Marveling at MECA’s annual MFA Thesis show

Museum And Gallery

Grand seductions

By GREG COOK | December 16, 2008

Milton Rogovin is a 98-year-old Buffalo leftie who took up photography when his optometry business fell apart after he'd been hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958. The heart of his work — and his 29 photos on view at Gallery Kayafas — is his four-decade portrait of the cool cats, stern moms, and stylish ladies of Buffalo's impoverished Lower West Side. The years have given his black-and-white shots the allure of nostalgia, but in the past I've gone back and forth about his artistry — sometimes it feels dull. This time, though, I'm swayed by his straight-ahead documentary vision. In his Quartets, he returns to the same persons again and again over the years. Parents become grandparents. A young couple with an infant become in time a tired old woman alone. The photos are often heartbreaking records of how poverty plus years can break up couples and homes, steal your health, ruin your looks, and grind down hope.

Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.

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ARTICLES BY GREG COOK

CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN | May 13, 2013
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MERRY PRANKSTERS | May 07, 2013
Parked out front of Brown University's gray modernist Granoff Center on a recent sunny morning were one of those 15-foot-tall inflatable rats that unions install in front of businesses they're protesting and a limousine sloppily painted to resemble a yellow and black school bus.

ALTERED IMAGES | April 30, 2013
Among the handsome Washington Street storefronts of AS220's renovated Mercantile Block building, with their neo-old-timey signs, is the residents' entrance to the building. It is against AS220's religion to leave any space empty that can be filled with art. So the lobby is the AS220 Resident Gallery, which occupants of the building take turns filling with their stuff.

IN THE CITY | April 23, 2013
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Providence art scene is how the city itself has been such a rich subject. A decade ago, the city became a galvanizing topic as artists fought to protect the old mills that served as their homes and studios from demolition — with mixed success. But lately, the community's industrial architecture itself has attracted artists' attention.

THE AFTERMATH OF ATROCITY | April 16, 2013
From the ruins of the Iraq war emerges Wafaa Bilal's "The Ashes Series" and Daniel Heyman's "I Am Sorry It Is So Difficult To Start," on view at Brown University's Bell Gallery.