Childs Gallery is pleased to present Touch and Recognition, an exhibition of prints and photographs by transfeminine, transdisciplinary artist and collaborative printmaker, Opal Ecker DeRuvo. Showcasing the artist's interest in depicting intimate portraiture, Touch and Recognition examines the lineage of representational image making from the artist's earliest prints to their current photography practice.  

Spanning roughly a decade and multiple media, including drypoint, monotype, lithography, aquatint, and kallitype, DeRuvo's work connects printmaking, early photography techniques, and modern technology in a conversation surrounding the use of line and light in portraiture. DeRuvo's early works depict everyday personal scenes in small, intimate prints executed through traditional printmaking media. More recently, they have explored using historic photo-processes, large-scale image transfers, and laser imaging techniques to produce more expansive, black and white artworks. 

DeRuvo began printmaking as an apprentice to a master printmaker at the age of 14 and received their BFA in printmaking from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. For the next six years they worked as a collaborative printmaker at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, CT. DeRuvo went on to receive their MFA from Yale in the painting and printmaking department, where they began to investigate the origins of photography within the materials and history of printmaking.  

DeRuvo is interested in the role of images in the formation of identity. Incorporating fundamental physics of light and the intricacy of our perception, their cross-disciplinary research looks to expand trans representation beyond the ways in which they are seen, and toward new ways of seeing. Their recent practice has sought to connect the materiality of photography with the experiences of trans-embodiment.  

DeRuvo's work as a printer has long been on display at Childs Gallery through their collaboration with artist E Lombardo – DeRuvo served as the printer for Lombardo's 2013-2016 series The Caprichos, a queer-feminist re-envisioning of all eighty plates in Francisco Goya's 1799 Los Caprichos. Their own work has since been included in many group shows at Childs, with Touch and Recognition marking their first solo exhibition at the gallery. They have additionally shown at the International Print Center of New York, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, the Westmoreland Museum of Art, and completed residencies at the Atelier Circulaire in Montreal, Quebec, and the Ateliers im Alten Schlachthof, Sigmaringen, Germany. They recently published a book of etchings with Edition Schwarze Seite in Germany and completed public art commissions at Artspace New Haven and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. DeRuvo is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. 

Touch and Recognition is on view at Childs Gallery June 1 through July 29, 2023. An opening reception with the artist will be held Sunday, June 11, 2-4pm. 

Fragments explores storytelling through the human form in both ancient and modern iterations, revealing fascinating commonalities between the two. Artist John MacConnell sketches and paints Classical sculptures alongside contemporary individuals, linking mythmaking in the Greco-Roman world with our current society. 

Using sculptures from the sanctuary at Delphi and the Acropolis in Athens as reference, MacConnell poses his models in the contrapposto forms of Hellenic statues. The figures are then fragmented, as ancient sculptures often are after thousands of years, missing an arm, leg, or even head, as if time and use had worn them away. 

Through the framework of these contemporary bodies juxtaposed with ancient sculptures, MacConnell examines the narratives we create about ourselves and others. Much as the stories we know about heroes and statesmen from antiquity are built from bits of information, our online personas are an amalgamation of pieces – curated selections from various social media accounts and dating profiles. MacConnell asks how the people of today will be remembered – what myths about us will develop from our fragmented digital footprint? 

In this way, MacConnell's new work in Fragments continues his interest in capturing different aspects of our experiences with social media, both the positive and negative. In particular, MacConnell explores how online communities engender virtual safe spaces for queer people. Such associations are often places for individuals to connect with each other when safe physical space or distance is an issue. Using these online communities, the artist connects and collaborates with people to make his work. His previous series Instant Gratification, Pinch Zoom, Rapid Development, and Pictura in Pictura reference the visual language distinctive to social media and the online world, and address themes of connection, flattery, idolatry, and objectification. 

Though inherent to a very modern medium, these ideas are paralleled in ancient statuary - Greek sculpture being particularly infamous for its insistence upon bodily perfection. The Classical period of Greek art developed an aesthetic based upon a set canon of proportions for the human form and the belief in the virtue of beauty – that one's outer looks are intrinsically tied to their inner morals. The Classical portrait thus displayed balance and harmony through idealization and the renouncement of realistic characterization, creating an aspirational visual tool for contemporaneous Greeks, and a representation of the body that continues to be influential to this day, with particular resonance in the gay community. 

MacConnell's paintings of Greek art come from photos taken during a 2009 trip, and mostly present works as they appear in museum settings - long removed from their places of origin and context. His images of contemporary models similarly lack identifiable surroundings that would ground them to a specific time or place. The removal of narrative framework leaves much to speculation, urging the creation of stories to fill in the unknowns, to understand who or what is being considered. His fracturing of body parts - noses, ears, genitalia, and more – produce modern ex votos, pieced offerings functioning as representations of one's whole self.

The work in Fragments, from antique statuaries to MacConnell's beautifully drafted modern analogs, adeptly correlates this notion of fiction building across thousands of years. Our understanding of art, myth, and history from antiquity is the result of selective curation, and crafted piecemeal just as much as our social media profiles. As time moves on our online presences grow, weaving stories both of our own making and as yet to-be-determined by future generations.  

After appearing in several group exhibitions, Fragments marks MacConnell's first solo show with Childs Gallery. Based in New York, MacConnell received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He has also studied at the Willem de Kooning Académie in Rotterdam. 

John MacConnell: Fragments is on view May 18 through July 8, 2023. An opening reception with the artist will be held Friday, May 19, 6 to 8pm.

The term horror vacui (fear of empty space) is used to denote artworks that are maximalist in their use of the available pictorial space. In such works the majority, if not the entirety, of the visual field is filled with details and incidents – often leading to works that have an all over, decorative effect. Originating as a pejorative denotation, Horror Vacui came into usage as Western audiences became increasingly familiar with the visual traditions of non-Wester cultures, in particular the intensely ornate fields pervasive in Islamic art. Gradually, the term was expanded to encompass a wider range of works and artistic styles, and took on a celebratory connotation as the overly sensorial nature can invoke a visceral response,  inviting the viewer to linger and savor the visual details. 

This online exhibition presents pieces from our collection that, in this lighter vein, celebrate visual excess and repetitive motifs. Including the work of Jan Pietersz Saenredam, Albert Decaris, Leo Meisner, and Lee Essex Doyle, amongst others, these artists invite the viewer to relish in the proliferation of forms.

Gaze explores the evolution of physique or 'beefcake' photography, from its earliest inception within the bodybuilding community, to ambiguously referential Classical-posed imagery, to its final incarnation as explicitly homoerotic material directly marketed to a burgeoning gay community. Artists featured include luminaries of the genre, such as Gregor Arax (Studio Arax), Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles), Alonzo Hanagan (Lon of New York), Bob Mizer (AMG Studios), Al Urban, Don Whitman (Western Photography Guild), and others. These individuals were not only pioneering photographers, but also savvy businessmen and some of the earliest gay rights activists, changing the status quo for gay men by challenging morality and censorship laws within the US. 

The early 20^th century saw a rise of interest in physical culture, a side effect of the rapid urbanization of society, wherein the traditional hallmarks of masculinity became increasingly both immaterial and inaccessible to white, middle-class men. Thus, new markers of masculinity were born, such as playing sports and the maintenance of a muscular body. By the 1930s, a robust number of magazines dedicated to bodybuilding were in circulation, and their large gay fanbase was an open secret. Enterprising photographers, finding their suggestive material barred from 'respectable' physique periodicals, eventually struck out on their own, launching magazines that specifically catered, through coded innuendo, to homosexual audiences. 

With the inception of magazines such as Physique Pictorial, VIM, Tomorrow's Man, and Grecian Guild Pictorial, photographers shifted their images away from the heavily muscled bodies of professional weightlifters to a more aesthete look - models with natural builds in posing straps, scant thong-style undergarments. The posing straps helped to skirt around existing obscenity laws - as gay pornography was illegal, these publications continued to operate under the pretense of interest in health and fitness, and the models were accordingly 'clothed.' The magazines, therefore, were able to be widely available at newspaper stands, bookstores, pharmacies, and through the mail.  

Physique models were often complemented on set with costumes and stage dressing, further distancing beefcake magazines from their bodybuilding forebearers. Playfully attired as gladiators, sailors, and cowboys, the images alluded to traditionally masculine figures and pursuits, while titillating their audience through fetishistic insinuations. Poses also frequently referenced the art and culture of Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance. Allusions to ancient sculptures of gods and athletes, as well as Renaissance paintings – the bound St. Sebastian being a favorite – helped downplay the salacious nature of the photos, while also beautifully demonstrating the artistry of studio photographers. Classical Greece was a particularly popular reference point, with some magazines espousing nostalgia for Hellenism where "the body of a muscular, graceful, well-proportioned youth was among the most admirable of all things." 

The enticing photographs within these periodicals were often a youth's first foray into wider gay society. Publications fostered an immense sense of community with their audiences, encouraging readers to correspond both amongst themselves and with the models. Subscribers were also given access to a larger network of gay consumer culture including books, artwork, recipes, clothing, music, and film. The increasing sense of identification as a group was bolstered by an atmosphere of friendship and inclusion, though racial exclusion continued, mostly perpetuated by the customers rather than publishers. 

Beefcake magazines and related materials like pen-pal clubs eventually drew the ire of the US Postal Office, and crackdowns began targeting both individual consumers and larger organizations. Supreme Court cases One, Inc. v. Olesen (1958) and Manual Enterprises, Inc. v. Day (1962) saw publishers fight against obscenity charges and win landmark decisions allowing for the open distribution of male nude imagery. Without the impediment of illegality, physique magazines again shifted to a more open depiction of sexuality, including explicit frontal nudity.  

The Supreme Court decisions in favor of physique and gay publishers would, however, ultimately usher in the decline of beefcake magazines. With gay pornography essentially decriminalized, male nude photography dropped the pretext of fitness, allowing a new generation of photographers to produce high quality male erotica available to be sold commercially. Liberation from morality laws also enabled male nude photography to enter the world of fine art and paved the way for celebrated artists to sensitively explore the male form in their works. 

Gaze surveys physique photography through its early years in the 1930s to its heyday of the 1950s and early 60s. Though once denigrated for their subject matter, beefcake photographers are now being reassessed: their works reexamined based on artistic merit and themselves recognized as trailblazers championing the beauty of the male form at a time when it was dangerous to do so. 

"Make it new"—more than a call to aesthetic innovation, Ezra Pound's modernist dictum carried the weight of an ethical imperative. Emerging as a response to the economic and technological revolutions that had torn asunder old social relations, the modernist sought an art form that could respond in equal measure to the times. Thus, the call to bury old artistic formulas in favor of aesthetic experimentation and innovative techniques was understood as an appeal to more deeply and authentically grapple with the experience of an ever-mutable modernity. 

Make it New: Modernist Paintings, 1930 – 1975 presents work by both international and local artists that took up modernism's gauntlet and sought formal experimentation as a primary goal. These artists actively engaged the liminal possibilities of the pictorial medium to expand its expressive potential. 

The exhibition encompasses many different artistic movements that fall broadly under the umbrella term 'Modernism.' The roots of Modernism itself trace back to the 19^th century when artists began to deviate from the strict confines of realism, but its tenets became boldly prominent in the early half of the following century and carried onwards. Make It New explores the various facets of Modern art, as works pivoted away from the representational toward the surreal and abstract, and subsequently branched forward into a myriad of other correlated genres. 

Featuring works by Milton Avery, Herbert Barnett, Jason Berger, Henry Botkin, Ted Davis, Werner Drewes, Ruth Eckstein, Jacob Kainen, Henry Koerner, Lawrence Kupferman, Sally Michel, Raymond Moisset, Robert S. Neuman, and Ben Norris, among others, Make It New pulls from Childs Gallery's extensive inventory, presenting an array of artists who pushed the boundaries of what painting meant and what a painting could be, during several decades of dynamic restructuring for Western society. 

The work of Herbert Barnett, for example, draws from the formal innovations pioneered by Picasso and Braque's Cubist experimentations. From these works can be traced an ever-expanding repertoire of techniques that sought to open up the formal limits of painting. Sally Michel took up Matisse's flat, expansive color plains and Lawrence Kupferman, in a radical withdrawal of authorial intent that would foreshadow things to come, experimented with pouring paint directly on to the picture surface in order to allow the pigment to freely find its own path. 

Make It New: Modernist Paintings, 1930-1975 is on view at Childs Gallery March 16 through May 13, 2023.

Arnold Trachtman's (1930-2019) vibrant Expressionist views of Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding cities are on view in On the Town, a new exhibition of work by the prolific, though somewhat overlooked artist.  Born in Lynn, Trachtman spent most of his life in the Greater Boston area, eschewing the artistic hub of New York for his roots in New England. After serving overseas in the aftermath of World War II and receiving his Masters degree from the Art Institute of Chicago, Trachtman returned to the East Coast to begin a long career of teaching, painting, and activism. Though much of his art was political in nature, Trachtman also continually produced scenes of his immediate world: the bridges, buildings, parks, and squares of Metro Boston. Each of these paintings brim with life, Trachtmans' keen observations detailing both the notable architecture and colorful characters inhabiting familiar locales, capturing a more personal view of the "town" he called home.  

As a child, Trachtman didn't excel academically, but was painting and drawing constantly. He would eventually graduate from esteemed art schools including the aforementioned Art Institute of Chicago and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he would also later teach. Artistically, Trachtman straddled many genres and movements. Though not a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, as a Jewish artist working in representational figuration in the Boston area during the mid-twentieth century, he is linked to the Boston Expressionists. His commitment to depicting urban life – especially the working-class cities and denizens of Greater Boston - also firmly associates Trachtman with social realism. A dedicated Marxist, he is frequently referred to as a 'protest artist' – his works were often politically motivated and confronted social justice issues.  

While spanning genres and defying easy categorization, Trachtman's artwork finds its focus through visual storytelling, whether political or personal. The paintings in On the Town are of the latter sort, expressively documenting the sites Trachtman would have seen, the streets he would have walked, daily. Mostly dating from the 1960s, they are historical snapshots, recordings on canvas of specific times and places deeply personal to the artist. The exhibition is reminiscent of a walking tour through various cities and towns, with Trachtman as a guide, pointing out interesting details that may have gone otherwise unnoticed. Viewing the world through Trachtman's eyes, his joyfulness in the familiar is apparent – his paintings revel in the color and movement of city life, particularly when depicting the comings and goings of local residents. Trachtman loved his community, and the feeling was reciprocated - when a house fire destroyed much of his early work, local businesses chipped in to help the artist start over.  

The works in On the Town celebrate city life and community, illuminating a Boston area of the past through the vision of one of its more unique residents. Trachtman's paintings tell stories and reveal an artist as deeply invested in his neighborhood as it was in him. On the Town is on view at Childs Gallery January 12 through March 11, 2023. 

Hidden Worlds, a new exhibition of work by French master printmaker Erik Desmazières, journeys through the artist's intricately detailed spaces, revealing imaginary cosmos and surrealist views of everyday scenes. With the meticulous draftsmanship of Old Masters like Dürer and Piranesi, Desmazières creates works that envision new worlds - images based both on the artist's imagination and experiences. The exhibition highlights Desmazières' early work, heavy with fantasy and science fiction leanings, and is supplemented by later uniquely cerebral views of Parisian rooftops, arcades, and ateliers. Hidden Worlds explores these complexly inviting spaces through prints and drawings that span Desmazières' nearly six-decade career. 

A copperplate etching revivalist working in the genre of Art Fantastique, Desmazières' work plays with both tradition and progression. Combining the past, present, and future, the artist displays his mastery of world-building, producing images and views of people, places, and things that never were, but certainly feel as if they could have been. His uncanny attention to detail and hand for atmospheric light and shadow brings to life scenes in a variety of reoccurring motifs: cities and buildings, battles and warriors, libraries and letters, wonder chambers and curiosities, comedies and characters. With each, the artist envisions an imaginary world unto itself, all demanding of a longer look, a deeper investigation into the singular world he has created. It is as if something more, something exciting, something important is happening right outside the boundary of the artist's plate.  

Born in Rabat, Morocco in 1948 to a French diplomat, Erik Desmazières has been described as arguably the finest French printmaker of his generation. After graduating from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris in 1971, he turned his attentions towards the arts, having drawn since childhood. He subsequently studied printmaking at the Cours du Soir de la Ville de Paris. During his career Desmazières has received the Grand Prix des Arts de la Ville de Paris, and was elected to the Société des Peintres-Graveurs Français, where he has served as President since 2006. He continues to be a force in printmaking, with solo museum exhibitions throughout the world, including major shows in France, the Netherlands, the United States, and Japan.

Hidden Worlds marks the fourth solo exhibition of Desmazières' work at Childs Gallery.Hidden Worlds: Prints and Drawings by Erik Desmazières is on view in the Childs Gallery print department January 6 through March 25, 2023.

Childs Gallery is pleased to present our latest online exclusive exhibition, Nocturnes.

James McNeill Whistler popularized the term "nocturne" in regards to works of visual art. Prior to Whistler's novel usage of the term, nocturnes referred to a musical compositions, usually an ensemble piece in several movements, intended for an evening party. During the Romantic era nocturnes underwent an evolution, they became single-movement character pieces usually written for solo piano that were meant to be evocative of night.  It was with this latter association in mind that Whistler began to incorporate the word in his titles, creating night scenes with a dreamlike, pensive mood. Since then the term gained a broader usage and has come to refer to any artwork that either directly represents a night scene or is evocative of night.

In this exhibition we present a wide array of works from our collection, including paintings, pastels, prints, and watercolors from a diverse set of artist, including Jean Michel Mathieux-Marie, Frank Benson, Leo Meissner, Resa Blatman, and many others.

William Evertson's latest series of woodblock prints draws inspiration from the idea of fake news, disinformation, propaganda, and the construction of divisive narratives that drive culture wars. The works in Politics, Protest, History, and Myth layer culturally resonant imagery upon overlapping themes from both our national and global history and mythos, examining the nature of shared ideas in a climate of extreme politicization. The woodblock printing method provides a bold, graphic media through which the artist seeks to understand the structure of both past and present. Combining historical research with old printing technology to comment on new but recurring issues, Evertson lays bare pervasive societal flaws that cross time and culture. 

Born in 1952, Evertson grew up with drills hiding under desks in preparation for nuclear war – a precursor to today's active shooter drills. While a twenty-something artist, America's landscape of cultural and political upheaval - including the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, anti-war protests, Black Panthers, the Chicago Seven, and Kent State massacre – helped foment Evertson's passion for activist art.  

The prints in Politics, Protest, History, and Myth continue Evertson's interest in asserting political activism through visual media. Using collaged imagery, often blending art historical and printmaking allusions with modern references gleaned from the internet and television, Evertson creates familiar yet irreverent scenes packed with biting socio-political commentary, allowing an examination of current polarizing rhetoric through historic counterpoints. The effect is humorous, but also (and more importantly) contemplative, as the prints detail an account of the frightening, yet somehow buffoonish possible downfall of contemporary western democracy.  

Evertson additionally pulls from Roland Barthes' Mythologies, Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, and surrealist author René Daumal's Mount Analogue for inspiration in his choice of imagery and narrative. Drawing upon these writings' various philosophies, allegories, and semiotics, the artist explores a visual representation of the indifference towards and normalization of extremist viewpoints. Of particular interest in Evertson's most recent work is the transformation of the Republican party's platform - from the traditional obstruction of progressive ideas into MAGA's theocratic authoritarian inclinations. The artist examines the subtle relationship of constructing mythologies as a propaganda technique, begetting the circulation of disinformation, to the advantage of the powerful and detriment of the masses. Evertson's use of prints – a traditionally more proletariat artform – is a clever subversion of this, establishing his own iconography within editioned works to counteract widespread falsehoods. 

William Evertson: Politics, Protest, History, and Myth is on view in the Childs Gallery Print Department October 6 through December 10, 2022. A reception with the artist will be held Thursday, October 6, 6-8pm.