The Walls Have Ears

One of the season’s must-see exhibits is actually a must-hear. Running through Sept. 5, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Listen Hear: The Art of Sound is bringing audio installations from 12 artists to two outdoor public spaces—the Ruggles MBTA station and the Back Bay Fens—as well as to select spaces within the museum itself, including the three rooms below.

The Courtyard is already a verdant oasis; Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei’s installation Small Conversation will heighten the natural wonder with his soundscape of insect and amphibian night calls—not made by actual critters, but produced with the artist’s own voice.

In the Dutch Room, the frame that held Vermeer’s The Concert has stood empty since the museum’s infamous 1990 heist. German sound artist and filmmaker Moritz Fehr will evoke the stolen work with his installation Undertone, returning the singer, lute player and harpsichordist to their rightful spot through sound.

Photo by Living Architecture Systems Group, Philip Beesley

The Fenway Gallery is hosting British artist and architect Philip Beesley’s Sentient Veil, a sensor-equipped sculpture with clusters of glass capsules that offers a choir of sounds in response to museum-goers’ movements.

THE IMPROPER’S 2017 SPRING ARTS PREVIEW: COMEDY | THEATER | MUSIC | DANCE | FILM

Coming to a Screen Near You

Look up from your phone—two exhibits are offering larger, higher-tech screens to gaze at this spring.

Photo by Johnna Arnold

Digital artist Camille Utterback’s interactive installation Entangled (above) uses a software program to track visitors’ movements and translate them into trippy visuals projected on a two-sided 10-by-15-foot screen. On display through April 22 at the new Emerson Urban Arts: Media Art Gallery, the “Genius Grant” recipient’s piece is being presented in concert with Cybernetic Serendipity, a look back at a 1968 London show regarded by many as the first digital media art exhibition. Meanwhile at Le Laboratoire Cambridge, new exhibit Life in Picoseconds is making use of Atom Screens, technology created by Harvard scientists and French design team Millimètre that sandwiches swirling particles between glass panels. Through June 12, the screens will serve as ever-evolving canvases for Daniel Faust’s photos of Silicon Valley as well as a film by Charles Reilly (below), a video artist and a scientist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

THE IMPROPER’S 2017 SPRING ARTS PREVIEW: COMEDY | THEATER | MUSIC | DANCE | FILM

Artistic Statements

Spring exhibitions that pack political punch

Taking on everything from domestic violence to female genital mutilation to the plight of Pussy Riot, Women’s Rights Are Human Rights: International Posters on Gender-Based Inequality, Violence and Discrimination proves that 2-D posters can have plenty of depth. Curated by MassArt graphic design professor Elizabeth Resnick, the works include Kuwait-born, New York-based designer Mohammad Sharaf’s Allowed, a witty response to the news that Saudi Arabia had lifted the ban on women riding bikes—but only for those chaperoned by a male guardian.

Through April 17 at Gallery 360 at Northeastern

I.M.A.G.I.N.E. Peace Now explores a loaded subject, showcasing 90 decommissioned guns sourced from a Pittsburgh buyback program and transformed into works of art. Organized by Providence metalsmith and activist Boris Bally, the exhibit includes a firearm turned into a copper-feathered falcon, a gun studded with tiny bones and baby teeth—a nod to Sandy Hook—and this pitcher set, titled tête-à-tête, from New Bedford silversmith Joost During.

Through June 10 at the Society of Arts and Crafts

Photo by Will Brown, courtesy of Nari Ward, Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia © 2017 Nari Ward

Oven pans and oil barrels, baseball bats and baby strollers—they’re all raw materials for Jamaica-born artist Nari Ward, who’ll use hundreds of shoelaces to spell the opening words of our Constitution for We the People. Installed with help from local teens, it’ll be on view as part of mid-career survey Nari Ward: Sun Splashed with 40 other works, like the timely Naturalization Drawing Table, in which Ward—a 2017 winner of the Vilcek Prize for immigrant artists—will have visitors taking “passport photos,” filling out forms and receiving prints from the artist in return on May 4, 6 and 18.

April 26-Sept. 4 at the Institute of Contemporary Art

“Ignarus Et Caecus” (Ignorant and Blind) by Michael James Toomy

Have your own artistic statement to make? Somerville’s Nave Gallery Annex is welcoming submissions in all mediums for #RESIST, an exhibit responding to the country’s current political climate. The deadline for entries is April 1 and there’s no entry fee, so visit navegallery.org for submission details and scope out the results at the annex April 27-May 27.

THE IMPROPER’S 2017 SPRING ARTS PREVIEW: COMEDY | THEATER | MUSIC | DANCE | FILM

Join the Club

Mexican-born, New York-based artist and educator Pablo Helguera has organized hundreds of events as MoMA’s director of adult and academic programs and dozens of his own art projects—like a “nomadic think tank” that had him traveling from one tip of the continent to the other. His next happening requires less mileage: Helguera is inviting Museum of Fine Arts visitors to Club Americano, a one-room exhibition that reframes pieces from the MFA’s collection to explore how we define American identity. It’s on view April 22-June 4, but he gave us a preview.

What’s the thinking behind the name? We called it Club Americano because we are responding to the rich history of Boston as a higher education center, specifically to the kinds of social spaces connected to the universities—the university club. University clubs are very exclusive spaces that are membership-only; only certain people can come in. … I wanted to make reference to the idea of learning of the university club, but make it a university of the people. It’s a place for everyone.

What will the vibe be like? The space is going to feel very different from a traditional gallery. It will feel more like a social space with couches and chairs and tables. What you will see inside this space is many objects from the collection that speak to subjects I feel are relevant at this moment and deserve discussion. And we will be addressing these topics by creating social events inspired by this old social convention, the after-dinner lectures, where a society would do a fancy dinner and then have an important figure like Mark Twain or a congressman give a speech about something like the value of education. So we will have different types of experts, writers, poets and artists give a speech about a subject familiar to them.

Can you tell us about a work that will be on display? We’re going to be showing the works of an important American photographer, Wallace Nutting. He was a minister who took up photography as a hobby and around the turn of the century started taking photographs of New England. They became very, very popular. He started making prints of bucolic American landscapes and nostalgic photographs of old American villages. What’s interesting is Nutting was working at a time when the U.S. was beginning to recognize its own history, because the U.S. was a very young country. So Nutting is credited with creating the idea of Americana. He kind of became the Martha Stewart of the time. He started a line of furniture, a line of rustic colonial objects, and his tinted photographs sold by the millions. He’s likely the most sold American artist in the history of this country, and ironically very few people know who he was.

THE IMPROPER’S 2016 FALL ARTS PREVIEW: COMEDY | THEATER | MUSIC | DANCE | FILM