The Boston Ten at Ferrin Gallery
Group Show Curated by the Artist Morgan Bulkeley
By: Charles Giuliano - Jul 21, 2008
The Boston Ten
Artists: Miroslav Antic, Gerry Bergstein, Gail Boyajian, Morgan Bulkeley, Mark Cooper, Jessica Hess, Anne Neely, David Phillips and Sandy Winters
The Ferrin Gallery
437 North Street
Pittsfield, Mass. 01201
July 19 through August 17, 2008
http://www.ferringallery.com
Several years ago the artist Morgan Bulkeley moved to the Berkshires. In 2006 after an opening with a group of ten Boston artists, at Lascano Gallery in Great Barrington, he invited them to join him for an after party. One of the artists brought some paper and pencils. They passed the sheets around and played a version of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. The original idea is that an artist drew a head, folded it over, and the next artist added something, folded it over, and passed it along. After the last participant the sheet is unfolded to reveal the resultant figure in several hands and styles.
The fun in this game is that one artist makes a drawing, often in a humorous manner, and the next guy adds to or changes it. Because of the complications of glaucoma, which prevents him from working on large canvases, Bulkeley amused himself over the past year by making drawings on 7 x 10" sheets of paper which were then circulated by mail among friends. He was delighted by the results which have been included in a grid of images in the exhibition "Boston Ten" which currently occupies one half of the Ferrin Gallery in Pittsfield.
It was a particular pleasure to attend the opening of the exhibition as a number of the Boston artists were on hand. It was a fun reunion but they did not all arrive from Boston. Gerry Bergstein, and his artist wife Gail Boyajian, actually drove three and a half hours south from their summer home in Vermont. Mark Cooper and David Phillips attended. It would have been great to see Miroslav Antic but this "Bostonian" has lived in Florida for the past few years.
While the show is lively and upbeat there is no unifying theme other than that the artists are friends of Bulkeley. But, suffice it to say, he has great friends, including two of my all time favorite Boston painters Bergstein and Antic. I combined them with Domingo Barreres and Robert Ferrandini is a group show "Los Cuatros Grandes" for the Gallery of the New England School of Art & Design. At the time I took heat for the show but I still maintain that they are four of the best Boston painters.
Although there was no theme as such to the show there was a unifying thread of aspects of figuration and narrative. Bulkeley has long been known for whimsical elements. A painting in this show, for example, includes humorous references to his favorite artists from Beuys to Guston. There is a similarly over the top sensibility in the Bergstein paintings in which a man seems buried by or emerging from a pile of trash with a gun in his hand and a pipe in his mouth. Boyajian embeds figurative, narrative elements in her pristine landscapes. In the Antic canvas he layers a vintage image of his family in bathing suits walking down a street with fish they have caught. Over this he paints a series of stripes and polka dots.
The recent works by Mark Cooper and Anne Neely were a surprise. Both have evolved away from what I was familiar with. They are combining figurative and abstract elements with rich color. The realism of Jessica Hess and the figuration of Sandy Winters were new to me.
The wild card of this project was the relief and free standing sculptures of David Phillips. The wall pieces seemed inspired by maps while a sliced loaf of bread, cast in bronze, was perched on and draped over a welded steel support. These were superbly crafted, compelling works.
Overall, this was a successful project providing a terrific sampler of some of the best of Boston on view in the Berkshires. Let's do it again.