Pepper Gallery closing

Pepper Gallery, after operating for 15 years on the fourth floor of 38 Newbury St., will close at the end of this month.

“I’m leaving the space but I’m continuing in some way,” owner Audrey Pepper said today. “I want to leave my options open and be able to meet a lot of interesting people and see where the business is going to go.”

In February, the New England chapter of the International Association of Art Critics awarded the Boston gallery both first and second place in the “best monographic show in a commercial gallery” category.

But Pepper said that her current five-year lease will expire at the end of May and with the economy struggling it seemed time to consider something new. “The business is very different now [than it was 15 years ago]. Foot traffic is down,” she said.

Pepper, who was a private dealer before opening the gallery, declined to discuss what specific options she was considering for the future, but said she plans to continue working in the field, retain clients and maintain access to artists.

“I’m not disappearing,” she said.

Related:
My review of Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick show at Pepper Gallery in May 2007, which won one of the AICA awards.

Miller Block moving

Miller Block Gallery, which opened in Boston in 1990, plans to move from 14 Newbury St. to 38 Newbury St. in June.

Ellen Miller said she has signed a five-year lease for the fourth floor space where Pepper Gallery is now, and plans to reopen there July 1 with an exhibition of campaign buttons that she’s asking Boston-area artists to create.

Miller’s longtime business partner Katie Block is expected to adopt a smaller role. Miller Block will retain its current name for roughly six months to a year, Miller said, but may then be renamed Ellen Miller Gallery.

“I’ll run the space. Things will seem fairly similar,” Miller said. “Change is happening. I don’t know that it’s going to be hugely apparent to people.”

Miller said she plans to continuing showing most of the artists Miller Block does now, but also add some artists, including St. Louis’s Andrew Millner and perhaps some local artists whose galleries have closed in the current art scene shuffle. And she said she plans to do more “community-based” shows, like the campaign button exhibit.

Miller said she and Block will continue to sell artwork at art fairs together, and Block will continue working with clients.

“We’ve worked together for 17 years. It’s time for a change,” Miller added. “The change that made the most sense for us as individuals was for me to take the space and run the gallery. We still have an amicable relationship.”

Miller Block originally was located at 207 Newbury St., then 11 Newbury St., until moving to its current location in 1998. The upcoming move was triggered by the gallery’s lease, which is set to expire at the end of June, with a tough art market lurking in the background.

Robert Rauschenberg has died

"Painting relates to both art and life.... (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” – Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg died Monday night at his home in Captiva, Florida, according to news reports. He was 82. The cause was apparently heart failure, after a short illness.

See: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times.

ICA raises $75 million

Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art announced today that it had raised $75 million in its capital campaign.

Gary Panter interview

Earlier this week I posted a link to my review of Gary Panter’s exhibition “Daydream Trap” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and excerpts from a public talk he gave at RISD in 2006. Below are excerpts from my interview of Panter at his Brooklyn home on April 11, 2008:

• “I thought the next generation of pop artists would put things into the media and then pull them back out of the media. … And then it would be a warmer kind of pop art. In some way it’s about images running through systems.”
  
• On his art: “I think it’s a self-discovery. You’re your own shrink. … I can find out what I like and don’t like about my interests and I can sort of evolve in that way.”
  
• “It’s really trying to make a hieroglyphic of my experience as a human in a way.”
  
• “It’s got characteristics of infantilism and arrested development and nostalgia. I just tried to find images that were powerful to me in my life. And the funniest.”
  
• “It’s a bower bird kind of instinct. … Put the shiny stuff out front of it that I think will be the greatest attraction.”
  
• “I want it to be seductive. I want it to control the mood. Because I think that’s what painting does. It tries to emanate or resonate and make some bell tones.”
  
• “These things are landscapes. They’re inhabited. … I really like thinking very simply about things. If it’s blue and it’s up high, it’s sky. And if it’s green and it’s down low, it’s grass.”
  
• “There’s this kind of mark I want and it comes from a short stubby brush. … This is kind of a really human hand-made printing process.”
  
• “When I took LSD in the ‘70s I was really shocked by how everything was in there. I thought I was going to have this organic religious experience. And I was just full of synthetic commercials. It was horrifying.”
  
• “Aesthetics are about seduction in some way. It’s coming out of mating symbols in some way. … And then we can use it in different ways.”
  
• “If you’re going to be dealing with imagery as a painter it should probably be primal. So it speaks to the species in some way.”
  
• “A lot of things is is it poetic or not. If it connects too readily it becomes entertainment. And if it’s poetic it’s probably a little less determined to you. I don’t want to make dead art. I don’t want it to be a TV show.”
  
• “Low tech is important in a way. I like cave men art. I think we’re cave men, we’re gophers pretending to be something else.”
  
• “It’s a pretty horrible world. You can scream, you can cry, you can laugh or all of the above. … I think humor is wise. If you talk to Sufi and Zen masters, they’re pulling this way. And it’s a way of reconciling opposites. … Zen humor short-circuits your assumptions.”

Pictured: Gary Panter, “Where Was the Air Force,” 2001 from “Satiroplastic” sketchbook, 1999-2001, courtesy of the artist.

Sister Corita Kent

From my review of “Corita Kent: We Can Create Life Without War” at Breslin Fine Arts:

Sister Corita Kent was something of a celebrity. Newsweek put her on the cover as “The Nun: Going Modern” in 1967. She drew up a rainbow-striped “Love” stamp for the US Postal Service in 1985. She’s best known locally for designing the rainbow stripes painted across the giant National Grid gas tank off Route 93 in Boston in 1971. But she was never quite part of the fine art world, and since her death in 1986, she’s all but disappeared from art history.

So you might not know that Kent was one of the best artists to emerge in the ’60s. Her giddy, neon pop art screenprints featured jitterbugging commercial slogans and long poetic quotations that vividly advertised her Catholic faith, called for civil rights and social justice, and opposed the Vietnam War. Which got her in trouble with the conservative Catholic hierarchy in LA, where she taught art for 20 years at Immaculate Heart College before leaving the order and settling in Boston in 1968.

Read the rest here.

Related:
I’ve previously written about Kent’s work here and here.

Corita Kent, “We Can Create Life Without War,” Breslin Fine Arts, 187 Main St., East Greenwich, Rhode Island, April 12 to May 15, 2008.

Pictured from top to bottom: Corita Kent’s screenprints “Come Alive,” 1967, and “News of the Week,” 1969.