Walking into Sarah Williams' show "Pretty Rural" at Andrea Schwartz in San Francisco, viewers are teleported across the country by her newest paintings. Specifically, they are transported into a dark winter evening complete with Christmas lights in Brookfield, Missouri, where Williams grew up.
Dan Mills is, in addition to being a very talented painter, a wealth of piercing information: 31 states are named after indigenous words, one in 113 people worldwide are displaced from their homes, one in five Syrians are refugees, Maine is the state with the smallest number of incarcerated people per capita in America yet is only the median for this statistic among countries worldwide, and New Hampshire is considered the “most free” state.
MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish shares her stories of experiences with selected books featuring Nick Cave, Jen Bervin, Mary Ruefle, Barbara Bourland, Carl Belz, J.M. Arms Sheldon, and Camille Flammarion.
Jamie Franklin has been the curator at the Bennington Museum in Vermont for almost 15 years. In that time, he has also assembled a personal collection of art from around the world ranging from calligraphic drawings to art created in prisons and psychiatric hospitals—a collection one might label “outsider art.” But Franklin says, “I don't like the term outsider art. There are art worlds; there is no Art World. There are artists working in many contexts, and many never get acclaim.”