Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Neighborhood Nights Kick Off Tonight
Monthly summer events offer free admission, live performances
Neighborhood Nights at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum are free to residents of nearby neighborhoods and the general public. The first of this summer’s Neighborhood Nights is tonight. Photo by Matt Teuten
Tonight, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is offering free admission, live music and dance performances, gallery games, and a chance to create some art of your own as part of its popular Neighborhood Nights series. Starting tonight and running through August 9, on three Thursday nights from 5 to 9 pm the Gardner invites guests to experience its world-class galleries free. The evenings are designed especially for residents of the surrounding neighborhoods of the Fenway, Mission Hill, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and Dorchester.
The theme of this summer’s Neighborhood Nights takes its cue from a special exhibition at the museum, Life, Death & Revelry, which traces the journey of one of its most important works, the Farnese Sarcophagus, over two millennia, from ancient Rome through the modern era. Tonight’s event is titled Life Cycles.
Visitors can enjoy live music by local artists Ruby Rose Fox and Josh Knowles in the Courtyard, as well as a performance by one of the museum’s Neighborhood Salon Luminary Artists, Kadahj Bennett, a Boston-based rapper, singer, actor, and musician, in the Living Room. Or head over to Calderwood Hall at 7 pm for an hour-long performance called Vessel, a commissioned dance theater piece by Marsha Parrilla that uses the Sarcophagus and the history of the transatlantic slave trade to explore and question historic narratives and offer fresh insight into life, death, and revelry.
The evening also features a cash bar and food trucks as well as gallery games.
Neighborhood Night is a wonderful opportunity to explore the museum’s soaring courtyard and galleries housing more than 2,500 paintings, sculptures, tapestries, and decorative arts. Opened in 1903, the museum was established by prominent Bostonian and arts patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose portrait by her longtime friend John Singer Sargent is on view.
The Gardner’s other Neighborhood Nights are Thursday, July 12, and Thursday, August 9, when the themes will be Creative Cycles and Cosmic Cycles.
The first summer Neighborhood Night at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way, Boston, is tonight, Thursday, June 27, from 5 to 9 pm. Tickets are free, but are limited by the museum’s capacity, so arriving early is advised. Find directions here.
Sarah Wells can be reached at swells21@bu.edu.
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