Two women are talking together, their voices are confident and clear and touched with laughter. The elder woman repeats the word for blue heron in Apsáalooke. I have come to Wendy Red Star’s exhibit many times now, and this is the first time I have heard her language aloud — I have to thank Shaun Leonardo.
Read article
Kang Seung Lee honors kin in spirit (April 7 newsletter)
An artist is kneeling with his hands in the earth. Kang Seung Lee has come to Namsan Park in Seoul, and somewhere along the mountain paths and Joseon gardens and 14th-century houses, he is remembering a writer and a filmmaker together.
Read article
Artists seek kinship in hard times in ‘Close to You’
Two men are dancing in the kitchen. They are barefoot, eyes closed, two black men holding each other at home, in a quiet lighted room. Los Angeles photographer Clifford Prince King offers an image of refuge and care in Close to You at Mass MoCA.
Read article
Glenn Kaino invokes protest in light and shadow
Los Angeles musician Deon Jones is singing U2’s Bloody Sunday in a ring of light. A protest in Derry, Northern Ireland, comes together with a protest Selma, Alabama, as international artist Glenn Kaino brings his new work to Mass MoCA.
Read article
Carrie Mae Weems holds her eye on the pandemic
Carrie Mae Weems is internationally known for her work in audio, digital images, video, and above all in photography. She has created Resist Covid: Take 6, a new public work, with messages for surviving in this hard time.
Read article
Black in the Berkshires: Revealing the past enlarges the future
Frances Jones-Sneed has walked along the Housatonic River, finding and telling the stories of black men and women in the Berkshires who have reshaped this country since this country began.
Read article
Wendy Red Star re-imagines care of Native objects and stories
Artist and curator Wendy Red Star, Mass MoCA and MCLA will host a virtual roundtable exploring the ways museums can re-imagine care for Indigenous objects.
Read article
Ledelle Moe’s sculptures make monuments of women (January 20 newsletter)
Giant heads gaze upward, and tall women stretch out in the sun. The sculptures in Ledelle Moe’s ‘When’ at Mass MoCA look smooth and weathered, as though they have been lying in a river bed for years.
Read article
A-Ok Barbecue spices up take-out in style
She is an Australian artisanal bread baker trained in New York. He is a former Manhattan chef and a butcher — a Russian Hungarian Jew from Connecticut. Together, at A-Ok, they are inventing Berkshire barbecue.
Read article
Unison stronger than fission: Poetry and art hold a light in hard times
Artist Trinh Mai and poet Shann Ray have created a book of words and paintings probing a world where the beauty of high canyons and loving relationships can exist at the same time as fission and division.
Read article