Ancestral Modern

Walu, 2008, Tommy Mitchell On display at the Seattle Art Museum: an extraordinary (as in EXTRAORDINARY) exhibit of contempoary aboriginal art. Mostly paintings, the show has been assembled from the collection of a Seattle couple, Robert Kaplan and Margaret Levi. Some of my favorite aboriginal painters are well represented— Emily Kam Kngwarray, Wimmitji Tjapangarti, Doreen […]

Color as the Breath of Bodies

Kathy Butterfly, Pillow Sue Williams, Color Pile Figuring Color at the ICA features works by Kathy Butterly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roy McMakin and Sue Williams. The intent of the exhibit is to explore the use of color and form to speak to the body: McMakin’s brightly colored and quirky sculptures address the human form; Butterly describes […]

Dreaming of Shambhala

Tangka from Seeking Shambhala (Photo: MFA) The MFA’s small show, Seeking Shambhala, is a quiet treasure chest opened up in a corner gallery of the Asian Wing. With a mythical utopian location at the heart of the exhibit, Shambhala (or as it is sometimes referenced in the West, Shangri-La) offers an open invitation to blend […]

Futurity

Sammy Tunis as Ada Lovelace in Futurity (Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva/Boston Globe) In an interview with Tony Kushner that took place when his landmark play in two parts, Angels in America, had just opened in Los Angeles, he talked about the genesis of the idea for AA. It was the 1980s and he was living in […]

The Facts and the Truth: Lucian Freud at the National Portrait Gallery

Benefits Supervisor (“Big Sue”) Resting “There are facts,” the painter Lucian Freud once said, “and there is the truth.” The current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London follows less than a year after Freud’s death at 88. The show is a stark reminder that while Freud dealt with the facts of our all-too-human […]