The dilapidated Lupinewood mansion is perched atop a winding hill in Greenfield, Massachusetts, overlooking the Connecticut River Valley. Once the lavish estate of the wealthy Peabody family, today Lupinewood exists as a collective of artists, organizers, educators, and health-care providers who are majority trans and queer—all living and working to establish a mutually supportive space for members and transient guests. They collaborate on art and share living spaces, income, food, knowledge, and intertwining intimate relationships, while always prioritizing their core tenets of sanctuary, convergence, and confrontation.

The 6,000-square-foot home and its 4.02 acres of land, which exists on colonized Pocumtuc territory, is a complicated haven for its eight members. Though the collective has existed in some form or another for about seven years, they didn’t truly have a safe and productive home until January 2017, when the group finally moved into Lupinewood.

To learn more about Lupinewood, we asked the collective what existing at Lupinewood means to them, and what they believe is possible at this place.

Cea Wiley of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Cea Wiley

Because I’m an herbalist, Lupinewood is a wild paradox for me. It’s a former robber baron’s mansion reclaimed by queer radical artists and organizers; the land, once manicured to perfection, has been reclaimed by plants growing any way they please; the inground swimming pool is getting swallowed by vines. It’s a fairy tale—it’s Robin Hood! Yet, here I am, a white person “owning” and living in structures erected on land stolen by white colonizers through genocide. As I pull weeds out of the gardens here, I think of the ways in which I am an invader myself.

I am starting a low-cost apothecary at Lupinewood, and want to develop a community clinic from it, with the aim of providing alternative health care to low-income folks. I’m setting up a medicinal garden, from which I can source medicine for the clinic, as well as for the street medic and medic trainer work to support front-line struggles. I want Lupinewood’s colonized land to materially combat the corrosion of capitalism on people’s bodies. I want it overrun with at-risk and endangered plants, plants that can be supportive of a complex and generative ecosystem. Additionally, I hope to use this place to host conferences and convergences with other radical health-care workers, using them to deepen the discourse around what it means to live within paradoxes, even as we fight them.

Aurora Rainer of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Aurora Rainer

There’s a long tradition of queers building alternative families and domestic structures. Many folks have had to: their biological families cut them loose, over and over; the domestic models they were handed couldn’t fit them. So many queer people have needed, historically, to be artists. They’ve needed to craft realities for themselves, their friends, and their partners.

I see myself as humbly continuing this tradition through Lupinewood. I am a painter by trade and have a painting studio here, where I make art about queer love and how trans-femininity lives in my white settler body. I take care of the beehives and I apprentice as an

herbalist, tending the food, medicine, and pollinator gardens here. I also help oversee our collective kitchen, keeping track of bulk orders and supply needs, trying to ensure there’s enough soup and tea for whoever’s catching a cold or working overtime. All of these projects are about queer, radical homemaking to me. They’re about crafting a reality in which my partners and friends can thrive, despite the obstacles the dominant culture gives them.

As a femme who grew up believing I could not occupy a feminine position, it’s deeply cathartic to engage directly in this feminized labor. And as a woman committed to social struggle, it is deeply healing, and deeply political, to imagine ways this labor can happen outside the oppressive frameworks in which capitalism has always placed femme labor.

Alyssa Kai of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Alyssa Kai

From a fascist right emboldened by Trump to the waves of evictions in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire, collective spaces of sanctuary, cultural production, and political action are under attack and more important than ever to defend and grow. I came up in such spaces, moving through the constellations of DIY living and performance venues on tour with one

musical project or another, stepping into the lush worlds generated by the activity they housed. For me and countless others, DIY spaces are exceptional places of experimentation that generate microcultures resilient to the challenges of political conflict, and provide points of refuge for people whose identities are under constant attack.

Since we moved in on New Year’s Eve, Lupinewood has quickly become a node for networks of queer and politicized projects circulating around the continent. We have an agency here that many collective spaces don’t have the luxury of wielding: agency over the safety of the space, over the ways it gets used and built out, over the reliability of a future here. Because of this, Lupinewood feels poised to be a particularly powerful and long-running space as both a safe haven for embattled people and a flywheel for the folks and projects that pass through here, whether for a day or a year. And as stewards of this place, we have made a collective commitment to each other: that we will work to keep it that way, in perpetuity.

Noel’le Longhaul of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Noel’le Longhaul

My personal art and tattoo practice grew out of my life as a transient younger punk, not yet having come out as trans, dissociated from where I came from and who I was. Riding trains across the country, I began tattooing elaborate, enchanted houses and landscapes on the transient and often similarly dissociated friends I met, while the literal homes and landscapes around me blurred. I was fundamentally ungrounded, and it took an immense toll on my body and spirit.

Lupinewood is an enchanted landscape. Its architecture is magical; it is thickly wooded and surrounded by wandering paths through the trees, and both the house and the land it sits on mirror the imagery in my work, sometimes uncannily. But it is also an actual place that I wake up to. It gives me the resources I need to regenerate my body so I can continue tattooing and art-making with the intensity that my practice demands.

One of the most crucial—and rare—resources it provides is a shared life with a collective of people who are my partners, friends, and artistic collaborators. The ability to move fluidly between making meals and making art together feels alchemical. It magnifies the meaning of the cultural production, turning a tattoo or a print into an artifact of a shared experience. And it turns daily routines into domestic rituals, which deepen in significance as more people stay here, cook here, receive medicine here, and use this place to ground themselves before making their next move.

beyon wren moor of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

beyon wren moor

As a two-spirit mixed Cree and Ukrainian settler now living on occupied Pocumtuc territory, I have no rights in this place called Lupinewood. The white settler promise of “human rights” has never included me or my people, and I know the safeties and comforts promised by such rights are on the same spectrum as feelings of entitlement. For me, Lupinewood is a place of responsibility: to care for the land and the people whose ancestors feed the trees and rivers here.

In the seven months since I arrived, Lupinewood has been a site of security and healing for me, an experience that sits uneasily alongside the knowledge of desperate indigenous struggles elsewhere. Before Lupinewood, and in between living at the Unist’ot’en Camp, Standing Rock, and on other front lines across so-called british columbia, I had been collecting the words and stories of 14indigenous women and two-spirit land defenders. With the help of my longtime collaborator, I am in the process of illustrating, hand-printing, and binding their words into a book describing what land defense looks like in their 14 respective nations. When finished, we plan to sell the book as one of many efforts to support their fight.

I have spent most of my life struggling for indigenous sovereignty and the defense of land, and I intend to use Lupinewood as a point of retreat and convergence for myself and other indigenous land defenders, as well as a tool to rally resources from the relative wealth of this area for front-line struggles.

Nick Berger of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Nick Berger

I’m a non-binary trans artist and musician who’s been living and organizing collectively for the past decade. The punk, queer, and organizing scenes I came up in were vibrant and chaotic, full of glorious aspirations and attempts to combat the massive power structures we recognized as the source of so much violence and pain. Simultaneously, these scenes had strong tendencies toward guilt and self-negation; the people in them were constantly prioritizing action at the expense of their own well-being. We were throwing ourselves at the problems we saw, but there was no space to heal the wounds this inevitably gave us.

As I’ve watched this dynamic happen, I’ve realized that many of us have a deeply internalized sense of disposability toward our bodies and relationships. Living within the capitalist, white, cis-het patriarchy means learning to commoditize lived experiences, and though many radicals are aware of and critical of this, it runs deep. What does it mean to stay in one place, even as one’s trauma catches up to them? What does it mean to consider a set of relationships, beyond perhaps a single romantic partnership, non-disposable? At Lupinewood, I want to work toward reconnecting basic self-care and mutual aid to the labor of organizing work. I want Lupinewood to engage a broader network of collective projects that are genuinely effective politically, and genuinely trauma-informed and care-oriented.

Terran Nullius of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Terran Nullius

I’ve worked with immigrants and refugees for the past nine years. I coordinate a site where classes and counseling services are free to non-native English speakers. These folks create a place together that is beautiful and worthy of defending, even as this country’s political culture turns against them.

We moved into Lupinewood as Trump was getting elected, with his bluster about a border wall and mass deportations. As we started unpacking our boxes here, the national conversation was decidedly about displacement.

Like my classroom, Lupinewood is about the creation and defense of place.

I’m not an immigrant. I’m white, U.S.-born, and live on stolen land. My relationship to place is privileged in many respects. Even with my privileges, finding a secure place has been incredibly hard. Being trans, polyamorous, lower class, and saddled with student debt have all led to years of unsafe, unstable, and ugly living situations for me and so many of the people I’m close to.

I want Lupinewood to create a place for people who more often battle displacement. I want to make it safe and strong, with the ability to offer shelter on short notice. I want to leverage Lupinewood’s privileges into infrastructure to support those who lack it. I want to make it physically beautiful, the kind of space people without power usually cannot access. I want to build a place worthy of defense.

Andrew Huckins of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Andrew Huckins

I believe that architecture subtly defines the limits of what’s possible, whether one is trying to change the world, simply get out of bed in the morning, or both. I’m thinking not just of physical space, but of cultural, economic, political, and social space as well. Whether it’s a local bylaw that recognizes only heteronuclear definitions of family, or the behavioral norms enforced by one’s peers, these architectures define paths of least resistance that lead inexorably toward a broken status quo.

The seven years I’ve spent working to realize Lupinewood have been a practice in forging paths that diverge from those of least resistance, and toward making resistance part of Lupinewood’s architectural DNA. Beyond the particular acts of resistance enacted by our collective and its networks, Lupinewood is, for me, the first major step on a lifelong path of creating, growing, and defending alternatives to the well-trodden walkways this civilization has wandered down.

I see Lupinewood growing into a deep resource for the upcoming struggles that our communities face. Building a kitchen capable of cooking for large groups of people, setting up a communal wood and metal shop, creating space for political organizers and their projects—while these are some of the specific next steps that I’m excited about, I feel most moved by Lupinewood’s broader potential to support, rather than suppress, the wisdom and power of those on the receiving end of systems of abusive violence.

Lupinewood

Greenfield, Massachusetts

Website

Photos by Caleb Cole

The post Building Sanctuary appeared first on Take Magazine.

As the excitement around Miami Art Week starts to die down, and the last of the Drake and Drake-adjacent performances end, we decided to head out for one final round of perusing the fairs. In addition, we ran into a certain famous duo who are usually hanging outside bodegas in The Bronx, but more on that later.

James Pettemgill of Wingate Studios showing an Elizabeth Atterbury print

First up was NADA Miami, which is the only major American art fair programmed by a nonprofit (New American Art Dealers Alliance). It seeks to  “[explore] new or underexposed art that is not typical of the ‘art establishment.’” We chose NADA as one of the final fairs to see because of its embrace of the underexposed and we needed to see works by Maine artist Elizabeth Atterbury who was named an Artist to Watch at fair by NADA organizers.

Northampton resident James Pettengill represented Wingate Studio out of Hinsdale, New Hampshire, which had some of Atterbury’s sculptural, embossed prints. Pettengill helped his father, master printer and owner of Wingate Studio, move the print shop in a new direction towards publishing contemporary and emerging artists. He was excited to show Atterbury’s work since her medium and method seem to match the shop’s new direction. Pettengill thought NADA was just the place to do it. “We do a lot of print fairs so it’s usually us and other print makers,” he says. “But to be at a contemporary art fair is really nice because we work with artists who are showing in that context.”

Wingate Studio not only operates as a publishing space for emerging printmakers; it also offers artists from around the region a small residency program (much like what Macrina Newhouse is doing at Mary Sky). The folks at Wingate Studio invite artists for short period of time to collaborate with staff while they live on their family farm in Hindsale.

Holi #16, 2013, Melted plastic, expanded foam, paper, artificial flowers, pigment 24 × 24 in 61 × 61 cm Sculpture by Judy Pfaff

Our final fair stop was Art Miami, the largest of the Art Miami/Aqua/Context network of Miami art fairs. Art Miami is less like a NADA, Untitled or SCOPE, and more like a PULSE or even Basel. At Art Miami,  there’s less fodder around programming and events, and more about packing the tent with people and sellable art.

This is where we tracked down James Baron Art, a booth full of interested buyers and contemporary works on paper and sculptures. Barron divides his time between Rome, Italy, and Kent, Connecticut, and has sold works by works by Picasso, Matisse, Warhol, Diebenkorn and LeWitt (just to name a few). “We work with collectors that are selling works. We don’t sell works directly from artists,” says Hascy Cross, director of James Baron Art. “Maybe the pieces have already been on the market sometime in the past or people will consign pieces to us in hopes that we’ll sell it for them.”

tomorrow is desus and mero’s first art auction and yes, these are the best art pieces money can buy #miamiartbasel

A post shared by the VICELAND bus (@vicelandbus) on Dec 8, 2017 at 9:55am PST

After the long haul across town through two different fairs, it was time to laugh at ourselves a little bit. So we cutt out to Wynwood to see Desus Nice and The Kid Mero of Viceland cable’s illustrious late night talk show Desus and Mero. They stood atop the Viceland Bus and conducted an art auction to benefit Planned Parenthood featuring props from the set of their show, one of Desus’s signature (allegedly) unused chap sticks and, of course, an enormous picture of themselves.

Top photo sculptures on view at Mrs. Gallery by Elizabeth Atterbury | Photo courtesy the artist website

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We stepped away from the big fairs for another day to check out some of the peripheral Miami Art Week fairs featuring familiar work from emerging and established artists, as well as some more DIY-oriented, artist-run spaces.

figure abstraction-fetish nuance. 24 x 24 in, oil on wood panel | photo courtesy Auerus Contemp. website

Aqua Art Miami is a smaller fair relative to its sibling fairs in downtown (Art Miami and Context). “It’s what I like to call a middle-class fair, not like Art Basel. Much more accessible,” says Kevin Havelton, art dealer and director of Aureus Contemporary in Providence Rhode Island. Havelton is a seasoned Miami Art Week presenter with  “a true passion for the work.” Unlike some art dealers, Havelton personally collects the work of all the artists he represents, and it shows when carefully he describes an artist’s work to interested buyers and folks who frequent just for fun. Havelton presented works by Carina Schott and Karim Hamid, both Rhode Island residents, and Eben Haines who lives and makes work in Boston.

Though Aqua is a beautiful fair staged in a posh, sun-soaked hotel in Miami Beach, for dealers like Havelton, it’s no afternoon jaunt. “This is a big week in the art world, a lot of people come pouring in. I refer to it as the Olympics of the contemporary art world,” says Havelton. “You have to work real fucking hard for your money.”

One of Andrew Fenlon’s “Procedural Paintings” featured by Mary Sky at Satellite Art Show

Next on our list was Miami Beach’s most rogue show (#NOTBASEL), all the way up North Beach past SCOPE. It’s called Satellite and seeks to “offer patrons and collectors a unique experience where art is at the forefront of creative expression, activism, and curiosity.” The charmingly dilapidated Ocean Terrace Motel housed dozens of spaces curated by gallery owners and artists. Some of the booths showed work all the way into the bathrooms of the converted hotel suites, which were usually painted or even incorporated into the works featured there.

At Satellite, we sought out Macrina Newhouse, director at Mary Sky, a gallery and rural individualized residency program in Hancock, Vermont, where, according to the artist, she “brings artists out of the city to have a rural experience and support them by giving them time to be quiet, be in nature and really engage with their work in a meaningful way.” Newhouse also has a space for Mary Sky at Spectrum Miami, but chose to bring the largest works she displayed by Andrew Fenlon, to Satellite. “I think this work is playing really well in Miami. It’s bright, colorful and poppy. People have been really receptive.”

Check in tomorrow for our final daily dispatch covering all the New England happenings at Art Miami and NADA.

Top photo courtesy Satellite website

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On day three of Miami Art Week, all the press previews and openings are over, but the fair perusals don’t stop here. Back when this art extravaganza was first organized, these first three days were key. Folks would flood to the openings and previews (or vernissage for those in the know), see the works at a few fairs, make their art purchases and/or sales, then take the weekend off. Today, it’s a much different game. Not only are there more buyers than ever, but each gallery owner and, in some cases, the artists who accompany them, have to remain present and working until late in the evening Sunday.

First up for us on this third day of holy art fair perusals is one of the longest running art fairs in Miami and the last big Miami Beach art fair we haven’t visited; PULSE.

Katelijne De Backer, the newly anointed director of PULSE, says the fair seeks to create more accessibility around the kind of works being presented at Art Week. “Even for those who cannot collect, the fair offers an opportunity to meet and talk with artists you would never otherwise have access to. I think this kind of generosity is important, especially now,” she told the New York Times.

William Baczek, owner at William Baczek Fine Arts in Northampon Massachusets, agrees that the fair is more accessible not only for folks who aren’t art collectors, but for smaller galleries that are essentially locked out of the larger Art Basel scene. Baczek presented paintings by Jaq Chartier and Jana Burke as well as sculptures by Anne Lilly. By the time we caught up with him, Baczek had already made a few sales.

After leaving PULSE, it was time to see a good Take Magazine pal — one of our 2017 Artists to Watch, Tanja Hollander. We met Hollander in the swanky VIP collectors’ lounge at Art Basel, easily the largest and most talked about fair at Art Week Miami. MGM Resorts Art & Culture presented her work as a participatory installation where attendees, much like at her past Mass MoCA installation, can add to her growing collection of sticky notes where people write their definition of a “true friend.” The folks at MGM Resorts Art & Culture chose to include one of Nick Cave’s sound suites in the suite, making the interactive exhibition felt like a spiritual continuation of her work with Mass MoCA since her installation there was positioned immediately before the entrance to Cave’s sullen yet sparkly meditation Until (both shows curated by Denise Markonish). 

One of two interactive installations by Tanja Hollander at Art Basel | Presented by MGM Resorts Art & Culture

Though most of the fairs are populated by galleries from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco (and all the other art hot spots across the world), there’s still much to explore in terms of New England artists, galleries, and their intimate connections to the broader art world.

Check in with us tomorrow for more coverage of Art Week in Miami when we chat with Auerus Contemporary of Providence Rhode Island and Mary Sky of Hookset, Vermont. 

Top photo interior of the collectors’ lounge at Art Basel featuring Nick Cave’s sound suite and Tanja Hollander’s interactive exhibition entitled Are You Really My Friend presented by MGM Resorts Art & Culture.

The post Miami Art Week Day 3: Tanja Hollander, PULSE & More appeared first on Take Magazine.

INK Miami held its private preview on the morning of December 6th in the decadent courtyard at the Suites of Dorchester on Miami Beach. Though the fair is small relative to its Art Week neighbors in South Beach, INK still features lots of galleries from around the world, from Ireland to Boston.

Childs Gallery from Boston was the only New England gallery showing at INK, offering a varied exhibition from two Alexander Calder pieces to an installation by Boston-born artist Sara Zielinski.

Zielinski’s installation, The Dolls House at INK Miami, was unique, filling an entire room of Childs Gallery’s suite. Every inch of the room was covered in printed fabrics, hand-sewn works and printed messages ranging in tone from emo to depraved.

Detail of Sara Zielinski’s installation at Childs Gallery entitled The Doll’s House

The install description sums up the work as “an immersive printed environment for fair-goers to explore,” but it seems much more personal than that. Whether we’re staring into Zielinski’s actual inner world or some version of what every girl (or grown woman) does in her bedroom, Zielinski’s careful placement and crude human figures call us back to our own alone-time memories and late-night journal-scribblings. In the same way that artists like Kathleen Hannah revealed themselves to us through their early bedroom pop musics, Zielinski revealed to INK Miami attendees just what it’s like inside the mind, life and room of another.

The SCOPE preview was next, and was quite the contrast to INK in size and style. SCOPE, much like UNTITLED (they are neighbors on the beach by the way), programs a packed fair, featuring a seemingly endless lineup of galleries from all over the world, works of all kinds, and different programming throughout the week.

The Bridge – 2017, 85 x 104 acrylic on canvas

Though we could easily talk about the hyper-minimalist artists emerging from Seoul and our favorite strange large-scale installation (head to our Instagram page for those broader, up-to-the-minute insights), we’ll focus on the handful of galleries from New England.

Clark Gallery from Lincoln, Massachusetts, was stationed near the entrance to the fair showing several artists, some of whom are from New England. Dana Salvo, owner of Clark Gallery, pointed us to Jessie Morgan, a Boston-based abstract painter whose work hung in the middle of the booth beside North Adams, Massachusetts painter Warner Friedman. 

Aureus Gallery from Providence, Rhode Island, was on the opposite side of the fair (Aureus is also showing some other artists up the road at AQUA). In addition to a daunting number of nationally well-known and international artists, Aureus Gallery featured a few artists making work in Rhode Island — sculptor Laura Kramer and painter Karim Hamid.

Selected work for “Unafilliate.us” by Tom Fruin

Just as we thought we’d seen most, if not all, the galleries and organizations from New England at SCOPE, we stumbled upon the “Unafilliate.us” exhibition, one of the Programs + Special Projects presented at SCOPE. A product of Craft Guile and Boston-based Column Health’s recent initiative to “help de-stigmatize mental illness and the disease of addiction,” the show at SCOPE features intricate quilts sewn from tiny drug baggies and hanging neon nooses by renowned New York artist Tom Fruin. All folks who visited the booth walked away with addiction counseling materials, and, surprisingly, one dose of Narcan with proper instructions for how to administer it on someone who’s overdosing.

Selected work for “Unafilliate.us” by Tom Fruin

Check in again tomorrow for our coverage of PULSE and one of our favorite Maine artist, Tanja Hollander. 

Top photo interior of Sara Zielinski’s installation The Doll’s House for Childs Gallery

The post Miami Art Week Day 2: INK Miami and SCOPE appeared first on Take Magazine.

At Art Week Miami, UNTITLED, Art Fair Miami is one of the big fairs. Though there are nearly endless booths to peruse featuring galleries and artists from around the world, UNTITLED seems even more concerned with providing novel experiences for the art kids and elders frequenting the fair. Ten limited edition free posters by famous artists, six different “special projects” installed and curated by UNTITLED throughout the fair, and nearly moment-to-moment programming add up to create what feels less like an art fair and more like a bazaar.

Anyway, amongst the madness were two New England galleries: Steven Zevitas Gallery from Boston, Massachusetts, and LaMontagne Gallery from Winchester, Massachusetts.

Alex Jackson | (C)(S)ell(ar)(er), 2017, oil on canvas, 72 x 66 inches

Steben Zevitas Gallery showed selected works from Alex Jackson, who graduated from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Skowhegan, Maine in 2015 and then went on to earn an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University. His works are daunting, both in size and thematic exploration.

Excuse MeKim Faler, 2017, Graphite Print

LaMontagne Gallery brought works from two New Englanders and one New York artist. Kim Faler’s work was on the scene alongside two of Joe Wardwell’s large wordy collages, sort of a minimized version of his massive work on view right now at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.

What They Want I Don’t KnowJoe Wardwell, 2016, oil on canvase, 60 x 50

Though Take Magazine isn’t necessarily a space for promoting art from outside New England, we can’t help but mention a few folks in this roundup. First, Eugenio Ampudia’s kinetic sculpture that morphs from the word “time” into shapes and patterns, then back again, serenely offers viewers a soothing, tangible work that found a way to assert itself amid the din of the fair (fun fact: the artist’s name was just scrawled into the wall below the piece, near the floor with no description and barely legible.)

A post shared by JohnW (@microwavedkale) on Dec 5, 2017 at 3:46pm PST

Additionally, the New York City-based gallery The Hole presented a selection of languid portraits by Eric Yahnker that spoke to basically everyone who walked by the booth. Donald Trump blow-drying his hair, a late-Victorian mother nursing her baby with a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and Justin Bieber painted in reverence like the Madonna Child all done in a sfumato that would rival da Vinci.

Mother’s Dew Eric Yahnker, 2017, Oil pastel on paper, 68.5 x 52″

Check in with us tomorrow as we give you the exclusive first look at SCOPE and INK Miami. 

Top photo courtesy UNTITLED, Art Fair

The post MIAMI ART WEEK DAY 1: THE EPIC UNTITLED, ART FAIR appeared first on Take Magazine.

Yes, of course, we’ll be at Art Basel. However, there’s so much more to Miami Art Week than the big fairs pushing big name artists and throwing parties. Art Week in Miami also consists of dozens of smaller fairs showcasing emerging, mid-career, and straight-up famous artists from all over the world. We’re looking to take our talents beyond South Beach and explore any and all fairs with New England connections. Yes, it’s an audacious task, but we think we can pull it off. Here’s our plan

UNTITLED, Art
Dec. 6 – 10

“Untitled, Art is an international, curated art fair founded in 2012 that focuses on curatorial balance and integrity across all disciplines of contemporary art. Untitled, Art innovates the standard fair model by selecting a curatorial team to identify, and curate a selection of galleries, artist-run exhibition spaces, and non-profit institutions and organizations, in dialogue with an architecturally designed venue.”

Hot New Englander(s) on-site: Kim Faler & Joseph Wardell, both represented by LaMontagne Gallery.

INK Miami
Dec. 6 – 10

“The Ink Miami Art Fair transforms the historic Suites of Dorchester Hotel into distinctive art galleries, surrounded by a verdant and tranquil courtyard. Visitors are invited to explore our main galleries offering a wide range of works on paper including new and noteworthy editions.”

Hot New Englander(s) on-site: Childs Gallery, which will have its whole booth transformed into an immersive print environment by multimedia artist Sara Zielinski.

Adam’s Nest at Art Gasel 3
Hotel Gathering
Dec 6 – 10

“Adam’s Nest is an idea that has been brewing for ages and the universe provided an opportunity to grab a retail space in Provincetown’s east end. The physical shop opened its doors in June 2016. We are located right next to Wired Puppy coffee and feature art, apparel, jewelry, and whatnot! We select items that appeal to our unique sense of humor, values and our lifestyle. We seek out artists and items through friends, our travels and various social media avenues and are always on the lookout for something interesting to share.”

NADA Miami 2017
Dec. 7 – 10

Mrs. Gallery out of Maspeth, New York, will be presenting varied works from Portland, Maine artist Elizabeth Atterbury.

Tanja Hollander at Art Basel

We’ll be visiting the Maine-born, Facebook-famous photographer Tanja Hollander at the Art Basel Collectors’ Lounge where Hollander will be signing copies of her new book Are Your Really My Friend, which is a collection of photographs that originally appeared in her installation of the same name at MASS MoCA this year.

PULSE Miami
Dec. 7 – 10

“Founded in 2005, PULSE Contemporary Art Fair is an established part of the annual art calendar and is recognized for providing its international community of emerging and established galleries with a dynamic platform for connecting with a global audience. PULSE offers visitors an engaging environment in which to discover and collect the most compelling contemporary art being produced today.”

Hot New Englander(s) on-site: William Baczek Fine Arts from Northampton, Massachusetts

This is just a few of the artists, fairs and galleries we plan to check on over the next week. Come back to our website everyday for more Art Week Miami updates and follow us on social for up-to-the-minute coverage.

Top photo courtesy PULSE Miami

The post Our Miami Art Week Preview, Preview appeared first on Take Magazine.

After three years of writing, performing with other bands, producing and recording, jazz saxophonist Mtali Shaka Banda will release his first album Rites of Passage with with his group, The Oneness Project. The work is a winding concept album telling Banda’s coming of age story using the medium of jazz to promote oneness while still reckoning with all the political moments since Ferguson, Missouri.

Rites of Passage album art by Reed Sutherland

“I’m trying to represent who I am and the way I’m trying to be, making sure my art and my life are one,” says Banda. “I think a lot of artists preach a certain way but don’t live that way. Or attempt to live a certain way, but their music reflects something else. I want to make music that reflects everything I am and everything that I’m trying to be — no bullshit.”

As the son of a Milawian refugee father and an African American mother, Banda acknowledges that his artistic expression is inherently political, especially in the realm of jazz music, a genre like blues and rock ‘n roll that was founded by people of color, then co-opted by white musicians for profit. “Black music is always revolutionary and always on that tip because our existence is political. Whether we try to separate it or not separate it, it’s always going to be political,” says Banda. “You can’t hide from those things, so I let it come up organically and try to tell a good story instead of deciding ‘I want to make protest music.’ Just let me be who I am and the politics will come.”

Interwoven within the narrative themes of the album is Banda’s mastery of the tenor sax. His playing feels fluid, familiar, and expert. Though Banda certainly solos and takes control in the special way a saxophonist can, there are more moments on Rites of Passage where his playing makes space for the other musicians. Bass solos, vocal improvisations, and soft fills from the drums often converge around Banda rather than pushing his sax front and center.

People who listen to bands like The Robert Glasper Experiment will recognize a similarity in how Banda brings folks from outside the world of hip hop, rap, and R & B to play jazz with him. In this way, Banda’s music will satisfy contemporary jazz devotees and people who appreciate the more musically divergent parts of Kendrick Lamar‘s To Pimp a Butterfly or the jazz samples off J Cole’s Forest Hill Drive.

Not that Banda is committed to catering to a specific audience. His primary concern is telling a relatable story through jazz music about “a young black man finding his voice in this world and attempting to be true to himself.”

Listen to Rites of Passage here first before the album’s official release on December 8th, 2017.

Mtali Shaka Banda – saxaphonist, Mtali Oneness Project
Website
Facebook
Instagram

Top photo by Yasmina Mattison-Sudan

The post Shaka on the Rhythm appeared first on Take Magazine.

“There’s this little lesson you give at the beginning of the show,” says burlesque performer Ruby Solitaire. “Basically, you say it’s okay to hoot and holler during the show. We want you to make a lot of noise. Just don’t be gross, don’t be cruel, and everybody’s going to have a good time. It’s about boundaries.”

Solitaire explains that defining expectations between burlesque performers and their audience or establishing “burletiquette” as coined by Bastard Keith, is an essential step in fostering the kind of atmosphere Solitaire wants at an Excelsior Burlesque show. She definitely aims for sultry, entertaining, and raucous, but she also wants her performances to be a space of expression, power, and body and sex positivity for the Excelsior performers of varying gender and racial identities.

Still confused about the difference between club stripping and burlesque? Solitaire has your differentiation: “[Burlesque is a] very artistic form of striptease that’s meant to tell a story and go beyond the capabilities of narrative that a traditional club stripper may have. [Club stripping’s] purpose is individualized attention, whereas burlesque is a three-minute play for the audience.”

Elsa Riot in Excelsior Burlesque. Photo courtesy of Ruby Solitaire.

Solitaire’s troupe used to perform in New York City, but after a change in cast and a few years hiatus, she’s back in New England ready, in a lot of ways, to start fresh. “Coming to New Hampshire, I realized I couldn’t assume that people had the lexicon for understanding burlesque, before they got into nerdlesque,” she says. (Nerdlesque is a subgenre of burlesque performance that uses nerdy references and pop culture properties as inspiration for themed shows or one-off acts.) Excelsior has its big homecoming show on December 9th at Jewel Music Venue.

Solitaire will bring in some performers she knows and trusts to do more classic performances before she starts doing the more brainy, subversive or “tightly themed” acts. No matter if she’s dressing up like one of Neil Gaiman’s characters from the extremely popular Sandman graphic novel series, doing a classic peel-off to reveal tasseled pasties, or if she’s stringing together acts as a tribute to the FX show show Archer, her performances are always “[a] nexus of strip tease, comedy, theater, dance and music. Raunchy, but with a wink and a nod.”

Harley Foxx. Photo by Pete Olsen

Ruby Solitaire’s pensive approach to burlesque performance goes beyond an entertaining rule-making, precise curation, and deep pop culture references. Hers is a political approach, specifically offering shows that are intentionally inclusive and body positive. “You have to be active in your casting if you want to be a body positive show and a diverse show,” she says. “You can’t just put out a casting notice saying ‘inclusivity encouraged’ or ‘we encourage people of color to apply for the show’ or ‘we encourage trans people to apply for the show,’” says Solitaire. “We actually have to go and seek these people out. But before that happens, you need to be sure you have a safe place to do it, in terms of the physical location and in making sure that people aren’t going to yell out horrible things. It’s definitely a challenge as a white, cis producer to do that, but it’s something that’s very worth doing.”

Ruby Solitaire – performer and producer at Excelsior Burlesque
Manchester, New Hampshire
Website
Twitter

Top image: Ruby Solitaire. Photo by William Skrainski.

The post Proper Burletiquette with Ruby Solitaire appeared first on Take Magazine.

For readers who have uncomplicated, loving relationships with their extended family coming to visit this Turkey Day, we say congratulations. For the rest of us who have a bit more fraught relationships with our close and/or extended families, here are some inoffensive and broad Shiny Objects. Hopefully an activity, live show or group outing will distract you from certain a family member’s off-kilter political leanings, backhanded compliments, and/or complaints about dates you brought home ten years ago. Head out and do something before the living room and dinner-time banter drives you to say or do something you’ll regret.

Things to do in Massachusetts 

It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Art from the Kirk Hammett Collection
Peabody Essex Museum
East India Square,
161 Essex Street
Salem
On view until November 26th
10AM – 5PM

Trick your Trump-supporting uncle into seeing this collection of classic horror and science fiction art. He’ll think he’s just seeing a bunch of rogue brutal works owned by the guitarist of Metallica, but you’ll know he’s actually “[exploring] the interplay of creativity, emotion and popular culture.”

SAINTS SLUTS SIRENS: Archetypes of the Feminine
UnchARTed Gallery
103 Market Street
Lowell
Friday November 24, Saturday November 25
11:30am to 1am

The lucky ones have at least one super cool, feminist relative right? They’re the one you can knowingly glance at across the table when someone’s husband says something awful. Peel away from the rest of the family and go see this exhibit with that special relative who sees your distaste with it all.

Things to do in Connecticut

Rags: An American Musical
The Goodspeed
6 Main Street
East Haddam
Friday, November 24 2PM & 8PM
Saturday, November 25 3PM & 8PM
Sunday, November 26 2PM 6:30PM

A good ol’ American musical about immigrants coming to the United States in the early 20th century. Certainly not an uncomplicated topic, but with a score by the songwriters of Annie and Wicked, everyone should be enamored for (at least) the duration of the performance.

Things to do in Vermont

Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium
1302 Main Street
St. Johnsbury
9AM – 5PM

With differing natural history exhibitions and contemporary programming in the varied locations across their Arts and Culture Campus, there’s something for everyone here. Study the museum map BEFORE you get stoned with your cousins and unsuccessfully attempt to locate the planetarium.

Things to do in Maine

19th Annual Animation Show of Shows
Portland Museum of Art
7 Congress Square
Friday, November 24, 2PM & 6PM
Saturday, November 25, 2PM
Sunday, November 26, 2PM
Portland, Maine

Animation is truly an incredible medium. Animated characters can reduce your Trump-supporting uncle to tears just as easily as it can provoke existential questions from your sibling getting his PhD in bioethics. In other words, animation is broad, entertaining and distracting, making it a perfect shared experience for any group.

Things to do in Rhode Island

Bowen’s Wharf Block Party
13 Bowen’s Wharf
Newport
Friday, November 24th
4:00-8pm (Parade starts at 6:15 PM)

It’s a harmless block party by the sea! Take the whole fam to watch the boat parade and while they’re distracted, sneak into one of the shops to do some pre-holiday shopping.

Things to do in New Hampshire

Art on The Hill Open Studios
Art on The Hill Kittery
78 Government Street
Kittery
Friday November 24 – Sunday November 26
10AM – 5PM

Here’s the plan: bring the whole family, separate from the group with your favs, leave the unwanted and unsavory relatives behind to fend for themselves. With three floors and dozens of studios to peruse, you should be able to disappear pretty easily.

The post Shiny Objects: November 24th-26th appeared first on Take Magazine.