September has been a great month for art shows in and near Cambridge. I’d especially like to call out an amazing exhibit of the work of ceramicist Isaac Scott called ” Mouros” which will be at Lucy Lacoste Gallery, 25 Main Street in Concord, Mass, through October 14.

Scott, now of Philadelphia, is a brilliant young sculptor and photographer whose photos of the 2020 riots in Philadelphia following the death of George Floyd were published by the New Yorker Magazine– earning him the National Magazine Award for Feature Photographer of the Year in 2021. He is also a fabulous sculptor/ceramicist.

Not long ago, Scott told me at the Lacoste opening, he visited a friend in Lisbon, knowing little about that city or Portugal. Taking tours of the city, he learned about its Moorish roots, legends of ghostly ancestors, and of the slave trade that originated in Lisbon the 1400s. Descended from slaves himself, he was fascinated by the stories he heard, and, when he returned to the US, crafted a series of ceramic heads, called “Mouros,” which, in the LaCoste exhibit, he pairs with photos he took of Lisbon and its surroundings.

“Rua Do Poço Dos Negros (Road of the Black Pit) is a street in Lisbon today. This street is a mass grave site for slaves. The irony is that the justification for taking the Slaves was so they could be converted to Christianity yet once converted, they were not considered worthy of being buried in the Catholic cemeteries. The Black Bust is wearing a crown of gold chain with eyes covered by a mask bearing the name of this street.“

• Isaac Scott
  Rua Do Poço Dos Negros, 2023
• Glazed Stoneware with Steel Chain
• 17.25h x 12.25w x 12d in
• Archival Pigment Inkjet Print mounted on Dibond
• 36 x 36 in
• IS016

“The exhibition powerfully brings to light the origination of the slave trade, references the African diaspora; and brings us back full circle to the present day with references to graffiti and hip-hop culture,” said Gallery Owner Lucy Lacoste..

One pairing includes a Mauro bust with a remarkable close-up photo of pigeons–whose ubiquity and flights all over the world seemed to parallel with the travels of Portuguese and other slave ships, Scott said.

“Pombo (Pigeon), 2023

The artist uses the pigeon as a symbol for the African Diaspora, which like the bird, spread all over the world and were domesticated. Most cities have feral pigeons. Once they are free, they are seen as a problem. The bust is covered with meticulously carved sculptured feathers with wings on the side.

Lacoste added, “In my over 30 years of being a gallerist, I’ve rarely seen an artist whose work is more exciting.  Here the artist pushes the boundaries of contemporary art by creating a dialogue between the two mediums of ceramics and photography to tell the culturally relevant story of the slave trade. “

Castelo Dos Mouros, 2023

This piece is inspired by the Moorish Castle in Cientro outside of Lisbon. The image is of a section of the castle. The plaque is a reference to another mass grave found at this location. After a renovation, experts were unable to distinguish which bodies were Moors or which bodies were Christian and reinterred them in a mass grave with a tombstone that read “What Man brought together only God can separate.”

Isaac Scott received his MFA from Temple University in 2021 under Roberto Lugo. Introduced to Lucy Lacoste in 2022, Scott was included in a well-received group show at the Gallery that year in which he showed his #Philadelphia Series, sculpture inspired by the 2020 Riots in Philadelphia, the city where he lives, after the death of George Floyd.

At Lucy Lacoste Gallery, 25 Main Street, Concord, Mass., through October 14, 2023.

–Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is a writer and photographer who resides in Cambridge, Mass.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, also in Cambridge.

“

As a longtime admire of the Lucy Lacoste gallery in Concord, MA, I was honored when Lucy asked me to write a press release for the show that opens there tomorrow. What follows is essentially a paid post–which the gallery has expanded on its Website.

In the show, “Articulating Space,” at 25 Main Street, two female artists challenge the boundaries of traditional ceramics and contemporary sculpture.

Both artists, Josephine Burr and Lily Fein, use the centuries-old technique of coiling and pinching clay to build forms, rather than rely on clay slabs or the potters wheel. Yet their work is highly modern—taking unusual shapes, embracing light in new ways, and shifting the expected boundaries of artist, object, viewer and artistic convention. Each artist takes a unique approach, Lacoste explains.

Lily Fein
Fein’s work tends to be intuitive and, in this exhibition, figurative, with vessels suggesting or relating to the human body.

Fein explains that while her pieces often evoke bodily forms, she sometimes challenges this metaphor “so that the distinctions between the interior or exterior of the vessel invert, touch, or disappear.

 “I encourage the objects to morph and change as I create them, developing a language of improvisation that gives form to a stream-of-consciousness approach to making. I am interested in how a clay form can capture, imply or perpetuate movement… defying the nature of the role we’re taught [that] objects occupy in our world.” 

A 2016 graduate of Syracuse University in 2016], Fein has won numerous awards; held residencies in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New York,  and Japan; and exhibited  in Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, Oregon, Montana, and Washington State. Born in Newton, MA, Fein currently resides in New Orleans.

Josephine Burr
Burr, a professor of ceramics at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, raises questions of interiority and objecthood (or: duration/temporality), according to Lucy Lacoste, the gallery owner “Some of her pieces are unusually large for ceramics—and she sometimes punches holes in the clay to allow light—and her own energy—to shine through.”

Burr explains that the “language” of clay is “mute and absorbent… a holder of time and of the unnoticed, of the underpinnings of consciousness and of daily life.” In her work, she probes at this “unnoticed space, coaxing the temporary and fleeting quality of experience into visible, tactile form.”

Her sculptures “echo familiar objects but confound their meaning—pinched to hold passing time, shifting light, the fragile uncertainty of being,” she says.  “Boundaries are intentionally blurred: between interior and exterior space; between pot and sculpture; between object and drawing.

“While clay as a material speaks of the familiar, the concrete and the immutable,” she says, “it also carries a sense of transition, fragility and porousness.” For Burr, “making becomes an act of tactile listening, attending fully to that fragile terrain at the edge of perception… Balance and trust are essential to this process. It is my hope that the work invites the viewer to recognize and rest in that space.”

Burr’s latest approach embraces and interrogates the boundaries of both two- and three-dimensional work. In her ‘still life’ An alphabet of makeshift days, #2 (winter light)—three small sculptural vessels rest on a shelf, a clay ring set against the wall, behind—Burr invites the viewer to consider the continuity and difference between her own work and the art historical lexicon.

Professor Burr, who lives in Hyde Park, MA, has held residencies and/or exhibited in Massachusetts, Maine, Houston, Philadelphia, New York, Texas, Vermont and Iceland. She is a 2021 nominee for the Boston Foundation’s Brother Thomas Fellowship.

Lacoste is “delighted to share the work of two insightful artists who are making important contributions to the increasingly synergistic worlds of ceramics and sculpture,” she says.

Articulating Space will be open through August 7, 2021. Both Fein and Burr will attend the opening reception on July 10^th from 3 – 5 PM, with artists’ remarks at 4 PM.

Articulating Space will transition into an online exhibition on Saturday, July 17^th to accommodate gallery renovation.

–-Anita M. Harris
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, in Cambridge, MA.

As someone involved in art, science and nature, I particularly enjoyed the current show at Lucy Lacoste Gallery, in Concord, Mass. It features the ceramic sculptures of Ashwini Bhat, whose work embodies her experiences as a classical Indian dancer, a painter, a writer, and a gardener. The show, “”What I Touch Touches Me,” is a visual and tactile representation of her California garden as she–and the garden–progressed through the pandemic. The result is a beautiful harvest of earthly and spiritual objects and ideas.

As Bhat explains: The structure of my new body of work is derived from my immersion in my surroundings in a dramatic, highly various, and fragile Northern California landscape. The sculptures are assembled in four segments: Comfort Objects, Animated Objects, Intimate Earth Objects, and Assemblage Objects.

Animated Object #4, below, brings to mind (for me) a leaf in the wind, a deeply colored Indian veil or scarf, and the graceful hand of dancer. ,

Comfort Objects evolved— during a pandemic in which touch has become unsafe— from Bhat’s examination of the shapes and forms of seed-pods “as symbols of mysterious, life-birthing potentialities.”

“Animated Objects are studies in gesture, movement, and the feelings evoked by[her} memories of objects that have deep personal associations for her.”

“Intimate Earth Objects” reference elements of earth and body. T” hese biomorphic forms enact the co-existence and mutuality of the human and non-human. And they also focus on the sorts of objects that are historically or culturally associated with rituals and sacrality. “

“Assemblage Objects juxtapose colors and consortiums of form that reference particular landscapes in which Bhat has spent time, she writes.

“All four segments are linked by allusions to primordial symbols or patterns such as the Mandala, Spiral, Serpent, the Ouroboros, and the Fibonacci sequence. 

“But the meanings of these sculptures are fluid, not rigid,” Bhat explains. The objects might easily cross over and fit into other groupings. And this boundary-less-ness allows them to acquire multiple connotations. There is an open interplay of elements and a possibility of infinitely reassembling alliances. ” Bhat’s aim is”to suggest ways of looking that promote raveled and linked engagements that define the relation between all animate and inanimate matter.”

Also included in the show are several of Bhat’s watercolors….

and a piece from a previous exhibit, “Empowering Voices.”

–Anita M. Harris

Lucy Lacoste Gallery, is located 25 Main Street, Concord, MA The show will be up until June 5.

Anita Harris is a writer, photographer and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, also in Cambridge.

At first, I thought I’d write about how surprised visitors to wealthy, traditional, suburban Concord, MA, would be to find a small ceramics gallery, owned by a petite blonde woman from Mississippi, showcasing the work of Black, East Asian, Hispanic, and other artists of color. But, of course, Concord is often considered the birthplace of the American Revolution and is, thus, the perfect place to bring the provocative, transformational work of talented artists from across the US to public attention.

As owner Lucy Lacoste explains, “The exhibition brings together artists of color … in response to the racial injustices that, while always present, have been brought to wider awareness by the protests after George Floyd’s murder.

“As a gallery, we want to expand our platform to include greater diversity in artists and content to more fully represent this new reality.  Art is a reflection of culture and history; thus, we want to show the art of those with lived experiences who are leading the way to human rights for all.”

This is not the first time the Lacoste Gallery has promoted social justice; Lacoste and ceramicist Lily Fein recently donated 18 per cent of profits from Fein’s recent show to the Black Lives Matter movement, and the gallery has frequently shown the work of artists from diverse backgrounds. But the current exhibit is unusual in that it features eight artists expressing the need for social justice–each from a unique and powerful personal perspective.

Natalia Arbelaez

Natalia Arbelez, 2018-19 Artist in Residence at Harvard, was born in Miami, spent the first four years in her mother’s country of Colombia, Medellin, before returning to the US–quickly learning English and forgetting Spanish within a month. Throughout her life, she writes, she has questioned her identity and felt a sense of loss.

Her work, concerned with an “essence” of the body, “fills that loss,” by allowing her to reconnect with her heritage–as she researches and preserves Latin American and Ameridian culture, people and identities lost through conquest, migration, and time –and gained through family, culture, exploration, and passed down through tradition and genetic memory…

“In my process of referencing the body, I have forgone the use of an actual and specific body.” Thus, “I can use the memory of my own body, the body of my family and ancestors to extend my memories to places beyond the body. I use these influences to contribute to a contemporary dialogue while simultaneously continuing the work of my ancestors. There has been so much loss and stigma of these communities that it is important to me that my work celebrates and honors them.”

Ashwini Bhat
Ashwini Bhat, born in Southern India,and now based in California, has an MA in literature and had an earlier career in Indian dance. She doesn’t say this, but to me, her work embodies twists and turns of such dance…and perhaps even of Indian sari’s. As her artist’s statement explains, “During shelter-in-place, I turned both inward and toward the world. This has been an intense time for self-reflection, for questioning my own identity as well as my identification with others and with nature, the world. These new sculptures reveal that focus on the alliance of inscapes and landscapes.”

Paul S. Briggs

The work of Paul S. Briggs, originally from New York State, to me looked like thick black iron prison bars, surrounded and locked with chains. Briggs, now Artist in Residence at 5the Harvard Ceramics Program and Associate Professor at Mass College of Art, writes: “This work is neither gendered nor is it about race, it does not respect person. Formally, it is using metaphor and metonymy. To be doubled up inside, tied in knots, feeling tight all over, is how many describe the everyday tension of existence in a society seized by pandemic and strivings to wake up from history and create a more just and loving society, the beloved community. The wounded, broken, pierced and knotted vessels have a presence of dignity and a certitude.”

Gerald Brown
Gerald Brown, a Chicago Southside native, currently teaches in Philadelphia. Her “sacred objects’ primary spiritual function is to demarcate space for ancestral as well as descendants of Strange Fruit, an expansive lineage of African Diasporic people in America.” Brown writes: “The forms possess the power to communicate ancestral blessings such as energy, memory, forgiveness and love, providing an opportunity for multi-layered healing personally as well as environmentally. These abstract portraits of Strange Fruit commemorate a range of subjects and their unique, complicated behaviors developed through resisting anti-Blackness. In the midst of survival, deadly environmental effects plague these inhabitants, causing a long-term development of various anti-Black tendencies. However, by creating these intimate moments to honestly learn from our past selves as well as provide guidance for moving forward, these forms become a beacon of solace in the face of violence.

The spiritual function of the sacred objects are activated through the choice of material and approach to construction. Action and touch carry energy, while clay records movement and memory. The way the marks are
made deeply affect the commemoration as well as the overall spiritual tactility function….There are a few adornments or appendages that are added to accentuate the form, but the work is primarily mirrored externally as internally to deliberately communicate the continuity between the spaces. Similarly, the improvisational, voluptuous contours also forge a sense of harmony between the observer and the Fruit, reflecting the natural duality between tumultuous chaos and intrinsic beauty, a core pillar of the Black experience. These dual energies flowlike water through the sacred objects, are transmitted through touch and absorbed by the recipient, rejuvenating inherited ancestral traumas and internalized anguish.

Aaron Caldwell

Aaron Caldwell, born and raised in Fresno, CA, is currently a graduate student at Illinois State University. As an artist, he is “interested in looking at Black and queer identity with a lens of interiority. [His] work is primarily inspired by Black folks’ history with moisturizing products for the hair and body, and my being conditioned to hold value in my hair, skin color and the necessary tools for care. Being considered physically ashy (white and dry skin) or socially ashy (wack, lame, ignorant) are lingo among Black folk.
“As a result, products like lotion or coconut oil have become a staple in the Black community, so I create objects that concretely elevate and highlight this relationship unique to Black culture. I also employ zoomorphic forms inspired by folktales and west and central african sculpture. The buffalo represents masculinity and manhood, the sheep represents queerness and the rabbit represents Blackness. My art narrates how I engage with my Blackness and queerness in private, through culture, and how these identities inform how I engage with the world.”

Renata Cassiano-Alvarez

Renata Cassiano-Alvarez, a Mexican-Italian artist born in Mexico City and now teaching at the University of Arkansas, works primarily in clay but a background in painting and drawing informs her practice–which makes stunning use of glazes.
She writes: “As a bi-cultural artist (Mexico/Italy), I have been preoccupied with the effects language has on the body and how to translate this phenomenon to process. This delving has led me to seek the transformation of the historical role ceramic materials have in the ceramic process. When this role is changed, it is possible to realize a physical metamorphosis of the elements. At the center, I am teaching ceramic glaze a new language. A material that historically has been relegated to surface decoration is able is able to become the structure of the sculpture itself by ways of casting. The result is a material with a new sentience, an outcome that does not resemble glaze as we traditionally know it, but rather a new vision with an expanded concept of possibility.
My sculptures reference the body and its contents and seek to give the transformation itself a physicality. In a way, I act as an archeologist to my own practice. I cut, excavate and carve the sculptures until I find what they are trying to tell me… Clay speaks many languages and keeps infinite possibilities. What I look for is for my sculptures to embody, become icons of freedom and force.

Sydnie Jimez
Sydnie Jimenez, born in Orlando Florida , ia a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She spent much of her childhood in Georgia as a “non-white-presenting person. “Growing up with the white side of her family, she was only reunited with the Dominican side of her family in adolescence. Most of her work , she writes, “is inadvertently informed by a feeling of cultural dysphoria. ” With her sculptures, she tries “to invoke a sense of familiarity and security within community while expressing a suspicion, frustration and/or anger toward societal ideals rooted in white supremacy and European colonization.”
The figures in the current show “were made during the peak of quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic at the same time as protests by black and brown youth that were sparked by police brutality and the deaths of black people by police including the murder of Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, and George Floyd to name a few. These figures are referencing protestors, protest, and a feeling of discontent, disorientation, and unease left in the wake of these deaths whose murderers were not brought to justice.”

Anthony Kascak

Anthony Kascak, has an MFA from the University of Arkansas School of art and BFA’s in art practices and psychologiy from the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Lacoste exhibit includes two wall pieces from his
MFA thesis show, and a wall piece made shortly after that. “I am interested in exploring how I can incorporate photography into my ceramics practice; I have done this directly through photographic decals as well as with physical touch and visual perception through ceramic frames and fragments,” he writes.
“These ceramic frames contain images and actions: fingerprints preserved and highlighted with glaze, photographic ceramic decals of my body, as well as adorned shards and cracks of ceramic pieces that highlight the fragility of the ceramic process and specific details of photographs. The physical touch involved in the ceramic process not only emphasizes the marks made to reference the literal act of touching, but also the vulnerability and potential of the material itself.”
*

I wish that, in this post, I could do justice to the brilliance of the exhibit…but it’s well- worth a visit to the gallery to experience the profound ideas and emotions it evokes. The ceramic pieces, writeups and the show as a whole serve as a transformational bridge from our individual and collective pasts– inspiring what I hope will be a universally shared, just and creative future.

Empowering Voices will be on view at Lacoste Gallery, 25 Main St. in Concord, MA until October 10, 2020.

–Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is a writer, photographer and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, also in Cambridge.

http://www.lacostegallery.com/

At the opening, Jeff Shapiro described his latest approaches.. After nine years in Japan, where he focused on wood-firing techniques and the “character of clay,” he moved to New York’s Hudson Valley, where for 30 years, he has created sculpture that may have “a sensibility to certain qualities of the Japanese aesthetic,. yet is a departure from both traditional Japanese pots.”  He thinks of his latest work as fine art:  that is, sculpture using clay as his medium.  One new series includes a solid-vertical form in black with a rough textured surface. In some cases, he treats the material like stone, waiting until the clay hardens so that he can carve and chisel it to expose its “inner quality.”  

deconstructed vessels; structural “cuboids; ”  and highly textured slabs which are fired in an electric kiln.

This is Shapiro’s fourth solo show at the Lacoste. It runs through May 26.

I found Ani Kasten’s latest ceramics exhibit, which opened yesterday at the Lacoste Gallery in Concord, MA, inspirational.  The work, comprised mainly of vessels of irregular shapes and sizes,  is  delicate, with seams sometimes held together with thin wires, and replete with beautiful, unexpected embellishments, cracks. colors and patterns that make the viewer stop to contemplate.

Entitled From the Ruins, the show focuses on vessels and sculptures that are “deconstructed…  ‘barely holding together’, ‘coming apart at the seams’, and searching for a cohesive beauty in their tenuous state of existence,”  according to the exhibit writeup.

I mentioned to Kasten that her work “spoke” to me, especially because too many of my close friends and family members have passed away, recently, and that I’m working on writing and photography projects that I hope will help bring shape, beauty, meaning and new life to past experiences.  Kasten responded that she, too, has gone through several major losses, which in part, inspired her current work.

Ani Kasten

 “Investigating the materiality of the clay is the foundation and focal point for all of my sculptural vessels. I create wheel-thrown and hand-built forms in families, and these sculptural groupings explore the meeting point between natural and man-made worlds. The vessels take their influence from plants, water, rocks and clay, as well as from architecture, industry and machinery.

“They investigate the nature of change, the compiling of memory, and a feeling of profound loss– the recognition of temporal beauty bound inextricably with grief. The pieces are like remnants, a landscape of objects that remain after some kind of significant change, grave markers, or organic matter that has survived a great fire.

According to a gallery publication, Kasten was drawn to the medium of clay as an apprentice to British ceramist Rupert Spira, Then she headed a stoneware making facility in Nepal for four years before returning to the USA to set up ceramic studios in California, Maryland and most recently Minnesota.  She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally with works in the permanent collections of the Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin; the Weisman Art Museum Minneapolis MN; and the Sana’ a Collection, the US Embassy, Sana’ a Yemen.

Much enjoyed the current show at Lacoste--which has long been my favorite Concord, MA, Gallery. This time, owner and former ceramicist Lucy Lacoste is featuring the work of ceramicist Don Reitz– pieces from as far back as the 1960s through equally-if-not-more exciting work from 2014, just before he passed away in his 80’s.

As Lacoste explains, “Don Reitz is one of the great geniuses of contemporary ceramics and was devoted to clay, color and expression throughout his career.

“The show  encompasses three periods in the Reitz’s career– the Sara series, in which he used color to narrative stories on earthenware clay, his wood-fire period using fire and ash for expression, and his color with wood-fire and salt, which was a summation of the many elements in his life works.

‘There are also connector pieces that led from one period to the next such as the colorful plates that preceded the use of color in the Sara series and earthenware with expressive brushwork that came at the end of his life.”

My favorite pieces were those embodying both painting and sculpture. That is, ceramics in the three-dimensional form of brush strokes, incorporating  and exhibiting both color and motion. 

 
According to Lacoste, “The driving force in Reitz’ life was to be an artist and communicate through his art.  As a youth with dyslexia, he found making marks in dirt to be expressive. He took this into his ceramics throughout his career with markings on clay being his personal language. His marks, symbols and signature were always important to him whether in his salt-fire work, where the salt melted in firing to become a revealing skin; or in the ‘Sara’ period where everything was a mark or symbolic imagery done with a colorful palette; or wood-fire where the marks were revealed through the ash. The artist has always approached his work intuitively and expressively.

I Go Without Fear, 1984, earthenware, low-fire salt with engobes,

“Among the pieces in the show is a  wall plaque I Go Without Fear, 1984, earthenware, low-fire salt with engobes, 2 x 25 x 20” from his ‘Sara’ series.  Reitz’s ‘Sara Series’ was born of adversity: while he recovered from a serious car accident and his young niece from cancer, the two exchanged drawings in what amounted to a healing partnership. A childlike sensibility with color and form in abundant informs Reitz’s work from this period. This is an endearing yet powerful work showing a stick figure cautiously and optimistically moving out into the world.

Jammin’

“Jammin’, 2013 is a powerful triptych being shown for the first time from the private collection of his family.  This piece stands out for its bold, dynamic color and free calligraphic painting.  It is one of the strongest and largest of his series of triptych showing the artist at his most painterly.”
The exhibition is free and open to the public and is wheel chair accessible.
Through March 27, 2017 at the
Lacoste Gallery
25 Main Street • Concord, MA 01742
978.369.0278 • www.lacostegallery.com

–Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris is a writer, photographer and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA. 
New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, also in Cambridge, MA.