BRATTLEBORO-Six new exhibitions open at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) on Saturday, March 22, at 10 a.m. Later that day, at 5 p.m., all are welcome to an opening party with the exhibiting artists and curators, featuring music by DJ Okyn, free food by Peruvian-inspired Amaru Gourmet, and a cash bar by Stone Church.
Among the new exhibitions is BMAC's ever-popular, biennial "Glasstastic," featuring imaginary creatures dreamed up by children in grades K–6 and brought to three-dimensional form by professional glass artists from throughout New England. The 21 creatures showcased in this seventh edition of "Glasstastic" were selected from among more than 1,000 submissions received from children all across the U.S.
"It's a joy to behold the creatures the kids dream up," said participating glass artist Marta Bernbaum of Brattleboro, "and it's always a fun challenge to figure out how to turn them into glass."
In connection with "Glasstastic," BMAC presents a glassblowing demonstration on Saturday, April 26, at the Bellows Falls studios of glass artists Chris Sherwin and Nick Kekic. During the event, the artists will transform two more imaginary creatures into glass.
A different breed of imaginary monsters will populate the museum's South Gallery in the exhibition "Dream Homes," featuring drawings by internationally best-selling Danish illustrator, writer, and film director John Kenn Mortensen.
The exhibition, Mortensen's first in the U.S., features the artist's most recent pen-and-ink drawings, as well as a collection of his iconic "sticky monsters" - detailed drawings rendered on yellow Post-it notes. Mortensen will discuss his work with BMAC director Danny Lichtenfeld, who curated the exhibit, in an online conversation on Thursday, April 24.
"Mortensen's fantastic creatures and the wild menagerie on view in 'Glasstastic' remind us that we live in a quirky, colorful world where everyone has a place and deserves to be celebrated for their uniqueness," said BMAC Director of Exhibitions Sarah Freeman.
On view in the museum's Ticket Gallery is "Contemporary Ukrainian Folk Art: The Matrix of Resilience," curated by New England-based, Ukrainian ethnographer Sophia Sushailo.
The exhibition features the work of three Ukrainian artists using traditional art forms to resist the erasure of their ancestral home and cultural heritage: Tetyana Konoval, Hanna Oliynyk, and Rustem Skybin.
"Despite Ukraine's tumultuous history and the systematic cultural genocide inflicted by colonial authoritarian regimes, seeds of hope have continued to germinate among artists," said Sushailo. "Rooted in ancestral memory, these works of art-embroidery, painting, ceramics, and traditional egg decoration known as Pysanky-project hope for a bright future."
In connection with the exhibition, BMAC is offering two Pysanky egg-decorating workshops on Saturday, April 5, and a hybrid in-person/online exhibition tour with Sushailo and the three exhibiting artists on Saturday, May 17.
Curated by Serubiri Moses and K. Anthony Jones, "Infinite Passage" is a retrospective of work by Guyanese-born, Brooklyn-based artist Carl E. Hazlewood. In his paintings, drawings, and installation works, approximately 50 of which will be on view at BMAC, Hazlewood "uses the language of abstraction to explore migration, movement, and the search for a place to belong," say organizers.
The exhibition takes its title from the passage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic and from the landscapes and seascapes of Hazlewood's native Guyana. The artist and curators will discuss the exhibition in an online talk on Tuesday, June 3.
In connection with "Infinite Passage," Grumbling Gryphons Traveling Children's Theater will present an interactive performance of "Anansi, the Trickster Spider: A West African Folktale" on Sunday, June 15, in the museum's Wolf Kahn & Emily Mason Gallery, surrounded by Hazlewood's artwork.
"Truth IS A Verb!" showcases the wildly creative, not-easily-categorized artwork of 92 year old Brattleboro resident Nye Ffarrabas. Curated by Mark Waskow, the exhibition features text-based works on paper - cards, letters, instructions, books - as well as three-dimensional objects on loan to BMAC from Brattleboro's C.X. Silver Gallery.
Ffarrabas became a public-facing artist in the 1960s, when New York City was the epicenter of the experimental and creative laboratory known as Fluxus, one of the major postmodernist art communities. Fluxus encouraged the view that life and art were inseparable, that "art was not an end-product-an object-but rather a creative energy and process," say organizers. Most of the artworks in the exhibition date from that period in Ffarrabas's career.
Ffarrabas and Waskow will discuss the exhibition at BMAC on Thursday, May 8. On Saturday, June 21, the public is invited to celebrate Ffarrabas's 93rd birthday at a daylong Fluxus birthday party at the museum.
The final exhibition opening at BMAC on March 22 is "Wish You Were Here," an installation in the museum's Mary Sommer Room of paintings and sculptures by Yeon Ji Yoo.
Yoo immigrated to the U.S. from Korea with her family in 1982 and has spent most of her life in New York City. According to curator David Rios Ferreira, Yoo's work explores the "increasingly precarious notion of the American Dream [...] masterfully balancing beauty and unease, drawing us into a surreal yet familiar environment." Yoo and Rios Ferreira will discuss the exhibition in an online talk on Tuesday, May 20.
The new exhibitions will remain on view through early July, with the exception of "Glasstastic" and "Dream Homes," which stay up through Nov. 1. For more information on the events mentioned above or others, visit brattleboromuseum.org.
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