Art blossoms in museums’ spring exhibitions
Culture is a moving target. It twists and turns, expands and contracts. A good museum needs to do the work to chart culture’s evolution. Thankfully, we have plenty of good museums here in Eastern Mass.
As we move into spring, our museums give us a host of new voices — bright, strange, eccentric and welcome voices. Celebrate the change of season by changing your perspective at one of these fresh exhibitions.
“The Children’s Crusade”
Open now, Institute of Contemporary Art
Born just four decades ago, María Berrío has become a major force in modern art. The Colombian born artist constructs huge paintings that she pieces together with strips of torn Japanese papers and watercolors to invent wondrous reflections of cross-cultural connections and 10,000mile migrations. This exhibition pulls together new and existing works from Berrío’s series The Children’s Crusade — an exploration of legends and contemporary realities facing child migrants.
“Fellow Wanderer: Isabella’s Travel Albums”
Open now, Isabella Stewart Gardner Isabella and her husband, Jack, crisscrossed the globe between 1867 and 1895. The couple trekked across Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East. The Gardner Museum has collected photos, papers, paintings and more from the pair’s journals of journeys and asked modern scholars and artists to use them to explore Isabella’s wise, charming, naive and sometimes backwards understanding of foreign cultures. Pages from nine albums are on view while complete albums can be viewed online.
“From the Andes to the Caribbean: American Art from the Spanish Empire”
Open March 3, Harvard Art Museums Expand your understanding of American art. This exhibit explores how the Spanish Empire recast the New World in its own image from 1492 to 1832. Paintings from what is now Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela mix with pieces fashioned from Cuban and Honduran mahogany, Mexican cochineal, and Peruvian silver to illuminate how imperialism interacted with and crushed indigenous cultures while shaping the art of the Americas.
“Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina”
Open March 4, Museum of Fine Art Organized with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, this exhibition details a story of art and enslavement through dozens of ceramic objects created by Black potters before the Civil War in Old Edgefield District. It also complements the artistic achievements with the contemporary works from modern Black artists inspired by or connected to these 200-year-old ceramics.
“After Hope: Videos of Resistance”
Open March 11, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem
The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco has pulled together an astounding 54 short videos for an exhibition about how hope connects to contemporary art and activism. The PEM brings these films to New England for an immersive experience celebrating arts underrepresented in American museums — “After Hope” presents work by artists from Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Myanmar, Turkey and more who explore themes including environmental destruction, feminism, censorship, globalized capitalism and more.