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As you tour the new exhibit at BU’s 808 Gallery, it quickly becomes apparent why it’s been titled Convergence. This big, ambitious show brings together the work of alumni from all over the world whose years of study at the College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts are separated by as many as six decades. The juried show, which coincides with the 60th anniversary celebration of CFA, includes more than 300 works by 141 alumni.
“We wanted to show that the School of Visual Arts is constantly contributing to the creative environment, the art world, which means young, exciting artists as well as more established ones,” says James Hull, exhibitions director ad interim.
The exhibit was curated by Andrea Champlin, a New York–based artist who teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. A call for submissions was sent out to alumni in advance of the show. Champlin received thousands of images to review. The work chosen for exhibition was based on merit, she says.
“My intent was be inclusive as well as to highlight the strengths of the individual artists and the school,” says Champlin.
The breadth and diversity of the work represented are striking. Not surprisingly, painting predominates over graphic design, sculpture, prints, photography, and video since painting, as Champlin points out, “has always been the core disciple at BU.” But all those other genres are on view here, underscoring the diversity of CFA alumni.
“Artists work in so many ways, it was essential to respond to the wide array of media being created,” says Hull.
Texas Dad (left) and Rising Son, oil on panel, by Sedrick Huckaby (CFA’97). Photo courtesy of the artist
There is so much to take in in this show that it’s best to plan on spending at least an hour in the gallery. Standouts include two vivid portraits by Sedrick Huckaby (CFA’97), Texas Dad and Rising Son. Huckaby works in broad brushstrokes, applying paint so thickly that his family portraits have an almost three-dimensional quality. There is something magisterial about both works, suggested by the monumental scale of each. Huckaby, a Fort Worth native, is an assistant professor of painting at the University of Texas, Arlington.
It’s virtually impossible to ignore Kurt Kauper’s life-size oil painting of former Boston Bruin Derek Sanderson, both because it’s one of the first paintings you see as you enter the gallery and because Sanderson appears completely naked, holding his hockey stick, his jersey hanging on a hook behind him in the locker room. The former Bruins center didn’t pose for the portrait. It’s part of a series of imagined celebrity nudes painted by Kauper (CFA’88) (others include Sanderson’s teammate Bobby Orr and the actor Cary Grant). The artist has exhibited at both the Whitney Museum of American Art and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art.
The exhibit also includes two intaglio prints by Sidney Hurwitz (CFA’59), a CFA professor emeritus of art, who taught printmaking at the School of Visual Arts from 1965 to 1999 and was director of the school from 1969 to 1975. Since the early 1970s, much of Hurwitz’s work has focused on scenes from America’s industrial landscape and pays tribute to the nation’s industrial past. His Bethlehem VII is one of a series of prints made after a 1996 trip to the Bethlehem steel plant in Pennsylvania shortly after it closed. Convergence is something of a family affair for the artist; the show contains several delicate bronze sculptures of nudes by his wife, Penelope Jencks (CFA’58), and two video animation pieces by his son, Adam (CFA’90).
Beech Mountain Cliffs, Winter Polyptych (2000), watercolor on paper, by Robert Phipps (CFA’71). Photo courtesy of the artist
Also included in the show is another father/son duo, Robert Phipps (CFA’71), and Gabriel Phipps (CFA’00), both of whom attended the show’s opening reception on October 24. The elder Phipps is represented with Beech Mountain Cliffs, Winter Polyptych. The magnificent watercolor panels recall ancient Japanese woodblock prints. The stark winter landscape is full of movement: the rapid brushstrokes of the trees, the waterfall, the birds in flight, even the bear ambling across the ice, all connote a sense of motion. Gabriel’s Nursemaid’s Elbow is altogether different, an abstract of lushly painted pink blocks of varying sizes set against a gray and blue background.
Gabriel was just a year old when his father enrolled in the MFA program, the elder Phipps recalls. “The three years of studying, drawing, deepening my range of expression as an artist, I valued it highly,” says Robert, who traveled from Maine to see the exhibit. Taking in the show, he says he was struck by how much broader a range of visual artists there is now at the School of Visual Arts than when he was a student. Gabriel, currently a visiting assistant professor of painting at Indiana University in Bloomington, says that the alumni exhibit is proof that “the program is headed toward a range of sensibilities that includes installation and conceptual art, abstract painting and classicism, and everything in between.”
Nursemaid’s Elbow (2010), oil on canvas, by Gabriel Phipps (CFA’00). Photo courtesy of the artist
Bookending the exhibit are two artists who earned their degrees more than five decades apart. Liz Gribin (CFA’56), an accomplished, prize-winning painter whose work has been described as “classical modernism,” is represented with a portrait, Passage (1993), a figurative image that has abstract elements. Ford Curran (CFA’14), is a graphic design artist who has created a series of tantalizing advertising prints for Curran & Joyce Bottling Company, the now-defunct company started by his great-great-grandfather in 1877. The nine images, oil paint on steel and Epson inkjet on paper, were featured in last spring’s MFA Graphic Design Thesis Exhibition. Curran studied old advertising campaigns that the company used over the decades, including old paper labels, branded wooden crates, and 19th-century ceramic jugs used for whiskey.
For Gribin, the exhibit’s opening reception was an opportunity to reminisce about how much the school has evolved since she was a student. When she arrived at BU, she says, “The curriculum was varied,” and included other areas of study, such as secretarial skills and dressmaking. “But there was also a very fine faculty teaching commercial art, anatomy, perspective, and painting,” says Gribin. “In 1954, David Aronson arrived to teach painting to the five painting majors, I being one of them. He made the school what it is today.” (Aronson, a leader in the Boston Expressionist movement, is a retired CFA professor emeritus of art).
Gribin says that when she was a student, the school was on St. Botolph Street, with a dorm attached. “We always felt that we weren’t a part of the bigger University because we were over in the Back Bay….So once in a while, we’d get our bikes and come over to Comm Ave, just to feel like we were a part of it,” she recalls.
Passage (1993), acrylic on canvas, by Liz Gribin (CFA’56).
Convergence reflects how the curriculum has changed over the decades, says Gribin. “Everything in those days was figurative. We had to learn anatomy, perspective, all that stuff, and we painted directly from a model, which I still do today. Now, of course, there’s so much technology and new kinds of media are in, stuff I don’t really understand. But I love seeing it.”
And that’s one of the goals of the exhibit, according to Champlin—to visually trace how the program’s emphasis has changed during its history. “BU has a reputation as a tradition-bound school. After seeing the work submitted to the alumni show, I believe that is starting to change,” she says.
Ultimately, Convergence is a celebration of the work of artists of all stripes, from every imaginable background, who continue to forge meaningful artistic lives long after they’ve left BU.
Convergence: School of Visual Arts Alumni Exhibition is on view at the 808 Gallery, 808 Commonwealth Ave., through Sunday, December 14. Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Saturday and Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m. The gallery is closed on Monday. The exhibit is free and open to the public. Take a MBTA Green Line B trolley to the BU West stop.
Nice exhibit. If this exhibition is planned again, please send me a submission form. Kay (Keszler) Moses.
Please show more artwork.