Lalla Essaydi at MFA

Lalla Essaydi, a SMFA alum, will be giving a visiting artist lecture on Thursday, 1/22/09, at 12:30 PM in the Riley Seminar Room at the MFA. She also currently has work on view in the new Herb Ritts Gallery at the MFA. She is known for her staged photographs of Moroccan women covered with calligraphy. While they may seem to be simple images at first, they are actually quite radical. Supposedly in Islam, women are not allowed to write using this calligraphy. A few years ago we bought one of her photographs of 3 women writing on each other, a very defiant act. I especially liked the performance aspect. In Boston, she is represented by Howard Yeserski Gallery.

Collect(ive/ions)

As we are gearing up for Art Basel Miami, I started to think about our collective buying patterns and how much overlap there is in our collections. Although none of us have the same image of an editioned print or photograph (except for benefit prints), we often buy work by the same artists, sometimes even part of the same series. It actually gives some depth to our personal collections, and the collective collection would probably make an interesting show- as much about the art as the social connections. Here is a list of artists that are in the collections of more than one of us (again, benefit prints aren't represented here). (If I left any out, please add them in the comments.)
Christiane Baumgartner
Erik Desmazieres
Lalla Essaydi
Claes Oldenburg
Julian Opie
Judy Pfaff
Stephen Sheffield
Doug and Mike Starn
Kate Sullivan
Kara Walker

InsideOut at the SMFA

Today is the official opening of the annual art sale at the SMFA, now called "InsideOut." The sale includes works by current students, faculty, alumni, and "affiliated artists" (like Kiki Smith, who was given the Medal Award by the SMFA). Some of us were able to preview the sale a couple times over the past week. Highlights in the sale include photographs by Esteban Pastorino Diaz (priced around $3800). The scenes in these large photographs look like they were made out of toy models, but they are of actual places taken by a camera flying on a kite. At least one of these photos sold during previews and there is a rumor that the MFA might have acquired one. Other things that I noticed missing (i.e., sold) at my second preview were a punched paper piece by Rachel Perry Welty and a painting of elephants by Meryl Blinder, both Boston-based artists. Lalla Essaydi photographs, a fixture at the sale, were $18,000 this year- and selling. In terms of prints, there were some interesting works by Mary Heilmann (who we were advised to buy last year, when her prices were cheaper and before her current show at the New Museum in NYC) and Chagoya, who some of us "discovered" at the Editions Fair in NYC this year. The image shown here is from SMFA advertisements for the sale and is done by recent SMFA grad, Nicole Kita (represented by Rotenberg Gallery in Boston).