Upcoming Exhibitions in the Galleries

Major exhibition featuring the new collaborative work of choreographer and performance artist Ann Carlson and video installation artist Mary Ellen Strom. Authored under the joint moniker Carlson/Strom, their work reflects on issues of regional culture and history, art history, and the blurring of the lines between art and life. This exhibition will be featured in the 2009 Boston CyberArts Festival and is organized by Curator Nick Capasso and Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch.

Mid-career survey exhibition of the work of Provincetown/ Cambridge, Massachusetts painter Tabitha Vevers, whose work is characterized by explorations of the female body and sexuality, often with references to sea life. Accompanied by a full-color exhibition catalogue. Third in a series of solo exhibitions of women artists in New England. Organized by Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo.

The Old, Weird America
Joyce and Edward Linde Gallery, Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Media Space, Arcade Gallery, Dewey Family Gallery, James and Audrey Foster Galleries, Fourth Floor Hallway Gallery
Jun 6 – Sep 7, 2009

The Old, Weird America considers a widespread resurgence of folklore—native, idiomatic, and communal themes and traditions—as a subject in contemporary art in the United States . Borrowing its title and inspirational spark from Greil Marcus’ 1997 book The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, this exhibition considers the work of 16 visual artists and collaborative teams exploring American folk imagery and history from the time of European settlement through the 1960s. Dylan, Marcus argues, was so influential because he found songs and stories in an older, half-forgotten world of American legend that seemed at once stranger and more telling than anything found in the mainstream. The artists featured in The Old, Weird America , all of whom came to prominence in the last decade, draw on folklore for its ability to illuminate American cultural life—its strange mixture of civilization and barbarism, enlightenment, and madness.

The Old, Weird America is organized by Senior Curator Toby Kamps of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. The exhibition is accompanied by a 159 page catalogue with essays by Toby Kamps, critic and independent curator Michael Duncan, and Weisman Art Museum education curator Colleen Sheehy. This exhibition is coordinated by DeCordova Curator Nick Capasso.

DeCordova Annual/Biennial Exhibition
Joyce and Edward Linde Gallery, Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Media Space, Arcade Gallery, James and Audrey Foster Galleries, Fourth Floor Hallway Gallery
Jan 23 – Apr, 2010 (closing date TBA)

The 2010 DeCordova Annual is a new presentation of this ongoing series. In the past, this exhibition has highlighted the work of a limited number of contemporary artists from the six New England states and emphasizes the quality and variety of works rather than any single or overarching theme. Originally titled the Artists/Visions series, the DeCordova Annual has showcased the works of emerging, mid-career, and established artists since 1989. Since its founding, the DeCordova Annual seeks to feature some of most innovative artists working in the region. This exhibition is organized by Assistant Curator Dina Deitsch.

Lalla Essaydi: Les Femmes du Maroc
Joyce and Edward Linde Gallery
Sep 26, 2009 – Jan 3, 2010

Les Femmes du Maroc is an extensive series of photographs that directly reference the composition and subjects of 19th-century Orientalist paintings and which build on Essaydi’s previous work addressing the oppression of women in both colonial and post-colonial Islamic cultures.

The title of Essaydi’s series Les Femmes du Maroc is adapted from Eugène Delacroix’s famous French Romantic painting Les Femmes d’Algiers (1834), a voyeuristic male fantasy of languorous women in an opulent harem. Paintings like these, as well as the 19th-century European colonial occupation of much of the Arab world, fostered orientalism, a political and cultural climate smitten with visions of Muslim women as mysterious, cloistered, yet sexually available slaves and odalisques. Increasingly violent and lurid Orientalist paintings were created by European artists like Jean-Léon Gérome, Auguste Bouchet, and Rudolf Ernst well into the early 20th century.

However in her photographs, Essaydi drains the paintings of color, removes all male figures, clothes the women, and sets everything within a shallow stage-like space defined by white fabric. All surfaces are covered with Arabic calligraphy – backdrops, floor, drapery, and skin – applied to the surfaces themselves, not overlaid on the photographs. This text is subversive on many levels. In Islamic culture, calligraphy is a male art form, used primarily to transcribe the Q’uran and other sacred literature. In Essaydi’s work, the writing is applied with henna, a tradition women’s art of body beautification, and the words are taken from the artist’s journals and discuss cultural and individual identity, memory, communication, and personal freedom.

Chakaia Booker solo exhibition (tentative)
Joyce and Edward Linde Gallery, Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Media Space, Arcade Gallery, James and Audrey Foster Galleries, Fourth Floor Hallway Gallery
May – Summer 2010 (exact dates TBA)

 

For more information about DeCordova's upcoming exhibitions, contact info@decordova.org.