BOSTON- On Saturday, March 24, artists, musicians, dancers, and other artistic thought leaders will offer discussions and performances throughout the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with the current exhibition, Fra Angelico: Heaven on Earth, as inspiration. Programming will take place throughout the day, from 11:30am – 4:30pm.
Renaissance master painter Fra Angelico transformed the history of western art with his breathtaking works, painted in the 1400s, by infusing traditional subjects with new meaning. His paintings featured ground-breaking approaches to narrative and expressive storytelling.
Multimedia artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons will speak about her artwork and Fra Angelico’s paintings in Calderwood Hall at 1pm. Campos-Pons’s work is often autobiographical, investigating themes of history, memory, gender and religion. Through deeply poetic and haunting imagery, Campos-Pons’s artwork evokes stories of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, indigo and sugar plantations, Catholic and Santeria religious practices, and revolutionary uprisings.
In the Fall of 2017, Now + There commissioned artist Elisa H. Hamilton to create Slideshow, a multi-media project for HUBWeek on Boston’s City Hall Plaza. Using photography, analog slides, and storytelling, Hamilton and ten other Boston-area women put their gutsy, generous, everyday lives on view. They will reunite as part of Life in Stories at the Gardner Museum to create an intimate, communal story-sharing space in the Museum’s Living Room from 11:30 – 4:30pm. Visit nowandthere.org/slideshow to learn more.
Two artists, Kadahj Bennett and Marsha Parrilla, will respond to the exhibition and the theme of life stories with performance. Bennett, a beatmaker, actor, artist, and musician, will perform a narrative and poetic collections of songs, photos, and speeches in the historic Tapestry Room gallery at 2pm. Parrilla, an award-winning dancer and choreographer, will perform a solo dance-theater piece, in the Museum’s flower-filled Courtyard at 3pm.
There will also be participatory activities in the Education Studio and in the galleries. Spotlight tours of the Fra Angelico: Heaven on Earth exhibition are planned at 12:30 p.m., 1:30 p.m., and 2:30 p.m. in Hostetter Gallery.
Fra Angelico: Heaven on Earth will be on view through May 20.
