This week, GBH Executive Arts Editor Jared Bowen recommends three explorations of love.
“Love Stories from the National Portrait Gallery, London,” on view at the Worcester Art Museum through March 13
With London’s National Portrait Gallery is closed for renovations, 100 works from its renowned collection have been sent on an international tour — kicking off in Worcester. Bowen calls it the perfect show for the holidays, which traces the “changing face of love from 16th-century Renaissance-era painting to contemporary photography.” The expansive collection features famous pairs like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. The show ends with a portrait of Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, side-by-side with portraits of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, which according to Bowen shows “what our own consumption of love can do to couples.”
Among the most mesmerizing, Bowen says, is a video portrait of a sleeping David Beckham. “The intimacy, [it] allows you into this most private of things, sleep,” said Lucy Peltz, a senior curator with the National Portrait Gallery in London. “He is letting us into his space and we are able, because of the familiarity of film, to forget that there is this intercession of an artist.”
“Jeffrey Gibson: INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE,” on view at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum through March 13
In Lincoln, Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition reflects himself as an artist, and how those four words — infinite, indigenous, queer and love — reflect his identity. Gibson has been inspired by art of the 20th century, as he takes indigenous materials and marries them with pop culture and pop music.
Monumental suspended structures, made of 50,000 pieces of fringe, are among the most captivating parts of the exhibition. Senior Curator Sarah Montross talked with Bowen about how Gibson aimed to create an immersive space and the monoliths, which “seem to hover from the ground and are radiantly colored. And so that experience is already a powerful one, to stand among these mysterious objects, that seem like could be almost calling reference to Stonehenge [and] to ancient, monolithic sources.”
“The Last Five Years,” presented by Lyric Stage Company of Boston through Dec. 12
The play by Jason Robert Brown plays with time in unconventional manner. Featuring two actors that are married in real life, it starts at the end of the relationship as a woman packs up her life after the dissolution of her marriage. That story moves backwards as the other moves forward until they meet. “This is love for better and for worse, with two skilled actors, really charting a steep narrative arc in a most visceral way,” Bowen says.
Whose portrait would you be most excited to see? Tell Jared about it on Facebook or Twitter!
