. Encircling all four sides of a thirty-twofoot-long freestanding wall in the center of the gallery, the painting is the eighty-four-yearold artist’s largest work to date. Nilsson renders sinewy figures in pastel hues, pirouetting hand-in-hand as they enact the titular “Ring Around the Rosie” nursery rhyme and its accompanying jig. It is one of three works featured in the exhibition “Alive and Kicking,” alongside a newly commissioned mural by Catalina Schliebener Muñoz and an installation from the 1980s by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt.
“Alive and Kicking” is on view at the Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art at the Paul J. Schupf Art Center, both named for Colby alumni. Opened in December 2022, the building, which is adjacent to the town hall, also houses a cinema, a performing arts venue, and studio and exhibition space operated by Waterville Creates. The complex is down the street from the headquarters of the Lunder Institute, a branch of the college’s museum devoted to research on American art.
Colby and its alumni are certainly endeavoring to make Waterville the cultural center of Maine. And within this milieu, the visual art program downtown is an access point for Mainers who have perhaps never stepped into the museum on campus. A sense of humor and playfulness was therefore important to impart with “Alive and Kicking”—and the idiomatic title certainly doesn’t hurt. The exhibition welcomes folks with a swatch of candy-colored elements; both Nilsson’s and Schliebener Muñoz’s contributions are chromatically liberal, and Lanigan-Schmidt’s installation of 125 shining aluminum lasagna pans offers a material both recognizable and opulent. Viewers ultimately step into what appears to be a playhouse, where, upon further examination, individual artworks touch on the tribulations of navigating identity, relationships, and whatever else life throws at us.
Nilsson’s painting was the result of two weeks of on-site work by the artist. According to the exhibition’s curator, Kendall DeBoer, Nilsson looked to tools from the museum’s many children’s programs in the downtown venue—sidewalk chalk, washable markers, glitter pens—as materials for envisioning how her characteristically playful, layered compositions would take shape. The commission, DeBoer stressed, is temporary; the monumental work will be painted over upon the exhibition’s conclusion in mid-November. This predetermined lifetime likely instigated a certain freedom for Nilsson, who used unfixed matter like chalk and charcoal.
The figures themselves have the exaggerated extremities Nilsson has cultivated over her sixdecade career: sharp noses, weak chins, four-fingered hands, and brightly colored skins that at times morph into the collar or cuff of clothing. There is one ostensible main character on each side of the wall. Both are shades of orange that hit the eye more sharply than surrounding blueish individuals. Relations emerge between these personalities in sideways glances and physical contact, and Nilsson doesn’t shy away from suggesting erotic body parts in the various curves jutting from
their corporealities. The work welcomes new associations the longer one sits with it, and with all four sides of the wall painted, Rounding Rosie’s Ring: Dance, You Fools, Dance is more akin to a decorative vessel than an illusionistic painting where a single narrative dominates.
Schliebener Muñoz’s commission also veers into multiple dimensions. Animales domésticos (2024) is a floor-to-ceiling mural that wraps around two walls. Schliebener Muñoz grounds the composition in rhombus blocks of pink, purple, and blue that create the illusion of
hallways—an optic trick taken from the static backgrounds of mid-century animations. Indeed, characters from three Disney films (One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Oliver and Company, and The Aristocats) appear in configurations of vinyl cut-outs, with their features partially removed or layered on top of one another.
As a background for this activity, the color-blocking proves versatile in the same vein as a stage set. From a purely formal perspective, it alters the already oblique architecture of the gallery (there are no ninety-degree
Center: Gladys Nilsson, Rounding Rosie’s Ring: Dance, You Fools, Dance, 2024. Charcoal, graphite, chalk, marker, and wall paint, 108 x 384 x 16 in. Installation view, “Alive & Kicking: Fantastic Installations by Thomas LaniganSchmidt, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, and Gladys Nilsson,” Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art at the Paul J. Schupf Art Center, Downtown Waterville, June 26–November 11, 2024. Photo by Luc Demers. Courtesy of Colby College.
Back wall: Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, Animales domésticos , 2024.
Vinyl cut-outs, polyester, acrylic, and synthetic fabrics, coloring book pages, and wall paint.
Installation view, “Alive & Kicking,” 2024. Photo by Luc Demers. Courtesy of Colby College.
corners) into something more expansive, à la Sol LeWitt.
The modified cartoons— cherubic puppies, kittens, and Cruella de Vil—don’t express a detectable storyline, but, as the Disney juggernaut is wont to do when brought to high art (Llyn Foulkes, Paul McCarthy, among others), they play on the recognizable. Schliebener Muñoz’s interpretation is a dizzying abstraction of the swirling contours of these childhood emblems. As the mind attempts to fill in the lines with memories of these melodramas, the most successful format for the pictures is not a mural but an adjacent whiteboard and a takeaway coloring book, where this play can be enacted.
Mysterium Tremendum , the installation of illustrated lasagna pans by Thomas LaniganSchmidt from the late 1980s, is the smallest piece in the presentation but requires the most time to view. Each silver tray contains either a picture or a text, numbered 1 to 10, describing a semi-autobiographical day in the life of a young boy (referred to as “Willie”) in suburban New Jersey.
In its arc, the tale imparts some ill-fated bullying and self-harm. A particularly harrowing scene shows the youngster cutting himself over a sink. What pulls Willie out of this hole, according to the artist’s epistolic notes, is an encounter with a fellow altar boy named Richie at the
public library. This experience suggests to Willie that his peers may share deeper inner lives and makes him feel less alone. The story wraps with the handful of drawings Willie made to give Richie during Mass rehearsal, which are comically endearing renditions of the instructional diagrams from the Catholic catechism.
Lanigan-Schmidt employed a favorite of punk tools, the Xerox machine, to duplicate the illustrations on view. Each xerox is affixed to the back of the pan, with the same image appearing three or four times across the 125 scenes. Mylar gels in various colors and textures, the kind used for theater lighting, are overlaid on each drawing, and
the artist further distinguishes each illustration with discursive flourishes; a depiction of his New Jersey town is, in one place, covered in the snow and, in another, has had its streets transformed into the idyllic canals of Venice.
These multiple renditions of each episode encourage a choose-your-own-adventure approach. The content of the piece seems to match that anomalous format as the artist teeters between the awful and the transcendent. “The blood drops looked like dried rose petals on sparkling white glitter” he writes on text number 7, describing Willie’s blood falling to the snow.
The relational realities of trauma and togetherness can be gleaned
from all three works. And while these experiences are universal, it feels erroneous to ignore how each artist’s biography is a force in shaping what they make.
Lanigan-Schmidt was a closeted gay teenager in the 1980s, Schliebener Muñoz is nonbinary, and Nilsson is an octogenarian woman. DeBoer’s introductory text states, “Though elements of identity come into play, none of the work is didactic,” and that framing feels right. Being an outsider can take many forms, and it is not necessarily permanent. But the feelings of alienation or belonging are rooted in some place and time, and those conditions are part of understanding the work.
Exhibited together, in an arrangement sans dividers of any kind, the three works share clear
affinities, evident in the artists’ approach to color (bright) and figuration (whimsical). Like “Ring Around the Rosie,” a game born in response to the terrors of the bubonic plague, levity can be found in each artist’s rendition of the human experience.
“Alive and Kicking” is on view at the Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art through November 11, 2024.
by Kate Schreiber
The
Installation
In 1996, the photographer Barbara Bosworth began taking her camera out to a meadow in Carlisle, Massachusetts, a bucolic suburb roughly twenty miles northwest of Boston. She had become acquainted with the 250-acre site through friends who owned part of it, and she wanted to capture it. “Meadows disappear in Massachusetts,” she later reflected. “I didn’t want this one to.” One night, she took a
picture of a full moon rising over the grass. A mockingbird was in a tree nearby. “It kept singing,” she recalled, “and I kept photographing.”
Indeed, she kept photographing for the next fifteen years, returning to the site again and again alongside her friend Margot Anne Kelley, a writer whom she recruited to join her in her venture. Eager to glean insights into the land’s history and its plant and animal inhabitants, the pair invited scientists, foragers, archaeologists, and other experts to wander through the meadow with them. In 2015, they published pictures and essays from their explorations in a book titled The Meadow. Currently, twelve of Bosworth’s
large-format photographs from the project, along with several contact prints, are on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. These images present softly idyllic views of the meadow at various times of day and throughout the year: at midnight, with the moon a white arc in the sky, or on a winter morning, with fog rising from the surrounding hills, animal tracks on the grass. They sometimes verge on pastoral cliché—there’s a picture of fireflies zooming over a sunny lane, and of mushrooms from a foraging trip, laid out on a quaint wooden table.
These works and others are accompanied by wall text quotations from Kelley’s essays that contextualize their collaborative
project and introduce slightly more critical considerations about the landscape. “A meadow,” she proposes in one, “is a moment of release—when cultivation has ceased, and forest has not (yet) re-claimed the space.” Indeed, while some meadows occur naturally and remain stable without intervention, many are the result of human disturbance, part of the succession from former agricultural fields to forests. They thus provide a window into the relationship between people and their environment; though beautiful and ecologically rich, they make palpable the manifold conflicts between human and nonhuman agents. The Greenough Land, as this particular parcel is called, served as farmland for much of the last several centuries (it has also housed, variously, possible sacred sites of the Nipmuc and Massachusett people, a mill, and a training ground for Revolutionary soldiers). Parts of the property are still used for agriculture; during Kelley’s and Bosworth’s tenure at the site, the town leased an easement to a dairy farmer who sprayed his genetically modified feed corn with Roundup. “It’s hard not to hate that,” Kelley writes.
Bosworth and Kelley’s book—a copy of which is in the exhibition, though unfortunately enclosed in a vitrine— probes the complexity of the site and its
human use. But the show, which consists of a fairly small selection of Bosworth’s photographs, and an even smaller sampling of Kelley’s writings, mostly does not. Signs of human presence— a road meandering through the meadow, a gate overgrown with vines, the foraged mushrooms— convey an uncomplicatedly picturesque view, one in which humans and nature coexist in pastoral harmony. We don’t see the more fraught aspects of human occupation, like the gas-guzzling vehicles that use the lane or the GMO feed corn.
The most interesting pictures are those that examine the edges of the landscape, places where disparate land uses or ecologies come together. In Winter view down the lane (2005), two unnaturally straight lines of shrubs
and trees frame a snow-covered lane, standing out in an otherwise flat expanse. The bird house and The meadow (2003) highlight the edge between mown and unmown grass, reminding the viewer, again, of the unnaturalness of these natural scenes. Without the instructive scaffolding of Kelley’s writing, however, these moments don’t stand out. It’s easier to explore the conflicted relationship between humans and nature in words than in photographs, which are limited by what is visible. Still, a photographer can choose what to frame. Bosworth’s photographs show beautiful scenes, skirting around the central conflict of the landscape.
Bosworth and Kelley, as they are well aware, are the inheritors of a long tradition of nature
contemplation in New England. Carlisle used to be part of Concord, home to some of the best-known observers of nature in American history. (Kelley muses that the seed for their meadow project may have been planted in 1851, when Henry David Thoreau, as a young surveyor, helped draw the boundary between Concord and Carlisle.)
Walden Pond is a little over five miles from the Greenough Land. Thoreau, of course, set a worthy example—or at least, for anyone writing or making art about nature, an inescapable one—when he went into the woods to study a single piece of land. But in this anthropocentric era, the Thoreauvian impulse to romanticize nature, to view it as an escape from human society, feels naive, even false. To be a chronicler of nature today is to be a chronicler of human disturbance: this chronicle isn’t always
picturesque, but it’s richer and truer than the alternative.
Ultimately, The Meadow, like Walden , is an attempt to know a place: to understand its rhythms, its history, its details, its meaning in the larger arc of things. It’s as worthy an undertaking as any in a society plagued by crises that stem, at least in part, from a disconnection from place. It’s also, as Kelley acknowledges, an impossible task. “The whole story’s more than we can know,” she writes. Bosworth’s photographs tell only a small piece of the story, but maybe that’s all we can ask of them.
“Barbara Bosworth: The Meadow” is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through December 1, 2024.
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The Danforth Art Museum hosts three exhibitions by contemporary New England-based artists exploring some of the most relevant issues of our day. Thought-provoking installations address our nation’s epidemic of gun violence and the urgent realities of climate change—grim issues that affect our daily lives. Featured artists include Ileana Doble Hernandez, Suzanne Révy, and DM Witman.
The exhibition will be on view at the Museum from October 12, 2024 through January 26, 2025. See danforth.framingham.edu for upcoming events and programs.
ALLISON ARMIJO
is a writer and editor based in Boston. In addition to being editorial assistant at BAR , they are web editor at The Gay & Lesbian Review. Their work has been published in Los Angeles Times, MIT News, and The Rumpus blog.
CAMILA BOHAN
INSAURRALDE is the programs & partnerships manager at Boston Art Review. They hold a BFA in painting and studio for interrelated media with honors from MassArt. They are also the program coordinator for Collective Futures Fund at Tufts University Art Galleries.
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ALISA PRINCE , PhD, is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based scholar, 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.
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