Category: Curatorial Take
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A Teapot and Our Thirst for Fossil Fuels
Teetering on a ceramic oil rig, Pecten Shell Teapot refashions centuries-old art motifs and porcelain recipes to tell a story about today’s environmental crisis. A dragon’s head and tail form the spout and handle of the teapot, respectively. Insatiable, the creature strides forward in a never-ending chase for a flaming pearl. For ceramicist Michelle Erickson, the […]
Chloe Brettman | 09.20.2023 -
Bark Cloth Defies Categorization
As much of a textile as it is a painted canvas or a work on paper, barkcloth—made from the inner bark of trees—confounds Western notions of art. By not fitting neatly into the artistic genres taught in predominantly Euro-American institutions, bark cloth prompts us to question and challenge the structures that shape our surroundings, said […]
Irene Bantigue | 07.28.2023 -
Watch the Throne
Since its emergence in the 1970s, hip hop has grown into a global phenomenon, driving innovations in music, fashion, technology, and visual and performing arts. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip hop, The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century captures hip hop’s extraordinary influence through more than […]
Asma Naeem | 03.29.2023 -
From the Ground Up
New Interpretation for the Antioch Floor Mosaics Reflect Many Cultural Influences Situated near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in present-day Türkiye, the ancient cities of Antioch and Daphne were thriving cultural, business, and political centers between the 1st and 6th centuries. Since the 1940s, fragments of floor mosaics from the homes of cosmopolitan elites […]
Staff | 02.10.2023 -
A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration
The Great Migration (1915–70) saw more than six million African Americans leave the South for destinations across the United States. Now open at the BMA, A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration explores how this pivotal period in American history transformed nearly every aspect of Black life and culture through newly commissioned […]
Staff | 11.16.2022 -
The Experiment Realized, What Happens Next?
In the final days of the groundbreaking exhibition Guarding the Art, curator and Museum guard Rob Kempton offers an analysis of what it has meant to serve as a curator and how it has—at least for now—changed the relationship between guard and visitor at the BMA. Since its opening in March, I have watched visitors […]
Rob Kempton | 07.06.2022 -
Joan Mitchell’s Weeds, 1976
When Xavier Fourcade visited Joan Mitchell at La Tour in June 1976 to lay the groundwork for her exhibition at his New York gallery that fall, Weeds was well underway but not quite finished, as a photograph of Fourcade in Mitchell’s studio attests: the painting leans against the wall behind him, its two panels pushed […]
Cecilia Wichmann | 07.05.2022 -
A Timeline of The Freedom Quilting Bee
At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the quilters of a small, rural town in Alabama founded the Freedom Quilting Bee. The woman-led cooperative used their craft skills to establish new forms of income and expand their quilting audience. Gee’s Bend, Alabama, is home to generations of extraordinary Black craftswomen, who represent a crucial […]
Stella Hendricks | 03.08.2021 -
A Conversation about Joan Mitchell
Opening in March 2022 at the BMA, the retrospective Joan Mitchell, co-organized by the BMA and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, explores the full arc of Joan Mitchell’s artistic practice, from her exceptional New York paintings in the early 1950s to the majestic, large-scale multi-panel works made in France later in her career. […]
Staff | 02.12.2021 -
What is Mother Power?
The Next Generation of Arts Professionals Explore the Answer in A Perfect Power: Motherhood and African Art In the matrilineal societies of Central Africa in the 1800s and early 1900s, when kinship was traced through the maternal line, mothers were credited not only with creating life and nurturing families, but protecting communities, strengthening leaders, and […]
Staff | 12.18.2020
