At Fall River museum and MIT art gallery, local artists collaborate by nature

FALL RIVER — Spring is several weeks away, but the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art is flourishing, vibrant with new growth.

Curators Brittni and Harry Gould Harvey are opening a new exhibit in FR MoCA’s new space at 44 Troy St., a show inspired by the city's complicated relationship with nature that aims to involve students from B.M.C. Durfee High School in exploring their environment. The two will also soon be featured in a show at the prestigious List Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

“It’s a real nice time to have FR MoCA be opening up our second exhibition here, our seventh one total, doing this collaboration with MIT, teaching our social practice class at Durfee,” said Brittni Harvey. “It’s a really active time where all these elements are speaking to each other.”

Art exhibit looks at Fall River's links to nature

Since October, FR MoCA has made its home in the Gather space at 44 Troy St., reclaiming what was for decades the American Wallpaper & Design Center. For their second show in this downtown space, the Harveys have turned to nature.

“Plant/ED: Drawing From Observation” features work by eight artists that is all "ecologically focused,” Brittni Harvey said.

“It’s thinking of nature, resources, and our responsibility to ecology. All these different artists are grappling with it in different ways.”

It’ll feature a mix of drawings, paintings, installations and other artworks. Artist Faith Wilding, who Harvey said is 80 and still practicing, creates carefully observed, detailed drawings of plant life. “She’s really meditative in her practice of drawing aspects of nature, giving them a lot of their own character and spirit,” Harvey said.

Other artists take different approaches, like Miles Huston, who will have two installations based around watering cans – one a more organic sculpture reminiscent of a tree and the other a rigid, almost bureaucratic display. Harvey suggested that there’s an irony at play in that "it's a plastic object that we’re feeding our plants and our nature with, but it’s also creating a lot of waste.”

Artist Peter Fend's installation of maps and infrastructural plans is more “politically minded,” Harvey said, highlighting the proliferation of harmful invasive species and ways to use the power of Fall River’s Quequechan River.

“Someone like him is a very different approach to someone like Faith, who’s sitting with nature and reflecting more emotionally to it," Harvey said.

Artists Parker Ito, GQZ, Kendall Rivera-Lane, Duncan Laurie and Vijay Masharani will also have pieces on display.

The show opens to the public Friday, Feb. 23, from 5 to 8 p.m., and will be on view until May 25. Admission is free.

FR MoCA part of the flourishing art scene in Fall River

From this show, more beauty is expected to grow and thrive.

"We’re actually going to be growing seedlings in the window of the gallery that over the three months will sprout," Harvey said. "The idea is that we’ll move them to pollinator gardens in the spring outside for their permanent home.”

FR MoCA has plans for gardens at its Troy Street space, at North Park and along the Quequechan River Rail Trail. It’s also hoping to use some land newly acquired by the city at the former Adirondack Farm on Blossom Road.

The Harveys teach a course at Durfee called social practice, linking art with community to create positive change. Those students will be helping with the garden space, interacting with the art, and having an educational experience that can’t be duplicated anywhere else.

“We grew up in this area and really wish we had something like this when we were younger," she said.

It’s a way to expose kids to new ways of seeing their city – as more than a collection of streets and buildings, but a community space that must exist in and around nature.

“Contemporary art can be confusing," she said. “How can we extend further out into the community and really engage to help create that connection and not make it feel like it’s not for everyone? Because we really want it to be for everyone.”

FR MoCA curators showing work at prestigious MIT gallery

The two curators have known each other since their teens, both drawn to the hardcore punk scene. Now in their early 30s, they’re married and working together on a two-person exhibit for an MIT show based around artistic collaboration.

It was their work together at FR MoCA that brought them to the attention of MIT’s curator.

“We're showing some pre-existing work, and we each have a couple of new pieces that we’ve produced as individuals -- and they commissioned us to do a collaborative sculpture," Brittni said. “So that’s kind of a first for us too.”

Brittni is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design’s textile arts department who previously worked for the U.S. Navy. Harry, she said, is a self-taught former commercial photographer who branched out into fine art. Their styles are different but complementary.

“We obviously work well together, enough to create FR MoCA and a life together," she said. “But there’s always struggle figuring out whose role is what, and what one can contribute which is different from what the other can contribute, so trying to find that coming together is tricky. But we’re kind of leaning into our individual expertise a bit."

The show, at MIT's List Visual Arts Center, will be on display from March 7 to June 23.

Dan Medeiros can be reached at [email protected]. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Herald News today.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Fall River art gallery opens nature exhibit; curators showing at MIT