Polly Apfelbaum
Stephen D. Paine Gallery at Massachusetts College of Art
Boston, MA
The Stephen D. Paine Gallery at Massachusetts College of Art presented "Polly Apfelbaum," in 2003. By meticulously arranging hundreds of small, hand-cut and hand-dyed pieces of fabric into exquisite, hypnotic forms that sprawl across the floor, Polly Apfelbaum played with and defies categories. Her myriad site-specific and improvisational installations - hybrids of drawing, painting and sculpture - made poetic references to landscape, biology and color field painting. A Guggenheim fellow and Joan Mitchell grant recipient, Apfelbaum lives and works in New York, where she teaches at the School of Visual Arts.
Apfelbaum’s site-specific installation was created for MassArt during her two-week residency. In addition to her signature fabric components, Apfelbaum utilized the 20x24 Polaroid camera at MassArt to fashion unique "linear drawings" for her exhibition.
College and university galleries tend to be where the exciting work is shown in Boston. MassArt’s David and Sandra Bakalar Gallery and Stephen D. Paine Gallery, which occupy over nine thousand square feet, host several major exhibitions each year, as well as graduate and undergraduate students in graduate thesis exhibitions, the annual Senior Show, and the All-School Show.
The Exhibitions Program is a respected force in Boston’s art scene. An important objective of this program is to exhibit works of art not usually seen in New England. The program mounts four to six professional exhibitions each year. Well-known figures in modern and post-modern art as well as young artists have premiered work. These exhibitions are covered regularly in the New England, national, and international press.
Another objective of the programs is to present a balance of different media, including painting, design, photography, sculpture, and performance art. In the fall of 2002, the college premiered Anne Wilson: Unfoldings, the first exhibition to present Wilson’s important early works alongside her tour de force installation from the Whitney Biennial, Topologies, shown here in its entirety for the first time. In early 2003, the college presented Mystic, the multimedia work of nine contemporary international artists exploring the themes of death, transcendence, clairvoyance and spiritualism. Also exhibited in early 2003 was Print, Power & Persuasion: Graphic Design in Germany, 1890-1945, a traveling show of powerful works on paper from the Wolfsonian-Florida International University and a collaboration with the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Goethe Institut, and Facing History and Ourselves.