Art Around the Hub - art museums in Boston, Massachusetts

Art in America, June, 1999 by Martha Buskirk

In a city where attention to the historic past has often taken precedence over contemporary creation, a diffuse network of artistic activity has evolved.

"Regional style is something we grope for in an effort to establish our identities," says Carl Belz, the recently retired director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham. "But doesn't that idea somehow come out of the past, when we used to talk about regional schools, before we were all in touch with everything immediately anyway?" In an era of international art stars and frequently overlapping rosters at geographically distant biennials and art fairs, it can be hard enough to locate regional characteristics. Add to this mix, in the case of Boston, the city's proximity to New York as well as the presence of more than 50 area colleges and universities, many with their own museums or galleries, and the question of locating a regional identity becomes even more complex.

Certainly little evidence of regional identity could be found last year in the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) exhibition "Transience and Sentimentality: Boston and Beyond," whose premise was defined so loosely that it allowed for the participation of almost any artist who had passed through Boston at some point in his or her career. While the theme of transience was appropriate to a town so dominated by its colleges, the inclusion of a significant percentage of artists who had only recently graduated from studio programs lent a thinness to the overall presentation, which suggested a general dissemination of contemporary art styles rather than a specific regional take.

The Boston area has also been feeling the effects of the ongoing game of curatorial musical chairs characteristic of the broader art world. By the time "Transience and Sentimentality" opened, one of its two curators had left for New York, and the ICA was nearing the end of its search for a new director. Nearby, at MIT's List Visual Arts Center, the selection of director Katy Kline and curator Helaine Posner to oversee Ann Hamilton's installation for the American pavilion at the 1999 Venice Biennale (opening this month) was an affirmation of an innovative exhibition program that had included the artist's 1992 aleph installation. But the good news was quickly tempered by the announcement of Posner's departure for New York and Kline's for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Mission Incomplete: The Major Venues

Boston's early support for the arts is notable. In 1876 the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) was one of the first major museums in America to open its doors; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, founded in 1936 as a noncollecting institution, was unique at that time in the U.S. More recently, though, Boston's support for contemporary art has been decidedly mixed, particularly when it comes to the area's major collecting institutions.

When the MFA mounted a popular but critically assailed exhibition of Herb Ritts's fashion photography in 1996, director Malcolm Rogers told a Boston Magazine interviewer that he hoped the show would "attract a younger crowd"--a strategy the museum subsequently pursued to its logical conclusion when it devoted contemporary gallery space to a celebration of the Wallace & Gromit clay animation characters. Neither show did anything to offset dissatisfaction with the museum's notoriously small and inconsistent holdings of modern and contemporary art. But Cheryl Brutvan, the MFA's recently appointed contemporary curator, is confident that the museum is committed to building its collections, insisting that otherwise she would not have been tempted to leave the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo. There has been continuing support for contemporary art from the MFA's department of prints, drawings and photographs, whose acquisitions were well represented in the recent exhibition "PhotoImage: Printmaking 60s to 90s." And this spring's highly regarded survey of work by Cuban-born photographer Abelardo Morell, who teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art, should bolster efforts to show more experimental material.

The MFA has also filled another major void with the opening of new galleries devoted to African, Oceanic and Ancient American art. While the museum has

succeeded in attracting throngs of people, it remains to be seen how much attention it is willing to devote to the long-term process of building an audience for contemporary art rather than relying on surefire crowd-pleasers like Monet--the subject of two major exhibitions in the past decade.

Audience-building is also a major issue at the ICA, which has posted low attendance figures in recent years. "You don't keep people out for generations and have them come back because you've had one popular exhibition or done one successful piece of marketing," says Jill Medvedow, the ICA's director since March 1998. "Since as a country we've pretty much decimated arts education for young people, I would say my job is even harder." Luckily, Medvedow arrived with a burst of energy that seems in no danger of abating. The ICA's lack of a permanent collection places all the attention on the exhibition program, and its focus on contemporary art ensures constant local scrutiny of the proportion of Boston artists included in its exhibitions. Medvedow's schedule favors solo exhibitions-including Carol Rama, Tracey Moffatt, Kerry James Marshall and Shimon Attie-although the ICA's most recent exhibition was devoted to area collectors of contemporary art. Medvedow does not expect, however, to revive the "Boston Now" exhibitions once part of the ICA programming, preferring to include local artists in thematic shows and other projects. It is also unclear what impact the appointment of curator Jessica Morgan will have, and whether the ICA will be able to realize its hopes for a new, more spacious facility.