'Big Bang!' at the DeCordova, 'Classified Documents' at Harvard, 'Trans am' at the New Art Center
By RANDI HOPKINS | January 9, 2007
Sarah Walker, Descending Order #2 |
“Abstract painting” is a broad historical category that takes in everything from the utopian spiritual and formal purity of the early decades of the 20th century (when forward-thinking artists decided to leave it to the camera to depict the physical world) to the macho of the purely visual as championed by Clement Greenberg later in that century. But as the 21st century gets under way, a new strain of “non-representational” painting draws vitality and purpose from its relationship to the world around it. Curated by Nick Capasso, “BIG BANG! ABSTRACT PAINTING FOR THE 21ST CENTURY” opens at the DeCordova Museum on January 20 with 15 painters whose work finds its structures and patterns in the complex world of science and technology, informed by the likes of cosmology, quantum physics, and neurology. Thaddeus Beal’s intricately patterned paintings reflect the struggle between chaos and order that we face on scales ranging from the cellular to the planetary. Sean Foley employs formal as well as psychological means to explore teetering multi-dimensionality. And Sarah Walker describes her mesmerizing paintings as “visualizing the reality of our existence being in many spaces at once.”Documentary photography was an innovative and powerful tool for social progress a century ago, when Harvard University’s then-new Department of Social Ethics established its Social Museum to promote a comparative study of societal conditions and institutions in America and abroad. “CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS: THE SOCIAL MUSEUM OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 1903–1931” opens at Harvard’s Sackler Museum on January 20 with more than 100 of the Social Museum’s original exhibition boards, including photographs and graphical illustrations. This collection, which was meticulously divided into categories (“Crime,” “Defectives,” “Races,” “War”), offers images, by professionals and amateurs, of such scenes as a table full of white-capped women workers in the H.J. Heinz Company’s Pickle Bottling Department.
Modern, media-saturated life is the subject uniting work by painters Jason Chase, Will DiBello, and Scott Listfield in “TRANS AM,” which opens at the New Art Center in Newton on January 18. All three are influenced by visions of an increasingly corporate and commercial America; the aspects of contemporary society their canvases explore include Internet pop-ups, graphic detritus culled from “logo spare parts” (advertising letters and words come loose from their original context), and images of a lone astronaut caught in a futuristic landscape that features both UFOs and Starbucks.
“Big Bang!” at DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln | January 20–April 22 | 781.259.8355 | “Classified Documents” at Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway, Cambridge | January 20–April 22 | 617.495.9400 | “Trans Am” at New Art Center in Newton, 61 Washington Park, Newtonville | January 18–March 4 | 617.964.3424
On the Web
Decordove Museum: www.infoatdecordova.org
Sackler Museum: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu
New Art Center: www.newartcenter.org
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Politics, Science and Technology, Harvard University, More 
, Politics, Science and Technology, Harvard University, Sciences, Espionage and Intelligence, Astronomy, Painting, Visual Arts, Cultural Institutions and Parks, Museums, Less 
