GBH Executive Arts Editor Jared Bowen is back with his weekly roundup of arts and culture picks in Boston and beyond. This week, find out how local happenings in visual and performing arts have had national implications.
Awards Season Goes Gender Neutral
Since 2012, the Grammy Awards, the latest edition of which aired this past Sunday, have been gender-neutral, removing binary divisions in award categories in favor of broader genre categories. But the Grammys are among the few to have done this — the Oscars, Emmys, and Tonys all still use “Best Actress” and “Best Actor” as opposed to “Best Performance.” This decision has led to non-binary performers like Justin David Sullivan, who uses he, she, and they pronouns, to remove their name from consideration in the 2023 Tony Awards because they do not feel comfortable in gendered categories. Sullivan is currently on Broadway in a production of “& Juliet,” a reimagining of “Romeo & Juliet” from the fated heroine’s perspective; Sullivan plays Juliet’s best friend May.
Here in New England, Bowen was first to share the news, the Elliot Norton Awards presented by the Boston Theater Critics Association will switch to genderless awards for their 40th anniversary. While planning the 2023 awards, the BTCA “recognized there is no reason to continue” dividing performance categories into distinct gendered awards, instead looking holistically at performance.
More Music & Culture
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”
Now streaming on Roku
This recent film tracing the story of photographer Nan Goldin was nominated for Best Documentary at the upcoming Oscars. Goldin's work has been seen in “all of the major museums throughout the world,” but “All The Beauty and the Bloodshed” chooses instead to follow her local roots growing up in Massachusetts and the influences on her early career. Primarily, this is seen in Goldin’s older sister, whose existence as a teenage lesbian in the 1960s led to her institutionalization by their parents. Goldin later started “traveling in these communities where people are marginalized,” and this experience informed her photography of the queer circles she involved herself in.
Later in life, Goldin developed an addiction to OxyContin following a surgery. After recovery, she then took on Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, including protests to remove their involvement from museums showing her work. This included the Harvard Art Museums, one of which still bears the Sackler family name. Bowen explains how in November, the Harvard Art Museums sent a statement which stated they “have no plans to remove Dr. [Arthur] Sackler’s name from the museum,” while the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, and Tufts University museums have all severed ties to the family.
"Made in China 2.0" by Wang Chong
Now playing at the Emerson Paramount Center Jackie Liebergott Black Box through Feb. 12
Wang Chong is a self-described “experimental theater practitioner” who works primarily in Beijing, but has brought “Made in China 2.0” to Boston through ArtsEmerson. The production talks about the cultural experience of being in Beijing and the limitations placed on artistry through government censorship in addition to the country’s controversial “zero-Covid” policy.
The very real risk of imprisonment for Chong is palpable within the work, and the entire production is “riveting,” even as a one-person play. However, Bowen laments that audiences “never really understand what it means for him” as Chong currently works in the United States.
"Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-Century American Landscapes"
On view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum through May 14
This exhibit features 140 paintings of northeast landscapes from across the 19th-century. Big names in art history such as Thomas Cole, William Bradford, and Albert Bierstadt are all included, but curator Naomi Slipp poses questions of who is excluded from the larger popular narrative surrounding landscape art. Women, Indigenous artists, and artists of color are often forgotten in these types of exhibitions. Bowen thinks of the exhibit “as crowdsourcing” answers to those questions of where these artists and issues are, hopefully inspiring future exhibitions to present previously unseen works by talented but historically forgotten artists.
Environmental issues also come to the fore in “Re/Framing the View.” Depictions of quahogging in New Bedford Harbor, for example, cannot be recreated today due to pollution of the water; one view of the Newport Cliff walk is unrepeatable because of a recent collapse. Comparing the idyllic imagery of the natural world in the 19th-century to today’s climate crisis is, as Eagen says, “kind of depressing,” but, as Slipp points out in the catalog, even at the time these paintings were created there was rapid development happening across the region.
"El Pasado Mío / My Own Past: Afrodescendant Contributions to Cuban Art"
On view at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Arts at Harvard through Jun. 2023
This exhibit at Harvard’s Cooper Gallery re-examines the history of Cuban art and how the African diaspora has heavily influenced its development. Much of the popular discussion of Cuban art notably excludes mention of Black artists, despite “the heritage and ancestry that has come” to the region through Black artistry.
Curator Ethelbert Cooper calls the exhibit among the first “to destabilize the narrative,” though the impacts of the popular narrative are felt within the exhibit. One wall, as Bowen describes, has “a lot of information about artists, but not their work,” while the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts, Cuba’s premiere school for artists, raises questions about where the representations of Black teachers and students are. The exhibit is “a moment of absolute discovery” that will hopefully inspire future work and conversations about the importance of Black heritage in Cuban art development and beyond.
