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The South Coast has played host to a myriad of engaging art exhibitions and cultural events over the course of 2025. From the playful to the painful, from the didactic to the dramatic, and from the erotic to the erratic, art spoke and there was much to listen to, much to heed and much to consider.
And with the art critic’s conventional conceit of creating a Top 10 list, I figured that like Spinal Tap’s amps, I’d do better and “go to 11.” But dismayed by the absence of alliteration, I opted for a Top 12 countdown list. And without further ado, here we go with numbers 12 through 7 (stay tuned for Part 2 for the Top 6).
12. “Complicated Legacies: Museum History, White Supremacy and Sculpture” at the New Bedford Whaling Museum
Oddly enough, this exhibition came about after a decision to NOT exhibit a particular work a number of years earlier, one that had been in the Whaling Museum’s permanent collection since 1916.
The work was a bronze bust of the wealthy New Bedford businessman Jonathan Bourne Jr. (1811-1889). It was donated to the Whaling Museum by his daughter Emily Bourne (along with $75,000) and for over a century, it sat on a plinth overlooking the famed half-scale model of the Lagoda.
And the problem? The bust was created by John Gutzon Borglum, best known as the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. Borglum was a notorious racist, who according to historian John Taliaferro, never said he was a member of the KKK, “but he sure was at the table with them a lot.”
After the killing of George Floyd and the national conversation on racial injustice, the Museum removed it from public display. The bust itself is mundane and forgettable, but the recontextualized conversation and institutional soul-searching that arose when it returned (along with similar items) in “Complicated Histories” was admirable and thought-provoking.
11. “The Art of Jim Charette: Four Decades of Chaos and Creation” at GroundWork NB
In the main lobby entrance of the large redbrick building at the corner of Maxfield and Purchase Streets that houses the rentable workspace (and in the long hallway, several meeting rooms and the ramp that leads to the restrooms), Charette displayed hundreds of brightly hued drawings, paintings and three-dimensional works, made primarily with old toys and spray paint.
It was a blending of three previous exhibitions (“Sad Little Boys” at the long-gone Abattoir Gallery, “An Orderly Chaos” at Gallery X, and “Still Playing with My Crayons” at the Ignition Space in Fall River), infused with a new series, “All Growed Up.”
Charette’s influences include Mad and National Lampoon magazines, underground comix, Saturday morning cartoons and a joyous love of the absurd characters of his own invention. Paintings were done on decidedly unprecious materials — corrugated cardboard, salvaged plexiglass, scraped lauan and old LPs. The neon colors were the pretty icing on the cake that you might not wanna eat.
10. “Emma Kathleen Hepburn Ferrer / The Unicorn, and Other Creatures of Hope / Reinterpreting Traditional Iconography from the Captive Beast to the Liberated Soul” at the CVPA Campus Gallery at UMass Dartmouth
Deeply immersed in the Christian and pagan mythologies of Europe and keenly aware of their overlap, Ferrer’s soft-edged mysterious paintings stir up a pot of misguided faith, the implied promise of riches and fame, world-weariness and abject animal abuse as the true believers create their own unicorns when there are none to be found.
In one painting, a horn is tied to the head of a goat as a cruel jest as it is paraded through town on the back of a horse as if it were part of a medieval freak show. In another, a goat in a manger seems to have had a horn forced into his skull to satisfy the myth.
Arrows fly, a donkey weeps, a goldfinch draws water in a thimble, a foal mourns its mother and a bear wears a skirt. The exhibition blurs the blatant with the mysterious, and Ferrer provides no clear answers. Cruelty? Yes. Tranquility? Also yes.
9. “Claridade: Cape Verdean Identity in Contemporary Art” at the New Bedford Whaling Museum
As New Bedford and the surrounding area make up the largest Cape Verdean community in the country, it is perfectly fitting that the Whaling Museum hosted an exhibition that celebrated their cultural contributions. Featuring the work of artists from the South Coast, Cabo Verde, Europe and elsewhere, it demanded multiple visits.
The walls of the Wattles Family Gallery were painted a jolting and brilliant shade of teal and it was a perfect hue on which to highlight the works of over a dozen artists, many who directly addressed the complicated footprint of the Cape Verdean legacy that dates back to the slavery era.
Among the best works in the powerful exhibition were sculptor Christian Goncalves’ melancholy figures, devoid of facial features, stripped of identity, voice and vision. And right up there was Ellen Gallagher’s “DeLuxe,” an entire wall of 60 white-framed ads directed at Black consumers in magazines such as Ebony. The ads were for products such as skin lighteners, hair straighteners and wigs in an era of “Black erasure.” Gallagher, with a wink and a nod, went even further, to address the grotesqueries of the worst of the “Mad Men” mentality.
Much more cheerful was Bela Duarte’s charmingly Picassoesque “Candy Seller.”
8. “Best of SouthCoast Artists” at the New Bedford Art Museum
In essence, this ambitious exhibition was essentially a love letter to local artists, past and present, and a knowing flirtation with the artists of the future.
Among the works displayed were paintings by Clifford Ashley, William Bradford, Albert Bierstadt, Leander Allen Plummer and other 1800s luminaries (all on loan from the collection of the New Bedford Free Public Library).
In a much more contemporary mode was Anis Beigzadeh’s “Let It Go,” in which a ceramic vase seemed to yearn to be free of a series of threads as it tilted precariously away from the wall. The artist described it as emblematic of the tension between femininity and patriarchy.
Sculptor Keith Francis utilized a non-functioning 1969 Gottlieb pinball machine to create “Game Over (The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play)” to warn of the increasing potential danger of a nuclear exchange. A side note: Francis has produced “Tilt,” yet another old pinball machine, from which he has removed one of its four legs. I’ll keep my distance from that one.
Other highlights of the show included “Leda,” JP Powel’s take on the Greek myth in which a maiden who is ravished by Zeus in the form of a swan literally lays eggs, and Meredith Wildes Cornell’s untitled painting of a mother nursing an infant while another sleeps nearby.
John Borowicz’s “Portrait of the Artist’s Father” (which became truly meta when one notes that the painting includes a segment of a painting that he had done earlier of his then-infant son) was not to be missed. And Mark Dion’s “The Ichthyology of Corruption (The Codfather),” a cartoon commentary on onetime local seafood magnate and ex-convict Carlos Rafael, provided just the right amount of silliness.
The only quibble? Only 75 South Coast artists? That barely scratches the surface. The good news is that the Art Museum is increasing its exhibition footprint.
7. “re-emergence” at the Kettle Black Gallery
The Kettle Black Gallery opened in the early spring with a three-month show called “The Collective” featuring work by painters Kim Barry, Joan DeCollibus, Christy Gunnels, Butch McCarthy and Robin Nunes and photographer David Walega.
The second exhibition, of the same duration, was “re-emergence,” a series of paintings and mixed media works by Gayle Wells Mandle. Delving deep into social issues, including economic disparity, environmental destruction, and concerns as to how girls are offered less opportunity than boys, she made generally subtle commentary, decipherable for those willing to truly engage with the work.
Some of the work included images of shantytowns, flood zones, rusting shacks, and mysterious calligraphy. There were four large colorful abstract canvases, each symbolizing a season of the year (and perhaps a season of life). But it was the Rauschenbergian assemblage, complete with a chair, at the entrance that crushed it.
When I interviewed the octogenarian Mandle at the gallery, she said that “no one notices women artists until they’re in their 80s.” I don’t think that’s true. But everyone should’ve noticed this show.
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
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Thanks, Don.
It’s like I needed to know all that as you’ve written.