16 art exhibits to explore this summer

“Humanity on the move.” Those were the words artist Hew Locke used to describe his massive installation that opened at the ICA Watershed on May 23. It’s also a good phrase to characterize many of the exhibits in this guide. The featured art includes local and global creatives from today and many centuries ago. Altogether, they offer countless opportunities to be introduced to something new and extraordinary. Maybe it’s the humor of a dystopian video game, the fascination with Dalí’s melting clocks, a retrospective on what it meant to be a multimedia artist in 1874 or an artist’s vision of a globe without borders. Spending time with one or more of these exhibits will refresh the way you look at the fast-moving world around us.

The ICA Watershed has hosted large-scale installations in recent summers: “Firelei Báez” in 2021 and “Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago” in 2023. This year, London-based Hew Locke brings a parade of exuberant and masked creatures to the Watershed. The exhibit first opened at the Tate Britain in 2022 and features around 140 life-sized sculptures, each unique and brimming with character. Locke said he wanted to create a complex, celebratory representation of humanity moving forward while still carrying the baggage of the past. The artist was born in Edinborough, spent 14 years of his early life in Guyana and is now based in London. “The Procession” puts his global influences on full display.

You can find an oasis of natural landscapes in the heart of Boston this summer with two exhibits running concurrently at the MFA. First, Hyman Bloom’s “Landscapes of the Mind.” The trees in his drawings resemble what you might expect diagrams of nerve endings from a mid-century medical textbook to look like. Boston-based Bloom traveled to Maine in the 1950s and discovered a passion for the wooded topography. The works in this exhibit come from the time in his life when he developed a view that there were parallels between nature and the psyche. In addition to the charcoal drawings, there are also photographs, watercolors and oil paintings. The works demonstrate his study of shading and light and his technical skills in replicating them.

The second exhibit features photographs from another Boston-based artist who traveled north for natural inspiration, albeit a little closer to home in Carlisle, Massachusetts. Barbara Bosworth visited the area’s grassy marshes alongside historians, archeologists, scientists and urban foragers to learn about the lands she captured in a series of photographs called “The Meadow.” Beginning in 1996, Bosworth took photos for 15 years, alongside Margot Anne Kelley, her friend and co-author of a book that shares the exhibit’s title. The images simultaneously capture the land’s stillness and history of transformation as European settlers seized the area from the Indigenous people who had lived off the land for thousands of years prior.

Walk up close to one of Jakob Fioole’s paintings and focus on a corner or a small area. You may think you’re looking at something entirely abstract, not far off other works in the Worcester Art Museum’s collections, from artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Mitchell. But if you take a step back, you see that these abstractions are part of a larger, textured world. A 2023 painting titled “something nice and friendly” appears to have a donkey in a harness being flown before a city skyline. If the style of the architecture looks familiar to locals, that may be because Fioole is based in nearby Berlin. He won the top honor at the 2023 ArtsWorcester Biennial, and this solo exhibition is part of winning that prize.

If you’re looking forward to the Salvador Dalí exhibit at the MFA this July (more details below) and simply can’t wait one more month, Chris Doyle’s “The Coast of Industry” may satisfy your desire for the fantastical and colorful twists on reality. The work seems like something Dalí would have made if he had animation skills and a place to project a 300-foot-wide film. The “The Coast of Industry” uses a single wall at MASS MoCA’s Building 5 as a screen to display the large-scale looping video with musical accompaniment composed by Jeremy Turner. It’s a fitting backdrop for a film about technology and commerce as the MASS MoCA campus inhabits a former factory complex. Another exhibit at the museum titled “The Plastic Bag Store,” and subtitled as a tragicomic ode to the foreverness of plastic, also engages with similar themes of industry, particularly consumerism. It’s a multimedia installation made in collaboration with the famed Williamstown Theatre Festival, on view through Sept. 2. If you’re into flower pressing, you may want to visit Carly Glovinski’s “Almanac,” in which she brings beautiful, large images of flowers to the walls of the museum. Likewise, if you’re into music, “Musicians on Musicians,” an exhibit of photographs of musicians curated by the members of Wilco, opens June 22. The band is also organizing a three-day music festival June 28-30 at the museum.

Michael C. Thorpe blends tradition and his own expression in “Homeowners Insurance.” His creative flair is perhaps best documented in his stitching: an aspect of quilting that is often only used for the mechanical purpose of holding fabric together. One of his works, “sissòn,” features textured hair and skin thanks to Thorpe’s intricate stitching style. Thorpe spoke with WBUR’s Amelia Mason in 2020 about the influences on his practice. He cites his mother as his first mentor and quilting’s long history with Black women in America as a source of his inspiration. The pieces in this collection share scenes, sometimes featuring family, friends or Thorpe himself. Works such as “Inconsistency Between Persons” and “Visual Writing 4 Communication” represent more abstract ideas. Despite his accomplishments, Thorpe is still in the early years of his artistry. He says his practice and approach are still changing with time.

Here are two exhibits about queer life that pair well together: one, centered on New York City, and another on Boston. Today, Christopher Street looks like many other roadways in NYC’s West Village: a few small boutique shops, restaurants, bars and walk-up apartments. But on June 28, 1969, it was the breaking point of a civil rights movement that would later be known as the Stonewall Uprising, a revolt of queer activists against the NYPD. The photographs by Mark Seliger “On Christopher Street” show portraits of transgender people in New York’s public spaces between 2013 and 2016 and provide a snapshot of what it is like to be transgender in these more recent times.

“Portraits from Boston, with Love” brings together works from three contemporary photographers with Boston roots and different approaches to imagining gender and sexuality in today’s society. Olivia Slaughter, a Gardner Museum artist-in-residence in January this year, made portraits of her chosen family during that time. Jaypix Belmer presents their self-portraits, and the museum describes Ally Schmaling’s work as “a psychedelic love letter using color and light for those who inspire them.”

The Fitchburg Art Museum’s annual juried exhibition brings together works from 109 artists from 58 towns and cities within 30 miles of Fitchburg. It’s an annual opportunity to engage and connect with the local artist community. The grand juror for this year’s exhibition is Gabriel Sosa, the artist behind the “La bodega de mis sueños” installation at the Fitchburg Art Museum and one of WBUR’s 2023 Makers.

This year, the exhibit runs concurrently alongside “Lost in the Woods,” a collection of wooden sculptures from Massachusetts artist Mark Del Guidice. He studied woodworking at Boston University’s program in artisanry under Alphonse Mattia and Jere Osgood. (MFA curator Michelle Millar Fisher has called the program, which ran from 1975-1985, a “craft supernova.”) There, he was introduced to the American Studio Furniture Movement, a postwar rejection of industrialized methods of mass production. His works use curvature, surface carvings and a diverse combination of woods to create unique sculptures and pieces of furniture.

If you’re someone who is fascinated by the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, you may want to make the trip to western Massachusetts for “Fragile Beauty.” The 28 objects in this exhibit come from the collection at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. The exhibit includes works from Louis Comfort Tiffany, who revolutionized the production of stained glass, French jeweler René Lalique, Steuben and more. If you visit The Clark, be sure to also check out “Kathia St. Hilaire: Invisible Empires,” which was highlighted in our spring arts guide and runs through Sept. 22.

Before AI generated the stuff of nightmares, there were the works of Salvador Dalí. From melting clocks to twisted dreamscapes, Dalí became one of the most prominent figures of Surrealism, the movement of artists to allow their visions to be driven by the expression of the unconscious mind. The works in this exhibit come from the MFA’s own collection as well as the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. They include one of his most widely known paintings, “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory,” as well as works such as “Ecumenical Council” in which Dalí inserts a gowned version of himself alongside a depiction of heavenly angels and religious characters. The exhibit also includes works by painters and printmakers who preceded Dalí, including “Infanta Maria Theresa” by Diego Velázquez, which Dalí paid tribute to in his painting “Velázquez Painting the Infanta Marguerita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory.”

For centuries, art tried to imitate images of reality in the clearest and most faithful manner. In part, as a response to the rise of photography in the early 1800s, an experimental trend in art known as impressionism swept through Europe. 150 years ago this year, a group of Parisians held the First Impressionist Exhibition. “Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism” focuses on the works of one of the artists in that 1874 show: Edgar Degas. The exhibit brings together pastels, drawings, photographs and prints of Degas’ innovative practice. Together, they offer insight into the methods and techniques he used as he was part of forging a new path for art in the 19th century as well as a peek into the 19th century French society which gave rise to the new style.

Picture this. You’re dreaming of a dystopian city. When you wake up, you find that it wasn’t a dream at all, but your new reality as you navigate bordered neighborhoods and corporate control over people’s way of life. That’s the opening storyline to “Escape from Lavender Island,” an interactive video game by Jeremy Couillard and the centerpiece of this show, his first institutional solo exhibition. Self-taught coder Couillard uses games, web projects and video installations as mediums for his art, which often includes pointed commentary on society and capitalism. He uses the escapist quality of video games to raise questions about our understanding and acceptance of reality.

James Baldwin published his book “The Fire Next Time” in 1963, in the midst of the country’s civil rights movement. It consists of two of his essays: "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" and "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind." Artist Steve Locke borrows the book’s title for his exhibition at MASS MoCA, in which he explores similar themes of American history, racism and the personal experiences of Black men in America. While Locke has mostly focused on painting in his 30 years as an artist, “The Fire Next Time” puts a spotlight on his recent work, which includes a wider variety of media such as drawings and multimedia sculptures. He also incorporates data-based research in this exhibit, as in the work titled “A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans Who Were Killed By Police or Who Died in Police Custody During My Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.” The exhibit also includes a new series of free-standing paintings commissioned by MASS MoCA.

What’s left of the model of a globe when it’s been sanded down so that the colors and lines signifying geographies and borders have been worn away? Visitors at “Augustina Woodgate: Ballroom” may find themselves reflecting on that question as they walk between and around the artist’s work, a room of globes that have been erased of all markings. Woodgate, who splits her time between Amsterdam and her native country of Buenos Aires, pairs these globes with navigational artifacts from the Peabody Essex Museum’s collection.