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Americans, ladies, and the look
The year in art
COMPILED BY JEFFREY GANTZ



1. Yankee doodles. With its variety of arresting oil portraits by 18th- and 19th-century itinerant painters, with its vibrant hooked rugs and delicately painted furniture, its African-American pottery and Pennsylvania Dutch baptismal records, the Museum of Fine Arts’ "American Folk" held up the wisdom of the unschooled, the expressiveness of the reserved, the fundamental place of art in daily life. And the Society of Arts and Crafts wrote a postscript with "No Boundaries," a contemporary-basket show that made the historic tension between art and craft dissolve.

2 Street noise. Along with the usual commercial buzz, Newbury Street continued to make artistic headlines. Newsworthy shows included George Gabin at the Chase Gallery; Phil Rogers, Shraga Weil, Maria Muller, Brother Thomas, Ali, and Mark Davis at the Pucker, Yitzhak Elyashiv, Stuart Ober, and Harriet Casdin-Silver at NAGA; Jim Stroud at the Barbara Krakow; Chris Komater at the Bernard Toale; Domingo Barreres and Aida Laleian at the Howard Yezerski; and diverse goodies at the Nielsen and the Chappell.

3 Ladies’ days. Not that women need a show of their own to shine, but it was gratifying to see the MFA give them one in "A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870–1940," a thoughtful historical survey that soared not on its concept but in the excellence of the art by Ellen Day Hale, Lilian Westcott Hale, Elizabeth Vaughan Okie Paxton, Polly Thayer, Gretchen Rogers, Gertrude Fiske, and more. Also notable: Yoko Ono at MIT’s List Gallery: Pat Keck with her "Messengers" at the Genovese-Sullivan Gallery; Ellen Gallagher with "Watery Ecstatic" at the ICA; Taylor Davis with her meticulous, lyrical plywood constructions at the Green Street T stop in Jamaica Plain; and Sister Wendy, who in an hour-long PBS special presumed to blow into Boston and tell us about our MFA — and then pulled it off.

4 Venerable institutions. When the oldest arts organization in America announces its first-ever juried photography exhibit, it’s time to pay attention. With "Manifest 2001," its group show of contemporary New England photographers, the Copley Society rose Lazarus-like from the damp ashes of its afternoon sherry to a place of assertive importance in contemporary art. Harvard University, meanwhile, held up its end with "Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings" at the Busch-Reisinger Museum and "Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection" at the Fogg.

5 More perfect pictures. As usual, the camera was in focus this year at multiple venues. We got "The Look: Images of Glamour and Style, Photographs by Horst and Hoynigen-Huene" at the MFA; "The Social Scene" and "Nikki S. Lee: Projects" at the ICA; the photosynthetic (grass made to look like a photograph) "Presence" of Heather Ackroyd and Daniel Harvey at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Nigerian-born Iké Udé with his gently outrageous "Beyond Decorum" at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center; Gary Schneider’s "Hand Mouth" at the Howard Yezerski; Nubar Alexanian’s "Gloucester Photographs" at the Cape Ann Historical Museum in Gloucester; and group shows at Gallery NAGA and the Lillian Immig Gallery at Emmanuel College.

6 Little big work. With "Alex Katz: Small Paintings" and "Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures," the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover offered a compelling look at three centuries of American portrait painting of a particular kind, the decidedly diminutive. Were Emily Dickinson alive and a curator, she’d have mounted these shows.

7 Cape-able. Yes, there are plenty of places in Provincetown that will vie for your tourist dollars under the banner "gallery" or "fine arts" with meticulously presented dreck. But there are also some genuine showcases for the kind of talent that put Provincetown on the artistic map. That would include the Rice/Polak Gallery, which last summer put the insufficiently celebrated art of Boston’s own David Prifti on display; the DNA Gallery, which had the heady, dazzling, cerebral work of photo-collage team Sterck and Rozo; the Albert Merola Gallery; the Schoolhouse Center; and the Tristan Gallery.

? Rising suns. Walking into Takashi Murakami’s "Made in Japan" at the MFA was like a visual sugar rush — you were hit with a high-energy blast of images and figures that looked like the beaming offspring of Mickey Mouse and the Power Puff Girls. But the MFA also gave us "Netsuke: Fantasy and Reality in Japanese Miniature Sculpture," a nifty show of those exquisite traditional — and cute — miniature creatures. And then there was the pottery of Noriyasu Tsuchiya at the Pucker Gallery, homely, idiosyncratic household items that sometimes look ungainly but when you pick them up always feel just right.

9 West of the moon. Well, west of Watertown, anyway. This year’s edition of the DeCordova Annual Exhibition, which is perhaps the premier showcase for emerging New England artists, gave us art as playground, where the ineluctably zany creations of Kelly Kaczynski, Dean Snyder, Janice Redman, and Richard Klein had the most staying power. And the Rose Museum at Brandeis celebrated its renovation, its new Lois Foster Wing, and its 40th anniversary with "A Defining Generation: Then and Now, 1961 and 2001," which was in part a greatest-hits show of the Rose’s fine collection of 20th-century art and in part a historical survey of the art of the early 1960s.

10 Out of town but not out of reach. Two of the year’s biggest shows took place at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but they were worth the trip. "Vermeer and the Delft School" gathered 15 Vermeers (out of about 34 known existing works) and surrounded them with important paintings by his major Delft colleagues. And "William Blake: Worlds and Visions" reintroduced us to the Apocalypse of English art and literature; this man took Revelation as seriously as he did Genesis, and like his Angel of the Revelation, he still dwarfs ordinary human beings.

Issue Date: December 27, 2001 - January 3, 2002
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