Childs Gallery is pleased to announce Adam Van Doren: In the Founders’ Footsteps, a new exhibition on view in the gallery’s upstairs Print Department. Featuring artwork from Van Doren’s latest book, In the Founders’ Footsteps: Landmarks of the American Revolution, the exhibition is a journey through history, touring sites associated with the Revolutionary War and America's founding.

From well-known buildings and monuments to more obscure niches throughout the original thirteen colonies, Van Doren’s watercolors document America’s early cultural landscape. Sites visited include Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, Yorktown battlefield and Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, Fraunces Tavern in New York, and the Joseph Webb House in Connecticut, among others.

In his vibrantly expressionist style, Van Doren explores where the Founding Fathers lived, fought, and died in pursuit of independence, offering an insightful tour of Americana and early history of the country.

Adam Van Doren: In the Founders’ Footsteps is on view April 7 through May 27, 2022. A reception with the artist will be held April 26, 2-4pm.

BOSTON, MA – Sean Flood returns to Childs Gallery this spring for his fourth solo exhibition, Urban Aesthetic. Through new paintings and prints, Flood continues to explore metropolitan cityscapes, their transit systems, and their people. Urban Aesthetic focuses on scenes of New York and Boston, the two cities between which the artist splits his time. With his distinctive layering and mark-making, Flood paints urban scenes in an expressive fashion that mimics actual construction practices, building an artwork, like a skyscraper, from the ground up.

Produced over the past four years, the paintings and prints in Urban Aesthetic are drawn from life. Flood often paints on streets and rooftops, as well as sketches in subways. Capturing images in this fashion, the artist uncannily taps into the reverberating energy of city life, each brushstroke a distinctive mark enlivened with the spontaneity inherent in plein air work.

Flood’s paintings and prints primarily focus on a rapidly changing urban environment. His work over the years can almost be viewed as documentary: evincing the rise of new buildings and structures as well as the demolition of the old. For all their moving intensity, they mark a definitive place and time, a glimpse at the city just as it is when Flood captures it – bottling the energy of a specific moment on paper or canvas.

This urban energy is integral to each of Flood’s works, as he strives to translate its palpable feeling to static form. Flood also observes a city’s varied interactions, between buildings, streets, and people, through dynamic mark-making. His attention to the many synergies of urban life is particularly strong in paintings like Chandler Tremont Plaza, where Boston’s low brick buildings compete with modern skyscrapers, and his Passenger series, in which subway commuters variously interact with each other and their phones.

Starting as a painter, Flood has now for many years integrated printmaking (primarily monotype) into his oeuvre. He continues to work fluidly between painting, printmaking, and drawing, paying particular attention to how atmosphere, texture, and mark-making come together throughout different media. Urban Aesthetic brings together examples of these different techniques, weaving an exhilarating and insightful journey through the streets of Boston and New York.

Sean Flood: Urban Aesthetic is on view March 17 through May 14, 2022. A reception with the artist will be held Thursday, March 17, 4-8pm.

From the 17^th to 19^th century, wealthy young European men embarked on lengthy travels around the Continent to round out their education. These travels, known as the Grand Tour, emphasized Classical arts and architecture, languages, history, literature, and philosophy, through trips that could last anywhere from several months to several years. Grand tourists were typically upper-class Englishmen, and though there was no set itinerary, treks usually involved sojourns throughout France, Switzerland, and Italy, but could also include locations further afield.

During their journeys tourists would buy souvenirs, often art depicting local sights and wonders as well as object d’art – bronze, alabaster, or marble reproductions of buildings and ruins by native craftsmen. Souvenirs of the Grand Tour brings together art and objects collected during these educational travels, as well as more modern and contemporary scenes of locations and monuments that would have been typical stops along the way.

The exhibition journeys from the temples of Ancient Egypt to the ruins of the Roman forum, treating viewers to their own version of the Grand Tour through prints, watercolors, drawings, and small sculptures.

Souvenirs of the Grand Tour will be on view in our upstairs Print Department February 17 through April 2, 2022.

Though they serve a simple purpose of connecting places and people, Bridges are alluring structures that are feats of engineering .  From the iconic Ponte Vecchio to the romantic covered bridges of New England, these architectural marvels have captivated artists for centuries.

Robert Freeman’s new exhibition America’s Past-time presents a marked departure for the acclaimed artist. Best known for his exuberant figurative images celebrating the beauty and elegance of the Black middle class, paintings from Freeman’s latest series delve into the profound racial divides within our country. Greatly disturbed by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black Americans, Freeman turned to his art as an expression of anger, outrage, and sadness. The resulting works make up America’s Past-time, wherein adults play traditional children’s games such as Capture the Flag and Blind Man’s Bluff, to terrifying and often deadly ends.

Freeman has always looked to his personal experiences for inspiration and has long been interested in putting themes of race and culture to canvas. Though much of his previous work depicts the rich and jubilant social lives of upwardly mobile African Americans, with celebratory paintings detailing parties and black-tie fêtes, Freeman’s imagery pivoted following the prominent deaths of several Black Americans (often at the hands of police and others in positions of power) in 2020. The works in his America’s Past-time series are no less lively than his paintings of cocktail soirées. They hum with the same frenzied energy, though now with a decidedly different undertone – frightened and anxious rather than elated and joyous.

Freeman states of his new work: “The deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor exemplified what Black Americans already knew about their own history.  This time a cellphone video secured a horrific event for the whole world to witness.  All too soon after came January 6th where again the world observed how divisive and violent our racial politics are.  On the eve of the first anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, my paintings represent the division that continues to rip at our nation's seams.”

Each painting in America’s Past-time takes its title from a familiar children’s game or activity. Playing deadly versions of these games, Freeman’s Black figures are portrayed as violently losing to their counterparts: drowning at a regatta of slave ships, hanged by a noose, chased by an angry mob, and so on. While the playful titles belie gruesome scenes, Freeman imparts his Black figures with a dignity that will seemingly elude them in death. They are strong and resistant, scared but fighting for life. They may be the “losers” of these games, but they are the heroes of Freeman’s paintings.

As visual metaphors of the racial divides in our country, the paintings in America’s Past-time are empowered by their blending of seeming innocence and apparent evil. Even the series title is a bit of clever name-play, referring both to fun, harmless games and leisure activities, as well as the brutal “past-times” faced by African Americans during slavery and the era of Jim Crow laws. In this exhibition, Freeman has essentially painted haunting echoes of the past, factual images of the present, and a dismal glimpse at the future. His works are beautifully grim - important warnings and a wakeup call for action towards social justice in our country.

A virtual opening reception and artist talk with Robert Freeman will be held Thursday, January 13, 6-7pm. Please register via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIldO-vqD0qHNRqf3-c_8ngLM4m6FdTuYnX.

Prints are produced by drawing or carving an image onto a printing surface (the matrix), such as a wood block, metal plate, or lithographic stone. This surface is then inked and the image is transferred to paper by the application of pressure, using either a printing press or various hand tools. The printmaking techniques on view Ink, Press, Repeat can be divided into four major categories: Relief, Intaglio, Planographic, and Stencil. Within these four categories exist a myriad of different printmaking techniques, each with its own unique combination of materials, tools, and processes.

In this exhibition, Childs Gallery staff have chosen some of their favorite representations of different printmaking techniques, including aquatint, collagraph, drypoint, engraving, etching, linocut, lithograph, mezzotint, monotype, screenprint, woodcut, and wood engraving, for a survey spanning the history of printmaking from the Renaissance to the present.

Featuring artists such as Frank Benson, Letterio Calapai, Catarina Coelho, Erik Desmazières, Sean Flood, Rockwell Kent, Sol LeWitt, Henry Moore, Rembrandt, Giovanni Battista Scultori, Carol Wax, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and others, Ink, Press, Repeat is on view in the Childs Gallery Print Department December 16, 2021, through February 5, 2022.

When John Singer Sargent first displayed his enigmatic The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit in Paris in 1882, critics praised the artist’s technical abilities but were perplexed by the unconventional approach to portraiture. The painting’s singular composition positions the figures of the four Boit girls on the threshold of a dark central void, obscuring the features of the two eldest girls. The ambiguous nature of the painting, both beautiful and mysterious, has continued to delight and confound audiences ever since. Sargent’s painting serves as the major inspiration for Spanish artist Jorge R. Pombo’s latest series of paintings, Variations on Sargent’s Daughters. Pombo’s striking Variations reinterpret the historical painting, obscuring figure and form through fluid abstraction.

A self-taught artist, Pombo describes his artmaking as a struggle of opposites: figuration versus abstraction, image against words, narrative versus non-narrative. His methodology is similarly paradoxical, and his techniques mirror this perpetual exploration of opposing forces. Appropriating images from master artists like Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Velázquez, and, of course, Sargent, Pombo paints works bound to specific points of departure, specific times and places, but then frees them from historicity via more modern means. Once the chosen image is rendered on canvas, the artist pours solvent over the oils. This method, reminiscent of mid-twentieth century action paintings, produces a fluid, abstracted version of the original masterpiece - a blurred variation emphasizing color and movement rather than figure and form.

Pombo says of his process: “I erase images, affirming as well as eliminating them. By blurring them capriciously with the solvent. I cause chance to intervene in the finishing decisions of the painting, emphasizing the liquid aspect of the discipline, trying to respect the dynamics of the nature of the paint puddles.”

Though familiar with The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit through photographs, Pombo first saw the painting in person in 2014 during a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He was immediately drawn in, the work holding an inexplicably powerful magnetism over him. Pombo has returned to Boston for a handful of visits since that fateful encounter, each time reserving a full day to reacquaint himself with Sargent’s painting.

Pombo’s reaction to The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is not uncommon, though his connection to the piece (which he likens to “an impossible love”) is significant. The unconventional work has been the subject of much speculation and admiration since its 1882 debut. Painted in the autumn of the same year, the work is half group portrait, half interior scene, depicting each of the daughters of American ex-pat Edward “Ned” Boit individually, yet obscuring the features of two. Sargent places the girls in an indeterminate space, a foyer both familiar and unfamiliar, light and dark, public and private. The painting has been variously described as a “happy play-world of a family of charming children,” and a commentary on the nature of childhood and adolescence, among other interpretations.

There are parallels between Pombo’s Daughters variations and Sargent’s original that extend beyond the obvious. As Pombo looks to art history for reference, Sargent, too, found a historical precedent for his unusual composition, taking inspiration from Diego Velázquez’s famed Las Meninas. Both Pombo and Sargent play with opposites within their respective works, creating enigmatic spaces that offer no straightforward answers, but rather evoke more questions. Perhaps part of Pombo’s intense affinity to The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is its artistic familiarity, a commonality between two artists that spans across time. There is additional personal resonance; Pombo has a daughter himself and is a godparent to a young girl in Boston as well. His variations on Sargent’s Daughters are thus also reflections of the lives of daughters he knows.

Pombo started his series during the Covid-19 lockdown in the beginning months of 2020. Living in northern Italy, an area hit by the pandemic early and particularly hard, Pombo used the imposed isolation to begin his interpretations of The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. In the face of the unknown of a global health crisis, Sargent’s painting proved especially relevant to Pombo’s (and the world’s) circumstances. The painting’s central dark mass took on an unnerving nature, becoming a threshold towards something unpredictable and unsettling. Pombo chose this black void as the central feature of many of the variations, intending to paint both nothingness and absence, a reflection of the isolation and uneasiness experienced during the pandemic.

Variations on Sargent’s Daughters is Pombo’s first solo exhibition at Childs Gallery, though the artist has exhibited extensively internationally including solo and group shows in China, Italy, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. His exhibition venues include the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Museo del Duomo di Milan, and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. Variations on Sargent’s Daughters will be on view November 18, 2021 through January 8, 2022.

Andrew Fish returns to Childs Gallery for his second solo exhibition, Retro Pictures, on view September 9 through November 13, 2021. The exhibition explores Fish’s upbringing, adolescence, and adulthood as part of Generation X, whose members straddled the 20^th and 21^st centuries as analog children and digital adults. Retro Pictures is a personal journey for Fish – an introspective look at events and images of the 1980s and 90s that helped shape him – but includes many recognizable hallmarks, icons, and flashpoints of the period that speak broadly to a collective sense of memory.

Seeking what it means to be a Gen-Xer artist at midlife, Fish navigates through self-exploration as it relates to the events, ideas, attitudes, and products prevalent in the era of his adolescence. Retro Pictures, therefore, functions as a sort of pictorial autoethnography, in which Fish’s personal experiences are connected to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. By retroactively looking at, and subsequently painting, past experiences, Fish investigates how the influence of pop culture, popular thought, and the environment shaped not only his contemporaneous experiences, but also established hopes, fears, and perspectives that continue to this day.

Fish looked to the internet for imagery he could paint and recontextualize to be more personal and profound. It is, perhaps, ironic for someone with a pre-internet childhood to mine the online world for reminiscent content, but the process allows Fish to blend familiar images with his own visual language to illustrate the relation between a past event or idea and his own memories. The individual paintings in Retro Pictures are thus both public and personal, containing largely identifiable images but particular resonance with the artist. The body of work as a whole, however, forms an intimate self-portrait, a record of a person rather than a historical time or place. In works like Breakdance and Berlin Wall, Fish looks beyond the familiarity of chest bumping dancers and hammer-wielding Berliners to probe what these images mean to him personally. Breakdancing was more than just dance, rather an entire cultural movement that encompassed music and fashion, drawing in Fish from a young age. The fall of the Berlin Wall, which occurred when the artist was finishing high school, presented a hopeful respite from the constant threat of nuclear annihilation and echoed a feeling of liberation anticipated by becoming an adult.

To more fully investigate the theme of Retro Pictures, Fish has also branched into new artistic territory, producing several sculptural works that complement his paintings. Fish’s sculptures punctuate the exhibition with mashups of memorabilia and ready-mades that add poignancy, humor, and reminiscence to the show. His Bicycle Wheel is a wink and nod to Marcel Duchamp’s famous design, with a Gen X twist. Using a BMX wheel, Fish imbues the sculpture with childhood memories of freestyle riding and acrobatics, while also contradicting Duchamp’s use of found objects by embracing a specific history and meaning through a shiny, new object.

An opening reception will be held Thursday, September 9, 4pm to 8pm. Please RSVP to info@childsgallery.com to attend.

Closet to Quarantine: Queer Art Then and Now connects past and present artistic expressions of queer experience. The exhibition spans the arc of queer history, from taboo, to revolutionary, to accepted and celebrated, featuring works by contemporary LGBTQ+ artists alongside their historical antecedents.

Childs Gallery, established in 1937, and the longest continually operating fine art gallery on Newbury Street, has been wholly or partially gay-owned since 1969. The gallery has long offered works by LGBTQ+ artists, including Richmond Barthé, Paul Cadmus, and Ben Norris, to name just a few. Alongside its other offerings, Childs Gallery has actively cultivated a focus on queer-interest art within its collection.

Closet to Quarantine: Queer Art Then and Now is inspired by the quarantine-era Instagram account of the gallery’s current owner, Richard Baiano (@artdealerboston). During the Covid-19 quarantine, Baiano posted historical and contemporary art by LGBTQ+ artists under the hashtag #queerartthenandnow as a way to develop a digital community, while also highlighting queer artists throughout history. Discovering artists digitally, through social media, has been an exciting deviation from the gallery’s usual approach. With its low barriers to entry, social media allows artists and audiences to connect more easily, giving access to those who may not otherwise have it, particularly historically marginalized groups like the LGBTQ+ community.

The current exhibition is an extension of this project, bringing together examples of historical queer art with work by contemporary LGBTQ+ artists, many of whom were discovered via social media and the #queerartthenandnow hashtag. The title Closet to Quarantine refers generally to the arc of queer history, but also to the shared themes of isolation and visibility across this history. The forced confinement of the Covid-19 quarantine has been particularly difficult for some members of the LGBTQ+ community, a group which has long fought for visibility and acceptance. In many ways, the physical and social isolation of this period echoes the isolation of historical queer experience (albeit without the same stigma). Throughout the pandemic, social media has served as an important antidote to this isolation, acting as a vital outlet for connection and creative expression.

Many of the themes expressed by the contemporary artists in this exhibition mirror those found in historical queer art. Queer themes in art can be broadly understood as a progression from taboo, to revolutionary, to acceptance and celebration. For the greater part of the 20th century, homosexuality was still considered taboo. As a result, queer art has been shaped by both the need to conceal references to queer identity, and the desire for increased visibility and acceptance.

This tension between concealment and visibility has long been present in queer art, often by necessity. Photographer George Platt Lynes, famous for his commercial work in fashion magazines, secretly produced a substantial body of nude and homoerotic photography throughout his life. Lynes considered his photographs of male nudes to be his finest work, yet this private body of work was never shown during his lifetime as it was considered taboo at the time. In contrast, contemporary artist Felipe Chavez uses his art practice to explore his own sexuality in a very public way. In his conceptual self-portraits, Chavez uses his own body to explore the male form and its relationship with sexuality and space as a gay man.

One of the most influential queer artists of the 20th century is Paul Cadmus, whose Renaissance-influenced paintings are considered a foundation of queer modernism. Cadmus was one of the first artists to wield an explicit male-on-male gaze in contemporary art and many of his paintings contain coded references to homosexuality and queer experience. In this exhibition, the artist’s highly finished drawing Male Nude NM32, 1967 depicts his longtime partner and muse Jon Anderson with sensual detail. Contemporary artists John MacConnell and Anthony Moore continue to work in this same tradition, depicting their male subjects as suggestively erotic objects of desire. Yet without any overt references to sexuality, it is left to the viewer to make the connection.

In the wake of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, the gay liberation movement began to promote increased visibility, encouraging people to “come out” as LGBTQ+, rather than assimilate to societal norms. Many artists likewise became emboldened to make and exhibit art about their sexual identity. These revolutionary works often depict graphic sexual content as an expression of pride - they represent a complete rejection of the taboo of queerness. Examples include the hyper-sexualized homoerotic illustrations of Tom of Finland and Mike Kuchar. Following in this unabashedly homoerotic tradition are contemporary artists Eric Lotzer and Emily Lombardo. Lotzer makes a very conscious attempt to redefine and reclaim the vulgar, exploring the uncomfortable yet attractive aspects of our primal sexual behavior. Lombardo’s work explores queer sex and relationships, often through reinterpretations of historic material, including Goya’s Los Caprichos and Marcantontio Raimondi’s I Modi series. She contributes At Sea to this exhibition – an intimate print depicting two women draped upon each other in a drifting boat.

With greater visibility and acceptance, many contemporary LGBTQ+ artists embrace and celebrate queer identity and sexuality in their work. Andrew Sedgwick Guth’s brightly colored embroidered paintings depict male-identifying figures in settings of intimacy. His goal with these works is to “depict the subjects in ‘pretty’ and ‘soft’ environments. Safe spaces for them to exist and to be beautiful in their own right.” In this same vein, Stuart Sandford, a co-curator of the #queerartthenandnow hashtag, celebrates the powerful and enduring classical ideal of male beauty in his multidisciplinary practice. He explains, “I always wanted to celebrate my sexuality and put the male nude body front and centre in my work. I grew up with negative depictions of LGBTQ life within popular media and thought it was important to depict the opposite - so portraying male intimacy became a natural focus.”

Childs Gallery is a generalist gallery with selected specialties - this exhibition is an ongoing endeavor to create an additional specialty of queer art within the gallery. The list of artists included here barely scratches the surface of the diverse and talented creators in the LGBTQ+ community. As we continue to connect, collaborate, and learn from each other, we intend to expand #queerartthenandnow into new spaces, as there is still so much to learn and so much work to be done. We also acknowledge that there are all sorts of queerness, and that this show comes primarily from the perspective of a cisgender gay man and thus does not presume to represent everyone within the LGBTQ+ community. However, we do see this as a step towards facilitating a community of queer artists and audiences under the historic Childs Gallery umbrella.

A reception for Closet to Quarantine: Queer Art Then and Now will take place on Saturday, September 18th, 4pm - 7pm.

Artists in the exhibition include: 

Hannah Barrett

Richmond Barthé

Robert Bliss

Paul Cadmus

Rick Castro

Felipe Chavez

Opal DeRuvo

Rubén Esparza

Jared French

Andrew Sedgwick Guth

Don Joint

Mike Kuchar

Emily Lombardo

Eric Lotzer

George Platt Lynes

John MacConnell

Anthony Moore

Ben Norris

Stuart Sandford

Margaret Rose Vendryes

Andy Warhol

Sara Zielinski