The Field Guide Part Two: A Guide to Boston Art Galleries

In the promotional material for "1999: Celebrating Boston's Artists," a year-long project organized by the Boston Art Dealers Association, a photograph of a very large and proud group of Boston artists standing on the steps of the Boston Public Library is used again and again. This photograph, called A Great Day in Boston, is--as acknowledged by the photographer--a direct quotation of a famous photograph taken by Art Kane in 1958 called A Great Day in Harlem, which showed a very large and proud group of seminal jazz musicians smiling at the camera.

In the South End, home of many of Boston's best galleries, a group called GTI Properties has bought up many of the decaying warehouses along Harrison Ave., fixing them up and making them into lofts, studios and gallery spaces. On one of these buildings hang purple and yellow banners announcing this as the "SoWa District"--south of Washington St. The acronym has not caught on.

Yes, it is hard being but a few hours drive from the Capital of the Twentieth Century. In the art world, where New York's hegemony is especially overwhelming, the resulting insecurity leads to Boston's misguided attempts to imitate or to compare itself to New York. Such attempts inevitably fall flat. This is unfortunate, because these gestures are intended as expressions of the Boston art community's justified optimism and pride: they just come out all wrong. In the photograph A Great Day in Boston, there are 810 beaming Boston visual artists. Behind all those goofy banners on Harrison Ave., there are three excellent commercial galleries and two lively non-profit spaces. The commercial galleries of Boston often show wonderful works by local, national and international artists, both emerging and established. The galleries tend to migrate from neighborhood to neighborhood every decade or so in search of collectors and cheaper rent, clustering around each other to benefit from the combination of their attractions. Currently, there are two centers, Newbury Street and the South End.

More adventurous commercial galleries and various cooperatives have congregated in the last several years along Harrison and Thayer, a sparsely populated area of warehouses, some rehabilitated and some abandoned, on the outskirts of the South End. As gallery director Bernard Toale puts it, the "landscape-and-sailboat dealers will never want to come down here." The difference between the Newbury and the South End galleries is apparent on several levels. On Newbury, the general emphasis is on representational painting; in the South End, I saw more mixed media. In the South End, the directors are chatty and amiable, even towards those who are obviously there just to look. Many seemed so genuinely excited about the work that they were showing that they longed to talk about it, to get all that enthusiasm off their chests. The art on the walls--especially at Genovese/Sullivan, Clifford-Smith and Bernard Toale, three superb galleries right next to each other-- justified the gush.