Upcoming Exhibitions

Create is a major group exhibition presenting a selection of the most important works created over the past 20 years by artists involved with three pioneering non-profit organizations: Creativity Explored, Creative Growth Art Center and the National Institute for Art and Disabilities Art Center (NIAD). These organizations were founded with the belief that exceptional creativity can emerge in anyone, and they support the work of artists with developmental disabilities through a unique and highly successful approach to group studio practice. The centers offer an experience that is, in many ways, the antithesis of that envisioned by the art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 when he coined the term “outsider art” to identify the work of artists who have no contact with the art world and who are physically and/or mentally isolated.

This major survey exhibition brings well-deserved attention to this compelling work, sharing it with a broad audience and expanding on its impact on a range of renowned international artists. Create sparks critical dialogue concerning the categories of contemporary art practice, especially the notion of “outsider art,” and challenges audiences to rethink the limitations of such categories. It is clear why works by these artists have been increasingly recognized as a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art, both nationally and internationally, among artists, curators, critics and collectors, as well as the broader cultural community, and are now in the permanent collections of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Jeremy Deller, Chris Offili and Peter Doig, and in prominent institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Create presents a range of exceptional works in diverse media by twenty artists who have produced artworks at these centers over the past 20 years. Among the artists included are Judith Scott, William Scott, John Patrick McKenzie, Evelyn Reyes and Dan Miller. Each artist has sustained an art-making practice at the highest level for many years, and the range of their work is extraordinary: Judith Scott’s visceral sculpture utilizes found materials wrapped in knotted yarn or string; William Scott’s humorous paintings incorporate sardonic urban motifs; John Patrick McKenzie’s lyrical work employs the repetition of text drawn from pop culture, current events and his immediate surroundings; Evelyn Reyes’s pastel drawings feature bold, minimalistic shapes; and Dan Miller’s intricate work includes drawings and paintings incorporating layered text.

James Montgomery Untitled, 2007

William Scott, Inner Limits, n.d.

Create is a traveling exhibition curated by Lawrence Rinder, with Matthew Higgs, and organized by the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and ICI (Independent Curators International), New York. The exhibition and accompanying catalog were made possible, in part, by Dr. James B. Pick and Dr. Rosalyn M. Laudati, and the continued support of the BAM/PFA Trustees. Additional support for the tour is made possible in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and the ICI Board of Trustees.

Victor Matthews (American, born 1963) Frozen City IV, 2013, wood, canvas, sneaker, paint, and cardboard, 29 x 19 x 7 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Matthews re-interprets the stark black and grey silhouettes of New York City into a soft creamy white. Skyscrapers, cars, bridges, and water towers float, street grids meander, and pigeons are transformed into doves. Author Salman Rushdie wrote of his works, “the white paintings…are lucid affectionate dreams of New York, like an all-white Oz with a white brick road (Broadway) snaking through a white metropolis that might, if you looked at it through green glasses, look almost like an emerald city.”

Similarly, Rossini’s subtly evocative photographs could be dreams rather than representations of the sky, sea and land he shoots. Instead of using his camera to freeze time like most photographers, he works like a painter to capture momentary impressions. His oversized prints with their patterns, texture, muted palette, and delicate tonal transitions seem more like canvases than images trapped by a lens. Rossini aims to catch the barely discernible memory of the moment between past and present. He achieves this goal by layering sequential images over abstract fields and distorting and compressing space to create beautiful and mysterious images.

Transitions: Victor Matthews and Paolo Nicola Rossini comes directly from its presentation as a collateral event at the 55th Venice Biennale and is curated by Natalie Clifford and Vittorio Urbani. The accompanying catalog includes essays by Clifford, Salman Rushdie, Francesco Clemente, and Boca Museum curator, Kathleen Goncharov.

Southwestern Allure: The Art of the Santa Fe Art Colony considers the development of Santa Fe as an art colony through the artists who visited there and helped establish the city as an artistic center, tracing the colony's formative years from approximately 1915 up to 1940. When artists from eastern locales began to settle in the Santa Fe area, they discovered a rich culture and a wealth of picturesque imagery. Southwestern Allure focuses exclusively on the art and artists of the Santa Fe colony, presenting the best of the artists’ work and showing the distinct artistic climate of this unique locale and the qualities that distinguish it apart from the rest of the state. The city’s draws were the majestic landscape and the multi-cultural environment, which proved a matchless blend of inspiration.

The exhibition presents a thorough picture of which artists went to Santa Fe, what they found compelling about the environment, the work they produced, and the prevailing artistic trends, from Realism to Modernism, which they applied to Southwestern subject matter. Through the works included in the exhibition, a range of styles are presented, encompassing the Santa Fe Old Guard, such as Carlos Vierra, Gerald Cassidy, and Warren Rollins, the Realism of Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, Leon Kroll, and John Sloan, as well as the introduction of the Modernist aesthetic to the Southwest with such artists as Stuart Davis, Andrew Dasburg, and Marsden Hartley, to highlight only a few of the prominent artists.

Southwestern Allure features over 40 outstanding artworks carefully selected from leading public and private collections. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue is organized by the Boca Museum of Art in conjunction with independent curator Dr. Valerie Ann Leeds, a specialist in American art of this period, and will travel to the Mennello Museum of American Art (Orlando), January thru April 2014.

John Sloan, Picnic on the Ridge, 1920, oil on canvas, 26 x 35 inches, Private Collection, Los Angeles, California

Edward Hopper, Ranch House, Santa Fe, 1925, Watercolor over pencil on paper, 13 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches, Williams College Museum of Art, Bequest of Lawrence H. Bloedel, Class of 1923, 77.9.6