May 24, 2021 - Boston Flora

Through June 20 – Shen Wei, Painting in Motion

May 24, 2021 by Boston Flora

Dancer, choreographer, painter, and filmmaker Shen Wei moves fluidly between disciplines and cultures to create art that expresses a common spirit animating the world around us. His theory of dance seeks to align the energies inside and outside the body, approaching the body and its environment as fundamentally interconnected. As a painter, Shen Wei uses the monumental scale of the canvas to create immersive visual environments that evoke ancient Chinese landscape paintings while enlisting the drips and gestures of twentieth-century abstraction. The size of the paintings invites the viewer on a journey along the canvas, integrating movement into the experience of static works. His films synthesize choreography, time, place, and light to craft ethereal worlds. Shen Wei’s practice transcends the boundaries between visual and performing arts, seeking spiritual meaning that unites his work across disciplines.

Painting in Motion, a single exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in three parts, is the first exhibition in the U.S. to present the range of Shen Wei’s artistry. Shen Wei’s recent paintings, including two works he created as an Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner Museum, are on display in the Hostetter Gallery along with notebooks, sketches, and documentation of his choreography that provide insight into his evolution as an artist. Calderwood Hall and the Fenway Gallery of the Palace screen his films, featuring a new commission for the Gardner Museum, Passion Spirit. Shen Wei reimagines an image from Passion Spirit for his piece on the Museum’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, showing the continuity between time-based and still media in his work.

For more information on times, and for a gallery guide, visit https://www.gardnermuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/shen-wei

Through Sunday, September 12 – Sonya Clark: Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know

May 24, 2021 by Boston Flora

Through large-scale textile pieces, interactive experiences, and performance, this exhibition, on view at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln through September 12, proposes a shift in the national discussion around race and remembrance. The Confederate Flag of Truce is a simple dishcloth employed as the South’s flag of surrender at the end of the Civil War in 1865. Yet, as Clark shows, propaganda continues to make the more familiar Confederate Battle Flag into the enduring symbol of this history. The exhibition asks: what was surrendered and who had the privilege of surrendering? Did the truce hold? Clark’s works explore the color, texture, and ideology of the Truce Flag, offering avenues for reevaluating foundational American narratives of truce and surrender.

DeCordova is pleased to present two concurrent exhibitions and a full slate of public programs relating to the art of Sonya Clark. A multidisciplinary textile artist and Professor at Amherst College, Clark’s work offers a profound encounter with race and the enduring effects of slavery in the United States. Click here to read about the companion exhibition, Sonya Clark: Heavenly Bound.

Sonya Clark: Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know is organized by the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. DeCordova’s presentation is coordinated by Sam Adams, Curatorial Fellow.

The exhibition is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Amherst College, Agnes Gund, the National Endowment for the Arts, Goya Contemporary Gallery & Goya-Girl Press, Rotasa Fund, the John Meyerhoff & Lenel Srochi-Meyerhoff Fund at the Baltimore Community Foundation, and Judith S. Weisman.

Additional support for deCordova’s presentation comes from the Coby Foundation, Ltd., the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, the Nathaniel Saltonstall Arts Fund, and the Roy A. Hunt Foundation. The exhibition is aligned with the Feminist Art Coalition. For complete information visit www.thetrustees.org.