From colorful ancestral paintings of remembrance to impressionistic springtime landscapes, we’ve rounded up four gallery exhibits you don’t want to miss this winter in Boston.
John Stockwell, “Gemini” (2022, oil on canvas)
Through 12/31
John Stockwell: New Works Arden Gallery, ardengallery.com
As the temperatures drop and clear skies make way to browning leaves, John Stockwell’s paintings of blooming fields feel like a breath of fresh air. The Cambridge native’s large, impressionistic meadows are reminiscent of the Swedish landscapes where he currently resides, with cerulean and indigo shades of fields spilling out into the Baltic Sea. Whereas Stockwell’s earlier work had a dreamy, impressionistic style, his artwork has evolved on par with 21st century climate change, growing more intense with the use of hands and fingertips as painting tools.
Through 1/8
Ancestors’ Voices / Vwa Zansèt Yo Laconia Gallery, laconiagallery.com
As the show’s title suggests, Haitian-born artist Colette Brésilla’s newest exhibit takes us on a colorful, spiritual and ancestral journey. Mixing painting, sculpting and textile design, Brésilla explores femininity through figures of Haitian folklore as spirits, mothers, market ladies and warriors. Using applique technique and patterns similar to Beninese fabrics—a land where many displaced Haitians originally hail from—the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston alumna creates softly colored paintings and textile works. In the words of the artist, the “transformative and healing potential of the arts” in dialogue with Haitian cosmology leaves the door open to boundless reflection and reimaginings.
Samuel Bak, “Alone” (2022, oil on linen canvas).
Through 1/15
Icons of Alone: New Works by Samuel Bak Pucker Gallery, puckergallery.com
In his newest exhibition, renowned artist Samuel Bak shows works melding Jewish history and surrealism into a visceral testimony of remembrance. Born in 1933, Bak finds inspiration from the Vilna ghetto in his hometown of Vilna, Lithuania, where he lived during Nazi occupation in 1941. Ever since, Bak has been painting and creating, interweaving his personal history with Jewish iconography to create visuals of his experience of the Holocaust. Icons of Alone, Bak’s newest series, documents ghettoization and displacement in surrealist works never seen before, now on display at the Pucker Gallery.
Titus Kaphar, “Jerome I” (2014, oil, tar and gold leaf on panel)
Through 1/16
Titus Kaphar: The Jerome Project Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, gardnermuseum.org
In 2011, artist Titus Kaphar began searching for information about his estranged father. Upon research, he found 97 records of incarcerated men with the same name. From then on, The Jerome Project was born: a series of small-scale portraits that invite the viewer to contemplate the dehumanizing impact of the American carceral system. The portraits, which are set against a gold-leaf background in homage to Byzantine devotional paintings, are swimming up to the mouth in tar—symbolic of the inmates’ time incarcerated. Later, Kaphar further extended the tar when he realized that upon release, the men were still deprived of many rights and silenced. Though their mouths are covered, the men’s piercing eyes speak volumes, challenging us to question whose lives we consider and whose we erase.
Photography by: ZOLA SOLAMENTE; COURTESY OF PUCKER GALLERY; COURTESY OF ISABELLA GARDNER MUSEUM/COLLECTION OF NOEL E. D. KIRNON
