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In the last Chasing the Muse column, I presented my thoughts on what I considered to be the Top 12 art events in the South Coast in 2025, working down from No. 12 to No. 7. Now, the final six:
6. “Bearing Witness: A Sea of Buttons in Memory of the Holocaust’s Youngest Victims” at the Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery at Bristol Community College.
Last winter, Gallery Director Kathleen Hancock and her assistant Olivia Harris spent over 10 hours pouring, corralling and raking approximately 1.5 million buttons into a 12’ X 45’ rectangle onto the floor of the gallery, with depths ranging from ¼” to 1½”.
It was a mesmerizing sight. All those buttons — black, ivory, pink, green, red, lavender, blue, yellow, hues of gold and silver, made of plastic, wood, and metal — were visually dense, and in their abstract fluidity, one could imagine wading into them as if they were a marsh.
It reminded me of the large-scale paintings of the abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock, a tactile field of color and shadow and depth, in which one could be immersed. It was a universe unto itself.
But what was the significance of the number? Why 1.5 million?
That was the number of children who were killed in the Holocaust. And for only the second time in my life, I wept in an art gallery.
5. “goodnightiloveyouillseeyouinthemorning” at the Co-Creative Center.
Mark Phelan’s paintings have always been intensely personal as he has explored grief, childhood memories, nostalgia for that which is no longer and perhaps never was, except in a feverish dreamstate.
The title of the show (and one of his paintings), “goodnightiloveyouillseeyouinthemorning” is quite purposely without capitalization, proper word spacing or punctuation. It is as tightly packed as his imagery.
Phelan displayed 17 paintings in that exhibition and all seemed to exist in a state of being between the real and the imagined. There was a painting of a treehouse and another of a sudden isolated downpour, memories of boyhood, likely altered by the passage of time.
“The Struggle” was a large painting of two men having a tug of war, and both of them were clearly Phelan himself. It seemed to suggest a battle between past self and present self, but the struggle will, as it does for all of us, be settled by the future self.
The painting “goodnightiloveyouillseeyouinthemorning” features multiple images of his wife Becky. It is a billet-doux of raw canvas and paint.
I’ve previously described Phelan as a painter with the soul of a poet. After all, would anyone without a poetic sensibility write these words on his canvas? “Remember the weight of the world / it’s the sound we used to buy on cassette and 45 / I summon you to appear, my love.”
4. “Red” at the Steeple Playhouse.
As the only non-static art on the list, I have to admit I’m as surprised as anyone to have even reviewed it, never mind rate it this highly.
When local actor Eric Paradis asked me to consider reviewing the Your Theatre production of “Red” at the Steeple Playhouse, I hemmed and hawed a bit, explaining that I don’t write about theater. I told him (as he already knew), “I write about painting and sculpture and printmaking and…” He cut me off, saying “It’s about Mark Rothko.”
He sold me with four words.
Penned by the American playwright John Logan, the local production starred Paradis as the famed, somewhat misanthropic, abstract expressionist, and Paul Inwood as Ken, a fictionalized studio assistant. It was directed by Suzanne Houbre, with Nicole Perullo serving as stage manager.
Ken is constantly berated by Rothko, who uses him as a sounding board and a whipping boy, until he garners the nerve to stand up to him.
The heavy drama was occasionally softened by some light comedic moments and, at times, a banter that bounced back and forth between the two actors with the precision and smoothness of a rap battle.
I was particularly amused when Paradis captured the mean-spirited cantankerousness of Rothko when he railed at his perceived enemies: other painters, museum curators, gallerists, disgruntled collectors and, yes, “goddamn son-of-a-bitch art critics.”
3. “I See Myself in You / Paintings by William Collin” at the Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery at Bristol Community College.
The gallery footprint is 25’ X 75’ and the ceiling is high. With only seven not particularly large paintings on display, one might think that William Collin’s “I See Myself in You” might appear sparse. But that was hardly the case.
The room was anchored by the heavy weight of complex emotions — apprehension, fatigue, disappointment, grief — and the suggestion of a quiet rage, but that silence does not make it any less palpable.
Collin exhibited a septet of images of young Black men and boys and although the paintings are not literal self-portraits, they seem to harbor elements of self, perhaps fleeting moments or maybe something that resides deeply within his soul.
His “Don’t Sell Grandma’s House” features a boy, perhaps 10 or 11, sitting on a floral patterned easy chair. His head is resting in his hand and it is certainly autobiographical. I have often visited his painting studio. The chair is there.
Many of the paintings utilize a floral motif. In one untitled work, a man sits on a curb and a red rose rises from between slabs of concrete. Even with a practiced hardness, vulnerability reveals itself.
The highlight of the show is a wonderfully rendered portrait of a teenager inspired by a Jay-Z lyric: “I put my hand on my heart and that means I feel ya / real recognize real and you looking familiar.”
Collin’s work, and I would go so far as to say his ethos itself, manages to be deeply personal, culturally specific, and positively universal, all at once.
2. “I Return With a Feeling of Us: The Photography of Anthony Barboza” at the New Bedford Art Museum.
Anthony Barboza and Collin have never met but there is certainly a tangential connection. The young painter briefly dated the niece of the master photographer. But far more significant is the commonality revealed by the titles of their respective exhibitions.
Barboza’s “I Return With a Feeling of Us” and Collin’s “I See Myself in You” both reverberate with a powerful love for Black culture and community. And while Collin looked inward to express his fidelity and appreciation, Barboza used his camera to document and celebrate the contributions of Black culture, to explore Harlem, Florida and Africa, and to make commentary on ugly truths and difficult moments.
The New Bedford Art Museum hosted the 81-year-old Barboza’s first retrospective exhibition. Needless to say, it was well overdue.
Barboza, like the great Harlem Renaissance era photographer James Van Der Zee, has not only a keen eye and superb sense of timing, but also the ability to garner the trust of his subjects, allowing for moments of intimacy, humor, vulnerability and sheer joy.
The subjects of his portraiture in “I Return With a Feeling of Us” constituted a pantheon of Black cultural figures: James Baldwin, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Dizzy Gillespie, Gil Scott-Heron, Sun Ra, Jacob Lawrence, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Romare Bearden, Jay-Z, Mos Def, Alicia Keys, Erykah Badu and Marvelous Marvin Hagler, among others.
And those Harlem 1970s street scenes? A trio of young boys wearing their Easter Sunday best in front of a graffitied wall? And the guy with the wide smile checking out an elegant woman as she passed him?
A bit of serendipity and patience paid off. Bravo, Mr. Barboza. Bravo.
1. “Radical Reinvention: Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture” at the New Bedford Art Museum.
Early in the year, shortly after the Art Museum dramatically reconfigured its interior space to maximize its exhibition footprint, it presented “Radical Reinvention: Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture.”
It was an exploration of the decades-long metamorphosis of ceramics itself, as certain practitioners moved beyond the utilitarian and the functional. Embracing clay as a vehicle in which the conceptual and the contemplative could be embraced, pioneers such as Peter Voulkos and Betty Woodman created works that, while grounded in tradition, went in unexpected directions.
Woodman’s “Exotic Bird Diptych” featured two Picasso inspired clay roosters on separate pedestals, inches apart. With their chests puffed up, they eyed each other as if about to engage in a barnyard cockfight.
Chris Gustin’s large scale plump pneumatic vessels referenced everything from the Venus of Willendorf to Fred Flintstone. A master ceramicist, his work tapped a comic sensibility, a subdued eroticism and body horror, sometimes all at once.
Don Reitz, who was once described as “one of the most virtuosic throwers” in the ceramics world, claimed he wanted to be a poet but dyslexia led him to clay, where he found his voice.
His “You Can’t Understand It Unless You Live It” had enigmatic marks and sad scratches and a sense of loss on the surface. It truly made one want to understand it, even if that were impossible. Unless you lived it.
Other exhibitors included the previously-mentioned Voulkos, Zemer Peled, Ibrahim Said, Deborah Coolidge, Nancy Train Smith, and the amazingly prolific Dana Sherwood, exploring mythological themes.
When I first reviewed “Radical Reinvention,” I called it “the finest exhibition in the history of the institution.” I stand by that assessment. Executive Director and Curator Suzanne de Vegh and her elite crackerjack team of assistants and preparators brought their A-game.
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
How can you not mention DATMA’s rooster. It is already beloved and iconic.