Category: Visual Arts

Currier curates a conversation

When Lorenzo Fusi joined the Currier Museum of Art in February 2023 as Chief Curator, one of his first exhibitions was “Distant Conversations.” It looked at the elective affinities between painter Ella Walker and ceramicist Betty Woodman, by displaying their works side by side.

Its success led to this year’s exhibition, which pairs painter Filippo de Pisis with photographer Robert Mappelthorpe. The latter is better known, mainly due to his often controversial photos. In a phone interview with the Hippo, Italy-born Fusi said he included de Pisis “to present and premiere the work of an Italian artist who I think is very influential and important beyond the borders of Italy.” Here’s an edited version of the interview.

Separated by years, Mappelthorpe and de Pisis never met. What do you think connects them artistically?

Mapplethorpe traveled multiple times to Italy, and I think most of these affinities originated by looking at the same work and the same monuments, the same kind of archaeological references which are basically sitting deep in Western art history. I think that most likely is the reason why there are so many uncanny similarities between the two of them.

What are some of the other elements linking them?

Each of them came from some form of prejudice. I would say de Pisis at one moment in time has been considered a bit too delicate … maybe too soft in his representation. By imposition, I think Mapplethorpe was considered too hard, too in your face, too confrontational. I think both of them have been stigmatized for this almost opposite way in which they come into art. And ironically, [via this] completely opposite or antagonist approach, they do produce work which is actually very … similar aesthetically. So I think this is not only an opportunity to discover de Pisis as an artist who has not been shown extensively in the United States, but also an opportunity to revisit Mapplethorpe’s work from a different … perspective.

They were both very purposeful in their approach.

Yes, intentional, and very deliberate in the way they wanted to represent something. If you start entering into that mindset, even the more graphic images of Mapplethorpe, and we have only one image from the more controversial portfolios … Joe Rubberman, the very famous picture of a man wearing a vinyl outfit laying down flat on a bench. It’s a very classical pose [and] although it looks very morbid and very sexual, as a matter of fact, this pose can be seen in hundreds of examples of art historical references, even though it might be very much in your face when you start looking at it…. The idea [is] to create an image that is transtemporal and it stays as an almost art historical testament. You don’t see the sexuality of it anymore. You don’t see the reference to this very murky underworld of gay life in New York in the ’70s and ’80s, you see a very iconic image of a body that could be Etruscan, could be ancient Roman or Greek. That’s where I think he stops being controversial and starts being an artist in a sense.

When did you know you were on the right track and this would be an impactful exhibition?

The Currier Museum of Art has a quite substantial collection of photography, going back to Lotte Jacobi, the first photography curator… I was surprised when I first moved to the Currier that we didn’t have any Mapplethorpe in our collection because undeniably he’s an American master of photography. I was looking at [how] we could incorporate some work by Mapplethorpe into the collection, but also … overcoming the prejudice associated with the more controversial reception of his photography. At the same time … I wanted to do something with de Pisis in the United States because he was an overlooked artist who I think should be represented. The moment of realization [came while] separately looking at the work. In my mind I had this crystallization that some of the images were very, very similar, and the more I delved into that, the more similarities I found. I think the moment for me when I became absolutely sure that it was a good exhibition or a good approach was when I showed it to a colleague of mine in Italy who immediately saw the poetry and the lyricism in this association, and he asked me to continue to do that research. Then I shared it with my team. They all saw how close the elective affinity is between these two artists, which is most surprising considering the time gap and geographical gap between the two of them. So it has not been a single moment of revelation, but multiple moments of affirmation that have happened from people who were not as yet in the project but could see immediately how powerful the association was.

Filippo de Pisis and Robert Mapplethorpe: A Distant Conversation
When: Saturday, April 13, through Sept. 2
Where: Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester
More: currier.org

Featured Photo: Filippo de Pisis, Fiori di Villa di Maggio. Courtesy photo.

‘A voice worth having,’ says Emmy-winning actor

By Zachary Lewis

[email protected]

Gordon Clapp, a New Hampshire native, is no stranger to the stage. He will be performing the role of Robert Frost in A.M. Dolan’s Robert Frost: This Verse Business at Stockbridge Theatre at Pinkerton Academy (44 N. Main St. in Derry) and will be in residence starting on Tuesday, April 2, at Pinkerton Academy with a public performance on Thursday, April 4, at 7 p.m.

Clapp is known for his Emmy-Award-winning performance as Detective Greg Medavoy on NYPD Blue, and was also nominated for a Tony award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in the revival of David Mamet’s Pulitzer’s Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross as Coach Mad Maxx in 2007, among a myriad of other film, television and stage credits.

Performing Robert Frost has been on Clapp’s mind for some time.

“This was something I had thought about doing since right after college. I read the biographies, and Frost was a voice that had been in my head since high school, since the inauguration of Kennedy,” he said.

“Also,” Clapp said, “I wanted to bring an older Frost to the stage, so I wanted to wait till I was old enough to be believable as the older Frost.”

As luck would have it, Clapp’s patience paid off.

“I stumbled across a script just at the time when I was thinking about writing, putting together a script.” So Clapp and Dolan “worked on it together. He’s actually more familiar with some of the talks and he knows where all the treasures are in the talks. He started working on this probably 20 years ago. We’ve been doing it for 15 years, on and off,” Clapp said.

While the Frost estate is protective of the late poet’s image, Clapp and Dolan “managed to get an endorsement from Peter Gilbert, who is the executor of the estate,” Clapp said.

During the presidential election week of 2016, Clapp and Dolan “went to Edinboro, Pennsylvania, where there was a meeting of the Frost Society. One of Frost’s granddaughters [Leslie Lee Francis] was there and she gave us a thumbs up … hoping we could make him a little younger and more energetic. It’s a very energetic performance in terms of presenting an 88-year-old,” Clapp said. “She just had a very strong memory of that. She spent a lot of time with her grandfather.”

Clapp is excited to bring the show to Derry.

“Derry was the most fertile ground for him for writing. He spent 10 years there. … He raised a family there. Many of the best poems he ever wrote were written in Derry or about his time in Derry or inspired by his time in Derry,” Clapp said.

Shannon Myers, Director of the Stockbridge Theatre, “came to see the show in Portsmouth in January of 2023,” Clapp said, “and she loved it and spread the word. We decided to do a three-day program.”

Frost taught at Pinkerton Academy. The performance for the students is “more about his thoughts on education. It’s the first time we’ve done something like that.”

Diving into the little and lesser-known details of Frost’s portfolio is what makes Clapp’s performance memorable.

“The first Frost poem that really captivated me outside of ‘[The] Road Not Taken’ and ‘Stopping by Woods [on a Snowy Evening]’ was a poem called ‘Out, Out—,’ which is not one of the ones that I say in the show,” Clapp said. It is not a poem that Frost ever recited either.

“He never read the poem in public and it’s a very short poem about the sudden accidental death of a teenage boy working on a farm sawing wood with a buzz saw and having his hand cut off and the response of everyone around him, so the family and friends. That poem really resonated with me…. There was a coldness to it but at the same time there was this kind of stoicism, ‘the show must go on’ feeling….”

That poem, which gained its name from the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy delivered by Macbeth in the Scottish play,was based on a real event in Franconia. According to Dierdre Fagan’s Critical Companion to Robert Frost, Frost was friends with the victim of the accident, a 16-year-old named Raymond Tracy Fitzgerald.

These tragedies rhymed with Frost’s own life. “There were all these dark, dark things and he kept overcoming them in his writing,” Clapp said. “All that’s subjective, but objectively … there’s a depth to Frost that I don’t think people appreciate because people think of him as a Hallmark card poet. But some of his work I think is profound…. We try to keep his voice alive because it’s a voice worth having at this point.”

This Verse Business
When: Thursday, April 4, at 7 p.m.
Where: Stockbridge Theatre in Derry
Tickets: $25 to $30; see pinkertonacademy.org/stockbridge-theatre
More info: Visit thisversebusiness.com for future show dates including
April 23-28 at Calderwood Pavilion in Boston

Featured Photo: Gordon Clapp. Courtesy Photo.

‘Unfixed Concrete Ideal’ exhibit at 3S Artspace

By Michael Witthaus
[email protected]

In an April 2020 episode of her 99% Invisible podcast, design critic Avery Trufelman said that concrete is exceeded only by water as the most consumed product in the world. In architecture, it’s also one of the most divisive. Trufelman noted that James Bond creator Ian Fleming named his Goldfinger supervillain after a real architect just because he disliked his buildings so intensely.

On the other hand, at least one of Ernő Goldfinger’s concrete creations has received landmark status.

“Unfixed Concrete Ideal,” opening April 5 at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, explores the role of concrete in civic architecture, and the many conflicting passions it can inspire. The exhibition includes mixed media works, photography, sculpture and even a couple of etchings done on drywall by co-curator Ben Sloat.

In a recent phone interview, Sloat noted the egalitarian nature of concrete. He’s an Asian-American who grew up in New York City; his mother is from Taiwan. Under-resourced as it grew in the 1960s, the country relied heavily on concrete. “It could modernize without deforesting,” Sloat said. “That felt like a really amazing thing that concrete can do.”

Sloat also likes that “concrete has a really significant impression in our cultural language; like, ‘my plans aren’t concrete yet.’ At the same time, concrete poetry looks like a shape. Other definitions are about amalgams or accumulations or abstraction; concrete photography is actually a form of non-representational photography. So I like that concrete has a very almost elastic presence in our cultural context.”

Running through June 2, the exhibition began as a response to the planned demolition of the Government Services Center (GSC) in Boston’s West End. Many of the works on display in the show are images of the building, which was built in 1971 and designed by Paul Rudolph, a well-known Brutalist architect.

Brutalism isn’t derived from the word “brutal.” “It’s actually related to ‘béton brut,’ which means raw concrete,” Sloat said. He called the style “quite the mixed bag; some people hate it. It’s one of those things — really good Brutalist buildings are amazing and knock-offs are terrible.”

This duality is at the center of “Unfixed Concrete Ideal,” which was shown first in Boston last July, and later in Fall River, Mass. An exhibition statement reads, “In some spaces, concrete can be seen as a modern and democratic material, while in others it can be quite hostile and oppressive. In many ways, concrete itself represents the ideals of the modern era, but also how incomplete those ideals often became.”

Joining the version in Portsmouth is “Heap,” a sculpture by Boston artist Tory Fair that consists of piled up cast objects that, curator Susan L. Stoops writes, “bear the memories of absent originals” — mugs, boots, cameras and other pieces. The two etchings from Sloat share Fair’s nostalgia. One shows an amphitheater that was originally part of the GSC; the other is a detail of Rudolph’s creation as it is today.

A series of sculptures by Finnish artist Anssi Taulu depict concrete’s stages of decomposition. “There’s a parallel between concrete being unfinished and being alive with the kind of natural cycles that we witness in the organic world,” Sloat said. “Certainly, Anssi is thinking about that … he uses a very lightweight concrete, and he adds more water and other binders, so it’s not super heavy.”

Other pieces reflect the social nature of concrete architecture, including excerpts from (Un)finished, a book of photographs that documents pending structures in modern Athens, from Greek artist and researcher Maria Lalou and Danish architect Skafte Aymo-Boot. Lalou’s work constantly questions “the relations between perception, space, material-object and an observing subject, with a central focus to the politics of the viewer,” according to her catalog bio.

Rudolph spoke of his work in similar terms while discussing a bench in the GSC plaza that was at one time a focal point of the structure.

“Civic architecture means assigning a proper role to each building so it works in concert with its neighbors,” he said. “The benches are curved for sociability; they are my social statement.”

Unfixed Concrete Ideal opening reception
When: Friday, April 5, 5 p.m.
Where: 3S Artspace, 319 Vaughan St., Portsmouth
More: 3Sarts.org

Featured Photo: “Heap” by Tory Fair. Courtesy Photo.

Wild & Scenic Film Festival returns

It’s hoped that when the final short of this year’s Wild & Scenic Film Festival is finished audience members will have a newfound commitment to conservation and an expanded awareness of the microcosmic world. A few of the selections may lead to a heretofore unknown fondness for timber rattlesnakes, as well as sloths and mussels.

Mostly, the festival’s organizer envisions the nature-centric collection of films as a call to action.

Admission to the Friday, March 29, event at Concord’s Bank of NH Stage includes a free one-year membership in New Hampshire Rivers Council (NHRC), the environmental group sponsoring it.

“It’s where inspiration meets activism,” the Council’s president, Michelle Tremblay, said recently. “What we want to do is inspire people to get more involved.”

Tremblay, who is also principal of Naturesource Communications (pronounced nature-resource), brought the festival to New Hampshire. In past years it was held at Red River Cinemas and routinely sold out, with backed-up waiting lists that couldn’t be satisfied.

The decision to move across the street, made after three years spent online due to the pandemic, means capacity is now doubled.

“We decided to come back big,” Tremblay said. “We have the entire facility … we’re able to offer our members, and new members, places that they can spread out, roam and socialize; and also, very comfortable seating.”

An extension of the weeklong Wild & Scenic Film Festival hosted by SYRCL, the South Yuba River Citizens League in California, the event offers regional groups a “best of” selection from each year’s entries. Tremblay said NHRC decided to focus on short works.

“We don’t have the whole week to show the film festival, so we carefully curate films that normally people wouldn’t be able to see,” she said. “You can go to a theater, you can watch full-length films, but finding good shorts which normally kind of fly under the radar, those are harder to access.”

This means lots of films, covering a wide range of topics, she continued. “We’re also able to offer something for everyone. The shorts range the gamut from water to land to animals, and we have films from all over the globe as well as some that are a little closer to home. So we really do try to curate with that in mind.”

SYRCL, affectionately called “The Mothership” by NHRC, does offer a pre-curated “festival in a box,” Tremblay said. “But we decided to do our own because we really feel like we know what the New Hampshire audiences have liked in the past, and we want to make sure that we’re able to continue to serve that.”

Along with shorts about reptiles, shellfish and sloths are “some wonderful films that give a Native American perspective and make people really think differently about natural resources,” she continued, adding she hopes that two “very abstract films that give kind of a micro view of different aspects of our natural environment … will really get people thinking about not just seeing something from a distance.”

PLACE – People, Lamprey, and Cultural Ecology is a short from Jeremy Monroe and David Herasimtschuk that Tremblay believes will resonate with Northeasterners. The SYRCL website describes the eight-minute film as following a Cayuse Tribe member while revealing “the connections between migratory fish, urban forests, and community stewardship … and the work one group is doing to rebuild the strength of these connections for future generations.”

The New Hampshire economy depends on its natural beauty. Asked how that affects NHRC’s mission, Tremblay replied that rivers are “the last populist water body…. They’ve always been the place where everyone can go to them. But they’ve also been hit hard. They receive our waste, hopefully treated; they get withdrawals for drinking water, for farming and for other purposes. Rivers really do work hard, and we work hard for the rivers.”

14th Annual Wild & Scenic Film Festival
When: Friday, March 29, 6 p.m.
Location: Bank of New Hampshire Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $25 ($20 members) at eventbrite.com
Video on Demand available, $15

Featured photo: Fresh Water Lamprey. Courtesy photo.