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.

“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

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. “

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.

“

It’s one of those gloomy December days–31 degrees, overcast.

The Ukraine war is still on; inflation is rampant; covid is again on the rise My book is out, sales are slow. Thanksgiving is over, Christmas is weeks away. My brothers are both ill in distant states

I decide to go for a run on the Charles.

The light is no good for photos, I’m thinking, as I cross a nearly deserted Memorial Drive.

But then a tree I’ve passed by hundreds of times reaches out to me. It’s decaying, but, I note, still strong.

I move closer; a new trunk seems to be growing inside it; young branches are reaching to the sky.

I pull my camera out of my pocket and take a few shots.

I amble along. Some trees look injured, dead; the bark is wearing off. I stop again, camera in hand.

Close in: abstract beauty

Back to my run…stopping frequently.

Many of the trees have amazing shapes

I wonder why they are so gnarly.

One holds a nest of leaves.

Another: a bird

An empty nest

There are milkweed…

Rusted weeds…

Bittersweet.

Reflections, shapes, colors in the water.

Later, when editing my photos, I discover a pair of ducks.

Black and white

More ducks;
a willow

A human touch.

Heading back: more stunning formations.

I return to the river path the next day, and the next, reassured to find changed light, new growth, life and hope as I–and nature– progress, slowly, with starts and stops, toward spring.

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

Still thinking about the fabulous Georgia O’Keeffe show I saw last Sunday at the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, MA. “Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style,”  is a retrospective going back to O’Keeffe’s high school years. It continues through her experiences in Chicago, Texas, New York City, Lake George, New Mexico and beyond her lifetime, to the present day.

 

 

The exhibit  features not only her art work through those years, but also year-book entries, photos of and by O’Keeffe, video of a conversation in which she says she was lucky that her work coincided with her time and was liked but that her paintings might have been better if she’d remained unknown.

Central to the show is the distinctive clothing she designed and wore–presented in relation to her paintings.

 

 

 

 

The show includes video from a 2018 fashion show in which models prance on a runway. wearing styles like those originated by OKeefe.(immediately below)

My friend E remarked on O’Keeffe as a feminist force. But while O’Keeffe was a ground breaker in the art world and is sometimes referred to as “the mother of abstract art,” a PEM commentary points out that she insisted throughout her career that she did not want to be considered a female artist…but simply an artist.

I did wonder what would have happened if famed New York City photographer Alfred Stieglitz, 30 years her senior, had not seen her work when she was a young artist and championed it–and her; if she had not moved to New York and married him; if he had not taken and shown photograph after photograph of her; if she had not had the safety and freedom afforded by Stieglitz and his family wealth in NY and Lake George. But an example of the early commercial artwork (left), on which she embarked to supplement her Texas teaching salary, makes me certain she would have become renowned on her own.

 

 

While I love most of O’Keeffe’s  paintings, I’m less enamoured of her fashion, which the show presents as an element of her artwork.  In my view, it seems to have become more traditionally masculine–with chunky-looking  black suits ordered from a men’s clothier in Hong Kong– as she moved on in life.(Or, as women’s societal roles changed?) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve  seen quite a few O’Keeffe shows over the years..several in New York, and one in Glens Falls, NY, near Lake George– but this is the first I’ve seen that incorporates and integrates so many aspects of her life.

I would have liked to have been told a bit more about O’Keeffe’s childhood and family and about her relationship with Stieglitz, but then, there’s Wikipedia for that. All in all, I found the exhibit of an artist who worked well into her 90s enriching and inspirational.

 

Should also mention the wonderful docent and ceramic artist/jewelry maker who told me that the unlabelled photos were taken by O’Keefe and encouraged me and other visitors to share our comments and photos on Instagram.  Also, btw, the PEM  cafeteria serves the richest, thickest hot chocolate I’ve ever tasted.

Georgia O’Keefe, Art, Image, Style will be at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, Dec. 1-April 1, 2018. 

–Anita Harris
Anita M. Harris is a writer, photographer and communications consultant  basedin Cambridge, MA. She is the author of Ithaca Diaries, Coming of Age in the 1960s, and Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, a PR and content marketing firm based in Kendall Square. :

Yesterday, I was privileged to view a remarkable documentary film shown at the Griffin Museum of Photography. As a  photographer/artist and writer, I sometimes wonder if there’s a point to all of the time and energy I put into my crafts. The film, called “A Single Frame,” produced by  Austin businessman and filmmaker Jeff Bowden, makes clear that one can never know the tremendous impact a work of art may ultimately have.

While on a family  trip to Dubrovnik in 2007, Bowden’s daughter  suggests going to an exhibit showing the work of female war photographers. Bowden is much taken with a photograph of a refugee boy taken during the war in Kosovo by  a young French photographer, Alexandra Boulat.

Driven by the  haunting image, Bowden sets out to find the child–who, if still alive would have been in his twenties or early thirties. Bowden’s search takes him from Texas to Paris, where he learns that Boulat passed away due to natural causes not long after the war. He tracks down a group of photographers she worked with, and, in conversations with them and others who were impacted by the war, learns of the devastation it caused, and of the post-war culture of the Balkans. Joining  forces with an experienced war-time fixer, he embarks on a search for the boy.

Rather than give away the outcome of the search, I’ll just say that  A Single Frame, released in 2015,   humanizes and educates distant audiences about the origins and impacts of the cruel war that lasted from 5 March 1998^[8] until 11 June 1999 in the former Yugoslavia. (As described on Wikipedia, the war was fought by the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (by this time, consisting of the Republics of Montenegro and Serbia), which controlled Kosovo before the war, and the Kosovo Albanian rebel group known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with air support from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and ground support from the Albanian army). Effective in multiple dimensions, the film shows that one never knows where a  work of art might lead, whom it might affect, and how its spirit might live on to inform, influence and inspire future generations. Bravo!

–Anita M. Harris

Link to trailer 

 

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

 

Spending a day out of Cambridge?  If you wish you were in Paris but can only make it to New York -– take your dreams to the Met and see  “Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris” and “Paris as Muse: Photography 1840s-1930s,”  (both through May 4) and “The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux” (through May 26)

[Rue de Constantine]
Charles Marville (French, Paris 1813–1879 Paris)
Date: ca. 1865 Medium: Albumen silver print from glass negative Dimensions: 27.3 x 36.8 cm (10 3/4 x 14 1/2 in.) Classification: Photographs Credit Line Permission Requested: Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1986 Accession Number: 1986.1141
)

 

CHARLES MARVILLE AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Fifth Avenue at East 79^th Street

“ A bittersweet meditation on the meaning of nostalgia and the evolution of urban centers”

The Met’s current exhibit of Paris street scenes by 19^th-century French photographer Charles Marville is a revelation of memory and awareness that rebuffs the notion of nostalgia.

Marville (1813-1879), the son of modest tradespeople, used various techniques to document the destruction and re-creation of Paris from the early 1850’s through the 1870’s.  From 1862 on, he was the official photographer of the city of Paris.

    The neighborhoods and buildings Marville captured in these wondrous and sad images are long gone, having made way for the Paris of Napoleon III and his chief architect and planner, Baron Georges-Eugène Hausmann.The gilded, historic Paris that many of us know — the Belle Epoque city of grand boulevards and the Palais Garnier — was born in Marville’s time.  Preservationism was evolving, as well, through the necessary process of repairing and cleaning such monuments as the great cathedral of Chartres, Notre Dame de Paris, and the Sainte-Chapelle.   

   The impulse to capture the past while obliterating it from sight is the beating heart of these photographs, which preserve the gritty city of Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème and Hugo’s Les Misérables     .In Marville’s photos, the outskirts of this Paris still look rural, even desolate.  Most of its streets appear to be empty, in part because images were taken very early in the day, but also because Marville’s exposures weren’t long enough to capture pedestrians and carriages in motion.  The rare figures here and there were actually posed within the frame by the artist.The “Hausmannization” of Paris, a cramped, crowded, and less romantic city than the one we imagine, began in the 1850’s under Emperor Napoleon III.   In addition to clearing medieval slums, upgrading sanitation, building parks, and restoring public monuments, the creation of boulevards and wider streets was intended to thwart those who might build and mount barricades, as they  had in the uprisings of 1830 and 1848.Marville recorded everything.  The old buildings, covered with advertising and all kinds of affiches  touting such modern conveniences as the folding umbrella.   The glass-covered, shop-lined alleys called passages, soon to be overshadowed by the department stores, les grand magasins.  The old industrial areas that dumped waste into the Seine tributaries and canals.  The timeless stares of tannery workers.The emerging wonders of the city are displayed here, too.   Hausmann’s “street furniture,” advertising kiosks, gas lamps, and – mais oui – public urinals, are respectfully and meticulously documented by Marville’s camera.  Most remarkable, perhaps, are the photographer’s views of the Avenue de l’Opéra as it was being built in the 1870’s.  Leading to the new Opéra, now called the Palais Garnier, the neighborhood is shown post-demolition and pre-construction, looking like nothing so much as a war zone.One of the final ironies is learning that Marville himself was a victim of Hausmann’s grand plan.  The photographer’s own studios were demolished and, during the 1871 uprising afterthe Franco-Prussian War, the Hôtel de Ville came under attack and much of its archival material – including Marville’s work as official photographer — was destroyed.

The exhibition is a bittersweet meditation on the meaning of nostalgia and the evolution of urban centers, whose periodic re-invention is both necessary and heartless.  Nostalgia is a construct; there are many pasts beyond the ones we recall and imagine.   The home that you long for may be just one of a cascade of images, seen for an instant in a series of receding mirrors.

–Rachel Yurman,  Cambridge, MA
© 2014

 

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning public relations and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

 

 

Dropped by last night’s opening at the Davis Orton Gallery in Hudson, NY, where former Cantabridgians Karen Davis and Mark Orton featured photographers  John Chervinsy,  John Cyr,   Elaine Mayes, and  David Torcoletti –each making powerful statements about  photography, art,  perception,  human emotion and the passage of time.

In “Studio Physics,” Chervinsky’s images challenge traditional photography by depicting not a single instant, but the passage of time.  He begins by composing and photographing a still life. Then, he crops a subset of the image sends it as a  file digitally to a painting factory in China, waits weeks for an anonymous artist in China to complete an oil painting of the cropped section and send it back in the mail, and, finally, he reinserts the painting into the original setup and rephotographs.

According to the Davis-Orton Website, “Chervinsky is interested in the tensions expressed in the comparison between reality vs. representation while adding, in this series, an unusual collaboration process with an anonymous artist half way around the world and subtle changes over time that we might otherwise take for granted.”

 

 

John Cyr’s photos of   developer trays memorialize the specific, tangible  tools used by photographer for a century–before the advent of digital media.

By titling each tray with its owner’s name–some quite renowned–” Cyr references the historical significance of these objects in a minimal manner that evokes thoughts about the images that have passed through each artist’s tray.”

While a few of the photographed trays appear relatively clean and empty, others frame beautiful abstract  patterns and formations.

 

 

Elaine Mayes,  former chair of the photography department at New York University,  takes photos of artistic and advertising  images in their  context–usually through glass–to  include not only the surrounding scene but also environmental particulars of the world beyond as reflected  in the glass.

“While thematically, the project is about how photographs and advertising imagery permeate our lives; it is also about how the flattening of space in a photograph can produce  a collage filled with unexpected content. ”

 

Especially moving were David Torcoletti “Soldiers”, a small portion of  hundreds photographs of U.S. soldiers that, during the Vietnam War,  were mailed to  a South Vietnamese radio and television personality known professionally as “Mai Lan.” For hours every day, Mai Lan broadcast to American troops stationed there. She also spent much time visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals all around the country.  English was her second language, but she was able to communicate very directly with her audience  Often the photos were inscribed with simple, touching and sincere declarations of appreciation for giving comfort to the subjects of the pictures. When the North overran South Vietnam, Mai Lan had to leave quickly;  she chose a small box of photographs to bring along, leaving hundreds behind.

 

 

According to  the Davis Orton Web site, ” Years later, Mai Lan, now Denise, and a colleague of David Torcoletti’s at a private school, showed him the images”–many of which were not well preserved. Torcoletti photographed all of the images and, with her permission, digitally adjusted twenty-four that he found most powerful  for  exposure, contrast, burning, dodging, color balance and saturation. All of these decisions were emotional and aesthetic. “For Torcoletti, the power of these objects was in the way they were disintegrating, barely holding on to the original image while becoming something else entirely.  They were now less specific to the individuals depicted and more about war and hope and a peculiar, distant “love” that sustained these men in impossible circumstances.”

 

The show closes November 11, 2012.

 

–Anita M. Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, a public relations and online marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.

 

 

 

 

Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn is a must-see restrospective by painter/photographer/sculptor/poet named…you guessed it:  “Roni Horn.” 

At Boston’s  Institute of Contemporary Art, the show, the first to compile such a large body of her work,  explores the changing nature of identity and perception.

In several galleries, the show  does so through photographic portraits of the artist and others at different stages of life.  

On the ICA’s first floor, photographs of the artist juxtapose images of her looking  traditionally masculine with others in which she appears “traditionally feminine–” from early childhood to the present.

On the fourth floor,   large portaits of her niece, also taken at different ages,  show slightly different expressions, moods, attitudes– are repeated, Warhol-like, in photo after photo.

 

Another gallery features pairs of seemingly identical photos of the heads and necks of owls and other birds taken from behind. 

Yet another includes two identical? photos of a white owl on a black perch.

An ICA brochure explains  that many of Horne’s works are  “composed as pairs, series or with multiple sides, inviting us to notice subtle yet infinte difference between their parts. ”

I was particularly intrigued and impressed with Horn’s large format photographs of water in nature–roiling, calm, on rocks, with glints of sun–many taken of London’s River Thames–and Horn’s accompanying poetic commentary on the changing nature of water and our perception of it. 

The “water” gallery  also includes two glass sculptures–one largely clear and white, the other mostly black–which, at times,  appear to be receptacles filled with water but have surfaces that seem to change shape. 

  Through a doorway in this gallery, the viewer can see out onto the water in Boston Harbor–highlighting all the more our involvement in/relation to/changing perception of the substance that is part and parcel of our existence–but can also destroy us.  

I also enjoyed Horn’s colorful glass sculptures–one, entitled “Pink Tons” , is the largest chunk of glass ever cast; the other, a  red  hassock-like piece with a squished-in corner that reminded me of a gigantic “gummy bear.”

Both appeared to change in form and texture depending on the viewer’s vantage point. 

“Peer over the top of Pink Tons’ opaque cast sides into a seemingly liquid center that reacts to the atomsospheric changes of Boston’s light and weather. This five-ton glass cube is at once imposing and inviting, brutish yet pink, ”  the  brochure explains.

“Integrating difference is the basis of identity, not the exclusion of it,” Horn writes. “You are this and this and that….”

Not only is each work beautiful and provocative in itself–but the show as a whole,  which integrates a multitude of media and art forms,  is a brilliant expression encorporating the artist’s multiple talents and perceptions –and our own.  

—Anita M. Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group. We also publish HarrisCom Blog and Ithaca Diaries Blog.