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The New Bedford Art Museum’s “Best of SouthCoast Artists” is a sweet and ardent visual billet-doux to the creative community of the region.
It embraces the local painters, sculptors, printmakers, ceramicists, photographers and other artists from the 1800s to the present and lets artwork by the masters of the past — Clifford W. Ashley, Albert Bierstadt, William Bradford, Oliver Tarbell Eddy, Charles Henry Gifford, Leander Allen Plummer and Clement Nye Smith (all on loan from the Collection of the New Bedford Free Public Library) — mingle and converse with well-established contemporary makers and the up-and-coming.
And it’s a hell of a party.
Carmen Hermo, the Lorraine and Alan Bressler Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was invited to select a number of artists for special recognition. She found herself inspired by both connections to and departures from what she expected to find.
Seeking to select artwork that bridged the past and the present and that informed the future, she noted: “Local material, seafaring histories and colonial-era side jokes coalesce alongside larger questions about family and home, the body and our perception of each other, and concerns about our nation and our shared future.”
The selected artists were ceramicist Anis Beigzadeh, sculptor Keith Francis, screenprinter Steven Daiber, weaver Arghavan Booyeh, mixed media artists Taylor Baldwin and David Meyers, photographer Laurence Cuelenaere, mixed media artist Stephanie Roberts-Camello, weaver Paula Stebbins Becker, painter Maren Brown, and printmaker Adrian Tio.
“The Best of SouthCoast Artist: Juried Exhibition” is displayed primarily in the People’s Gallery, while others are featured elsewhere within the museum.
Beigzadeh’s “Let It Go” is a contoured ceramic vessel on the floor, precariously leaning away from the wall, suspended in place and in space by hundreds of vibrant blue fine threads. The threads appear as wings yet they constrain the vessel. They are rigid, mathematical and restrictive. The vessel is organic, earthy and longing to be free. The artist describes “Let It Go” as symbolic of the tension between femininity and patriarchy. Beigzadeh was the first-place winner in Hermo’s juried exhibition.
Francis has never shied away from hot button topics (voter suppression, gun violence, corporate greed) in his very non-traditional sculptures. He was named the second-place winner by Hermo. His “Game Over (The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play)” is a non-functioning 1969 Gottlieb pinball machine repurposed to deliver a haunting commentary on the threat of nuclear war. The bumpers are shaped into missiles, the scoring areas are marked with the names Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the soundtrack is a 1955 interview with J. Robert Oppenheimer conducted by Edward R. Murrow.
Barnstable-based painter Jackie Reeves displays “Access Denied,” an acrylic painting, from 2022. Of course, Barnstable is no more South Coast than New Bedford is on Cape Cod but it is a terrific painting nonetheless, so I think we can agree to let it slide. It features seven figures on the wrong side of a tall barbed wire fence. Some carry belongings, others have nothing in their hands save reins. The sky is gray and ominous. There may be a fire in the background. Heat seems to rise from the earth. And mysterious holes on the surface of the painting suggest tears in the fabric of reality itself. And that may be what it feels like to travel hundreds of miles only to have access denied.
Several artists embrace mythological subjects, such as Roger Kizik’s shaped painting of a statue of an ancient Greek demigod. Created in 2019, “Herakles Redux” imagines the statue, headless and missing some extremities, at the bottom of the ocean. A bright red octopus drapes over the shoulders, small fish swim by, a sea urchin bobs.
JP Powel’s “Leda” depicts the maiden Leda, who was seduced (raped) by the Greek god Zeus when he took the form of a swan. She sits in a massive nest by the side of a pond, near reeds and lilypads. Several large eggs, the product of Zeus’s assault, are beneath her, as she dutifully tries to hatch them. There is nothing but sadness and despair on her face.
As one might expect in a show taking place in New Bedford that spans centuries, there are a number of works that depict fish, boats and memorable seascapes. Ashley’s “Harpooning a Porpoise (from the Martingale Stay of a Whaler)” from 1906 is an over-the-top depiction of a whaleman thrusting his spear into the waves that is so charmingly ridiculous it looks like it could have been the cover of an old-timey boys’ adventure book.
“Bluefish” by Plummer is a tremendously painstakingly carved, painted and stained pinewood relief work from 1908.
The most contemporary work depicting sea creatures is Mark Dion’s “The Ichthyology of Corruption (The Codfather)” from 2021. A clear reference to former seafood magnate and ex-convict Carlos Rafael, the screenprinted bookcloth work depicts a dozen cartoonish fish. Each is identified by species: Money Laundering, Extortion, Sextortion, Influence Peddling, Cronyism, Embezzlement and six other previously unidentified underworld undersea underlings.
There are so many paintings depicting relatives within the “Best of SouthCoast Artists” that the Art Museum may want to consider family as an overarching theme for a future exhibition.
One of the oldest in that genre is Eddy’s “Ballou Family Portrait,” circa 1845. There are three little girls in the painting, including a set of pudgy-faced twins, perhaps 5 years old. They wear identical reddish brown dresses. One has a bubble wand in her hand and the other has a flower and points at her sister’s bubble. And there is a slightly younger blonde girl, less sure of herself. It is endearing but somehow lowkey creepy, as if they were characters in the 1845 version of “The Addams Family.”
“Francois” by Julie Francois is a handprinted photolithograph on muslin fabric. It is a large-scale work as brightly hued as Warhol’s pop art at its most vivid. Francois mostly sticks with an intense red and an only slightly duller blue as a backdrop for photographs of moms, dads, grandpas, grandmas, aunties, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. It’s a wonderfully vibrant family portrait — on steroids.
A small untitled painting by Meredith Wildes Cornell depicts a heavyset woman sitting on the floor. One twin is cradled in her arms and nurses at her breast. The other is inches away, fast asleep. The diagonal geometry of the room almost seems to bend as if to embrace the entire family.
“Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter” by Robert A. Anderson (1995) is a wonderfully rendered image of a seemingly barely adolescent girl. Her face is detailed with almost photorealist precision, her hair just slightly less so, her blouse is reduced to much simpler marks with brushstokes clearly evident and the background is not much more than a wash. He clearly knew what to focus on.
However, the most photorealist painter in the exhibition is the remarkable John Borowicz. His “Portrait of the Artist’s Father” could easily be mistaken for a high-resolution photograph. His dad sits in a short-sleeved shirt, baby blue gym shorts and sneakers. Every strand of the shag carpet is visible. A small Polynesian style statue is on a nearby table. And in the upper right hand corner of the painting, there is another painting. It is a portrait of his son that he did, when the child was but a toddler. It’s absolutely meta.
There are 75 artists exhibiting in “Best of SouthCoast Artists.” I’ve only scratched the surface.
It will be up at the New Bedford Art Museum, 608 Pleasant St., until Aug. 31.
You may need more than one visit … just sayin’.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
