Visual Art
RAQIB SHAW: BALLADS OF EAST AND WEST One of the
Gardner Museum’s rare “takeover” exhibitions, where the work of a single artist occupies all of its contemporary exhibition spaces (its main Hostetter gallery, its little Fenway gallery, and its facade installation), “Ballads of East and West” is an expansive showcase of Shaw’s extravagant painterly vision as a collision of his transcontinental life. Born and raised in the Indian city of Srinigar in the Himalayas and now living in London, Shaw looks back at the region of his youth as a former paradise fallen victim to political tumult and outside influence. Through May 12. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way. 617-566-1401, www.gardnermuseum.org
LATOYA M. HOBBS: IT’S TIME
“Carving Out Time” (2020-21) is Hobbs’s series of five lifesize woodcuts, in which she portrays a day in the life of her family in Baltimore, where she lives. An intimately diaristic view of her everyday with husband Ariston Jacks, also an artist, and their two children, “Carving Out Time” offers an unvarnished view of a woman artist’s many competing responsibilities as wife, mother, and caregiver, and of the deep history from which she comes. Look closely and you’ll see canonic artists like Alma Thomas, Elizabeth Catlett, and Kerry James Marshall embedded in her images, a lineage that gives her impetus to carry ever on. Through July 21. Harvard Art Museums. 32 Quincy St., Cambridge. 617-495-9400, www.harvardartmuseums.org
JOSEPH GRIGELY: IN WHAT WAY WHAM? (WHITE NOISE AND OTHER WORKS, 19962023) A fateful fall as a 10-year old left Grigely, who lives in Western Massachusetts, completely So began his life, as he describes it, of “watching the world with the sound turned off,” a transformative loss that he, as a formerly hearing person, felt acutely. Much of his work is about that experience of knowing sound but being cut off from it; his foundational work, “Conversations With the Hearing,” from the 1990s, is the bedrock of this affecting survey, which papers two broad elliptical spaces with thousands of handwritten conversations between Grigely and friends, colleagues, and strangers who don’t know American Sign Language (ASL). A monument to the rift between Grigely’s past and current lives, the display radiates loss, but also the power and necessity of connection. It makes you aware of the simplicity of communication that many take for granted. Through March. Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams. 413-662-2111, www.massmoca.org