Fitchburg Art Museum

FITCHBURG — A new thought-provoking exhibit opening at the Fitchburg Art Museum this weekend highlights the Black Artist Residency, an inaugural program that offered seven artists unfettered access to the museum’s permanent collection over a one-year period.

According to a press release, the creative partnership between FAM and artist collective WHERE ARE ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE AT (WAATBPA) showcases the exhibition ‘Dialogues, Diasporas, and Detours Through Africa’ that was organized by multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and guest curator Dell Marie Hamilton in collaboration with FAM curator Lauren Szumita.

The residency offered WAATBPA founder and photographer Archy LaSalle and associate members Lou Jones, Reginald Jackson, and Sharon Dunn an opportunity to collaborate with emerging artists bashexo, Digi Chivetta, and George Annan Jr. in a generative mentor-mentee relationship facilitated by FAM’s institutional support.

“After years of planning, I’m thrilled to see works from these seven talented artists coming to our gallery walls,” Szumita said of the exhibit. “FAM began this Residency in collaboration with WHERE ARE ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE AT to highlight Black artists and provide them with an opportunity to share their work with the public, and to engage with our collection of African art. It shows that museum collections are relevant to today’s issues, histories, and conversations. Placing traditional African objects in conversation with contemporary works of art adds to the ongoing dialogue with—and about—the African diaspora.”

Several objects from the museum’s collection served as inspirational foundations for the work produced in the residency. These include African masquerades, an Egyptian mummified child, a Senufo champion farmer’s staff from Côte d & Ivoire, and wooden Ifa divination trays from Nigeria.

These works and several other materials will be on display alongside the artwork they inspired through the exhibit that provides viewers with an expansive look into the artistic processes of each artist through the use of photography, virtual exhibitions, performance art, installation, digital video, and a reading room to further contextualize the rigor and beauty of African art and its aesthetic impact.

“From Edmonia Lewis’s 1876 ‘Death of Cleopatra’ sculpture to Countee Cullen’s landmark Harlem Renaissance poem, ‘Heritage,’ to the Pan-Africanist triumph of ‘FESTAC’77,’ to the present-day work being produced by WAATBPA, the ancestral complexity and our contemporary understandings of Africa continue to serve as fuel for the imaginative endeavors of Black artists,” Hamilton said in the release.

Since the late 19th century Black artists in the United States have instigated a rich artistic dialogue with Africa, the release shared. As a result, each artist has deeply engaged and taken inspiration from FAM’s African art collection, using these works as catalysts and points of departure to create new bodies of work. As such, the exhibition will offer audiences a view into the latest chapter of a long-standing and evolving discourse with the continent.

Of the project, LaSalle stated in the release, “Although this exhibition’s focus is on inspiration from the continent of Africa, WHERE ARE ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE AT is committed to ensuring that all Black and Brown artists have the freedom to pursue their creativity in all ways, regardless of their family history and culture. Celebrating the art of all artists and particularly the younger generation of Black and Brown artists, WHERE ARE ALL THE BLACK PEOPLE AT will continue to stay vigilant and committed to the importance of access and inclusion to the permanent collections of our art institutions.”

The opening reception for the ‘Dialogues, Diasporas, and Detours Through Africa’ exhibit will take place on Oct. 21 from 2 to 5 p.m. For more information, including artist bios and curatorial programming, visit fitchburgartmuseum.org.

FITCHBURG – If you’re looking to escape from the heat and take in some local culture and talent, the Fitchburg Art Museum (FAM) has several exhibits currently on display including the 87th annual Regional Exhibition of Art & Craft.

The Regional Exhibition of Art & Craft is one of the longest-running juried exhibitions in New England. The yearly FAM show, which opened last month and runs through Aug. 27, spotlights artists and crafters from the region by providing a museum environment for their work and connecting them with fellow creators, patrons, and art enthusiasts.

Museum Director Nick Capasso said they are “thrilled to present…the exhibit as an expression of our commitment to artists in our community.”

“Each year this juried exhibition celebrates diverse artworks by scores of artists from our region, where exhibition opportunities are few and far between,” he said.

There are several other summer exhibits that showcase the vitality and importance of the local artist community include Lancaster artist Andrius Alvarez-Backus’s “Desastre!” exhibit up through Aug. 27, which showcases pieces created from a wide variety of materials such as fabric, paint, pastels, wood, wax, feathers, grass, raffia, sand, stones, and found objects. Alvarez-Backus was the first-place winner in last summer’s Regional Exhibition of Art & Craft.

Ten artists from ArtsWorcester, which exhibits and promotes local artists, are featured in the exhibit “Call and Response: Impact,” including Colleen Fitzgerald, Amanda Kidd-Kestler, Joseph Landry, Stevie Leigh, Carrie Nixon, Melissa Parent, Anju Pillai, Donalyn Schofield, Luca Webb, and David Wesley White. Also on display through Aug. 27, “Impact” is the eleventh iteration of the annual collaboration between ArtsWorcester and FAM and one work from each of the artists was created in response to pieces from the art museum’s permanent collection.

According to the exhibit description, this year’s theme explores humanity’s complex and reciprocal relationship with the environment. The natural world has always inspired artists with its equal capacity for beauty and power, creation and destruction, and, perhaps most urgently, change. Amidst a global concern for the climate crisis, artists represent nature’s transformation to simultaneously spark dialogue about our role in its decay and ponder the ways we work with the earth.

Cuban American artist and educator Gabriel Sosa’s “La Bodega de mis suenos” (The Bodega of my dreams) is an inaugural installation of public art on the museum’s façade that considers the stories of Spanish-speaking residents in Central Massachusetts, contemporary visual culture in downtown Fitchburg, and the complexities of the American Dream.

Ari Montford’s “Freedom Arrows” amplifies the arrow’s symbolism as “tool, weapon, and message to explore Indigenous Black themes through the lens of the Native American experience of genocide,” the exhibit description reads.

Within the museum lobby, a volley of hand-beaded arrows is suspended midair as if just unleashed from unseen bows and embedded in the walls. Dual concepts of protection and service, and aggression and power blend with the arrows’ spiritual presence to create a space that provokes conversation about racial justice and narrative-making.

Montford’s installation engages with the impact of structural racism, Indigenous trauma, and the process of creating safe spaces for restorative justice.

FAM is thrilled to announce an exhibition celebrating its recent acquisition of Rania Matar’s stunning portfolio SHE. Matar is a Lebanese-American photographer internationally renowned for her explorations of cross-cultural identity and femininity.

The arresting, intimate portraits in SHE evokes the transitional states of Becoming, what Matar describes as “the fraught beauty and vulnerability of growing up” as a young woman. This portfolio is shown in the “Oceans at My Door” exhibit on display through Jan. 7, 2024, alongside other works from Matar’s subsequent series “Where Do I Go?” an ongoing project that focuses on Lebanese women at a crossroad as they navigate national crises of corruption, inflation, lockdown, and shortages.

Lastly, “Eye of the Beholder: Gender through the Camera Lens,” up through Aug. 27, delves into the museum’s permanent collection to explore how photographers have used the “gendered gaze” across the early 20th and 21st centuries.

This exhibition highlights some of the museum’s iconic favorites and recent acquisitions — including work from Gertrude Kasebier, Cindy Sherman, and Yasumasa Morimura — to examine how power is embedded in the male and female gazes. “Eye of the Beholder” further explores artists who experiment with or outright reject the gender binary, questioning and complicating methods of perceiving gender and its performance.

Capasso said they welcome people to come by and check out all they have to offer.

“At FAM, you can encounter beauty and creativity, while beating the heat, the rain, and the smoke from Canada!”

The Fitchburg Art Museum is open Wednesday through Friday from noon to 4 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Discounted admission of $2 per person is offered to EBT card holders through the state Card to Culture program and free admission is offered to several groups including Fitchburg State University students and Ward 4B residents and everyone the first Thursday of each month with extended hours from noon to 7 p.m. For a complete list and more information visit fitchburgartmuseum.org/plan-your-visit.