Best of show

A selective, subjective recounting of the past year

By Jenna Russell

CLEANING HOUSE: the ICA at MECA sweeps the “Coolest Concept” category.

What would late December be without a bunch of lists, to make you feel the icy rush of time sprinting past? All hell broke loose in 2001, and art kept right on happening, transforming and communicating as ever. Neither hijacker nor anthrax nor world war can stop it. So here’s a selective, subjective recounting of the best of the past year in local visual arts.

SHOW OF THE YEAR Nothing else came close to the dazzling variety and blue-ribbon caliber of the 2001 Biennial at the Portland Museum of Art. With arresting photography by Scott Peterman, sumptuous wood furniture — pure eye candy — by John Costin, unsettling painting by Anne Harris, and mostly standout contributions by 55 other artists, this was a visual buffet that called for out-and-out gluttony. It opened in April, bashed any remaining stereotypes of Maine art, and benefited from the presence of the outstanding “Local Color” photography show upstairs at the museum. Together, they made spring feel unusually fresh and dewy with possibility. It’s hard to imagine how they can top it in 2003. Hey all you artsy Maine youngsters — you better get cracking.

COOLEST CONCEPT A good idea is more than half the battle, in art as in everything else. The idea for a city-wide exploration of “domestic culture” this spring, hatched by the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, was a clear winner. Curators gathered art reflecting on house and home, by dozens of artists, in diverse venues that included the ICA and the Victoria Mansion. There was a performance in a reconstructed 1950s kitchen, at Elements Gallery, and a toy house at the ICA complete with Gap-clad kids and miniature art. The theme, to the organizers’ credit, wasn’t obvious, and it couldn’t help but be thought- and conversation-provoking, what with the tangled web of gender, class, and identity issues linked by the subject matter.

BEST SHOW NORTH OF PORTLAND For several years, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art has been quietly saving Mainers the long trip to Manhattan by importing cutting-edge and big-name art to the Brunswick campus. Before closing up shop for lengthy renovations, museum curators went out with a bang, featuring South African video artist William Kentridge last winter in a show so memorable I actually remember it in detail 10 months later. (This is almost unheard of, in my experience.) Kentridge’s short films, each made from a series of charcoal drawings, read like strange, powerful poems, shown in makeshift theaters installed in the basement. More about universal human experience than the politics of apartheid, they made an important contribution to the year’s roster of appearances by international artists, in a vital contemporary medium that too rarely shows up on the scene here.

MOST BRAZEN INNOVATION Okay, so a show in a U-Haul truck probably doesn’t count as an artist’s “big break.” But the van gallery — introduced at First Friday art walks this summer by a group of artists known as FAZE — does break with uptight old ideas about gallery spaces. The experiment had the kind of peppy, can-do spirit that says the Portland scene is still lovably unpredictable. We applaud the low-rent logic and the in-your-face attitude: If you won’t come to the art, we’ll bring it — and the music, and the free condoms — to you. Keep on truckin’.

MOST CONSISTENT QUALITY Open a 2001 calendar to any page at random. Now point to a day. Whenever it was, you can bet Aucocisco, the Congress Street gallery, was showing something worth seeing. Like an athlete who’s always on time for practice, who gives his all even when he doesn’t get the headlines, Aucocisco owner Andy Versoza can be counted on to produce stylish and substantive shows month after month. The work, always serious, is also admirably diverse; this year, it ranged from black and white photographs of Paris by Todd Webb to paintings by actor-artist Zero Mostel. This degree of consistency, in venues outside the museum, is essential in a city that wants to be known for its thriving arts district.

BEST MAKEOVER Sometimes all it takes is a new lipstick color, or slightly shorter hair, for everything old to be made new again. We can’t fully explain what makes the Hay Gallery — always an architectural gem in a gem of a location — seem so much brighter and airier lately. There’s a new owner, former advertising agency owner Linda Laughlin; more noticeably, there’s a lot less clutter, and two new, more intimate back rooms that nicely complement the large main gallery. There, the spare, sunny space frames the art like never before. It’s a nice place to visit, and if you could live there, you might. (Runner-up in this category is the Filament Gallery, making the most of its new space, a former grocery, at the other end of Congress Street.)

BEST INVESTMENT IN THE FUTURE Two must-haves, if you want to keep artists around, are bars and affordable housing. The latter, much-discussed this year as proposals for artists’ dwellings and studios took shape, became concrete this fall when developer Peter Bass broke ground on the East Bayside Studio Project. Granted, $150,000 condos aren’t in every artist’s budget. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see artists gaining space to live and work in, rather than losing it. That’s progress. Let’s hope it’s a trend.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com