Mario Quiroz: Mis Vecinos, Portraits of Fitchburg’s Latino Communities
Mario Quiroz is a contemporary photographer who was born in El Salvador and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a citizen of the United States. His work is focused on exploring the 21st-century American immigrant experience. In 2013, FAM invited Mario Quiroz to come to Fitchburg to make photographic portraits of individuals, families, and groups from this city’s growing Latino communities. Quiroz approached this project in two ways: he created informal portraits in private homes, workplaces, churches, and social gatherings, and he also made formal portraits in a special studio at the museum. While most of the artworks in Mis Vecinos are straight black-and-white photographs, Quiroz has hand-colored over 30 of the formal portraits. These photographs will enter FAM’s permanent collection as a tribute to our Latino neighbors.
(Image: Mario Quiroz, HC 1405-FIT-MKY-0304, hand-colored photograph)
On view through September 6, 2015 Location: Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA
Terry Winters: Printed Matters
Terry Winters made his first print in 1982 and, to date, he has created more than 110 editions, including numerous multi-sheet portfolios, working with innovative fine art presses internationally. This exhibition considers Winters’s use of the printed image as a resource for experimentation, invention, and collaboration. He views prints as equal to paintings and drawings and avoids applying a hierarchy to his various modes of working. Yet the print medium is nonetheless of special significance to an artist who has long looked to the universe of printed matter for inspiration and who consistently applies ideas generated through the printmaking process to his practice as a whole.
(Image: Terry Winters, In Blue (detail), 2008, portfolio of nine relief prints printed in three colors on Somerset paper, and text by Eliot Weinberger printed on eight sheets of vintage Whatman paper, 14 x 11 in. each, courtesy The Grenfell Press, New York.)
On view through May 10, 2015 Location: Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME
Gari Melchers: An American Impressionist at Home and Abroad
Hugely successful during his own lifetime, the Detroit-born artist Julius Garibaldi (“Gari”) Melchers left behind an artistic legacy that is as varied as it is compelling. From engaging peasant scenes inspired by his years at Egmond aan Zee, Holland (where he shared a studio with the great American painter George Hitchcock in the late 19th century) to intimate portraits of mothers and their children, Melchers' oeuvre is inflected with a dynamic range of influences, including the Barbizon School, Impressionism and Symbolism. From this broad range of sources, Melchers created a style that was uniquely his own; remarkable for its insistent structural rigor and careful draughtsmanship (absorbed through his years at Dusseldorf's Royal Academy of Art) as well as a lyrical palette and keen observance of humanity.
(Image: Gari Melchers, The Landing, Bermuda. Lent by Gari Melchers Home and Studio, University of Mary Washington.)
On View from March 5 – May 22, 2015 Location: Bellarmine Museum of Art, Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT
Green Mountain Graveyards
Green Mountain Graveyards traces the evolution of gravestone and funerary art in Vermont. This exhibit connects changing symbols and motifs with cultural and social views of death and mortality.
Photographs of Vermont's earliest gravestones from the late 1700s depict the last vestiges of the popular "memento mori" movement, including carvings depicting coffins, hourglasses, and crude portraits. As society's views on death softened, artwork shifted away from the physical remains to more spiritual concerns, incorporating weeping willow trees, angels and winged cherubs.
On view through April 2015 Location: Vermont History Museum, Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier, VT
The State of Clay: Pushing Boundaries
Pushing Boundaries presents the work of 50 of the talented 300 ceramicists over the past 18 years who have participated in the State of Clay exhibitions at the Lexington Arts and Crafts Society, Lexington, MA. These ceramicists are educators, studio potters, established professionals, emerging artists and craftspeople with both traditional and contemporary styles who seek to stretch the boundaries of clay – with the aim of bringing awareness of this medium to the public.
(Image: Claudia Olds Goldie, Navigating a Dream (back), 2013. Stoneware, wooden dowel, graphite pencil drawing. 20” x 14” x 10”.Photo by Will Howcroft.)
On view from March 7, 2015 to May 24, 2015 Location: Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA