The Last Hurrah

By Elin Spring

Are you sitting down? After 21 years in Boston’s SoWa arts district, Gallery Kayafas is hosting its last exhibition. Visionary director Arlette Kayafas has distinguished her gallery with its imaginative and thought-provoking exhibits, often pairing traditional photographic exemplars with fresh, thematically resonant work from today’s emerging artists. Here is a classic example I described ten years ago:

Gallery Kayafas opens its twelfth season with a tour de force, pairing German master August Sander’s century-old portraits with those of contemporary American photographer Jess T. Dugan. Their pairing is revelatory, giving viewers a rich historical context that an exhibit of photographers from the same era could never achieve. As might be expected, Sander’s and Dugan’s cultural and individual differences are thrown into sharp relief, which makes their commonalties all the more enlightening. Despite Sander’s intention of objectivity and Dugan’s subjective approach, they share a search for truth through their explorations of identity that provide insight and provoke questions about the very nature that makes us human.

Arlette Kayafas with photographs by Jess T. Dugan at Gallery Kayafas, which is closing at the end of August 2024. Photo by Elin Spring.

Over the years, Arlette Kayafas’ exhibits have enticed, enlightened, and roused a devoted audience. Her shows have confronted issues in ways that encourage reflection and, oftentimes, prompt activism. The gallery’s final suite of solo shows ponders nothing less than the contrasts between idealism and reality. Photographer Jack Lueders-Booth’s passion project Women Prisoner Polaroids parries with newcomer Kevin Bennett Moore’s exuberantly anxious self-portraits, No Bitter Fruit. Exhibited along with the late Robert Moeller’s mixed media Democracy Under Siege, Karen Moss’ ink drawings of Portraits: Personal Spaces and Lauren Evans’ sculptural Small World, Gallery Kayafas describes the state of our nation at yet another inflection point, underscoring the importance and impact of free artistic expression.

NOTE: Exhibits will be on view through Saturday, August 10th, 2024 with a First Friday Gallery Reception on August 2nd from 5:30 – 8:00pm and a special Celebration of the late Robert Moeller on Thursday, July 18th from 5:30 – 7:30pm.

From the series Women Prisoner Polaroids by Jack Lueders-Booth, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

For veteran photographer and educator Jack Lueders-Booth, what began in 1977 as a two-year appointment to teach photography to the female inmates at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution (MCI) in Framingham, MA, evolved into Women Prisoner Polaroids, a decade-long portrait and narrative project that “grew to occupy me personally, and fully.”

From the series Women Prisoner Polaroids by Jack Lueders-Booth, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

MCI Framingham was a low-security women’s prison that began experimenting in the mid-1970’s with “normalization” programming for its inmates, who weren’t required to wear uniforms and were allowed to home decorate their cells. Around 1980, fellowships from the Polaroid Corporation gave Lueders-Booth access to unlimited instant film, enabling him to fulfill prisoners’ wishes to have their portraits made. By request, he was allowed to continue making portraits and recording personal stories, while also tutoring inmates interested in photography, until 1986.

From the series Women Prisoner Polaroids by Jack Lueders-Booth, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

From the series Women Prisoner Polaroids by Jack Lueders-Booth, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

This exhibit features 32 Polacolor II 4”x 5” prints. The sharpness and color saturation of this large-format film are fantastic, but as always, it is Lueders-Booth’s emotional engagement that makes his portraits shine. The small scale of these prints and his tight compositions acknowledge both captivity and intimacy. It is obvious that Lueders-Booth’s subjects are comfortable with him, a key to collaborations that portray genuine feeling. Although the majority are single portraits, conveying magnetic expressions and telling body language, some of the women chose to include fellow inmates or visiting partners, relatives, or friends. Sometimes, the solo portraits include favorite possessions that similarly reveal personality and attitude.

From the series Women Prisoner Polaroids by Jack Lueders-Booth, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

From the series Women Prisoner Polaroids by Jack Lueders-Booth, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

What makes Women Prisoner Polaroids most compelling to me is the entrancing way they lead us into bigger questions. Books that accompany this exhibit include riveting oral histories. But taken as a whole, Lueders-Booth’s work addresses the much broader issue of why these women have been incarcerated in the first place. Although each of us is ultimately responsible for our actions, how have the entrapments of sex, economic, educational and especially racial discrimination hijacked our American ideals into the largest prison system in the world?

From the series Women Prisoner Polaroids by Jack Lueders-Booth, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

“Bird Watcher” 2023, from the series No Bitter Fruit by Kevin Bennett Moore, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

Emerging photographer Kevin Bennett Moore approaches America’s socio-political discord with a conceptual, performative lens in the series No Bitter Fruit. His cinematic self-portraits blare with a preponderance of red, white and blue. Period costumes and props reflect a passion for the mid-century modern era, a period of national optimism with an undercurrent of looming nuclear war. While our patriotism has been supplanted by polarization, Moore’s images suggest that our nation seems poised on a similarly perilous brink.

“At It Again” 2024, from the series No Bitter Fruit by Kevin Bennett Moore, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

Uncertainty seems to be in the air Moore breathes. He expresses this tension by contrasting big, bold compositions and vibrant, happy colors with depictions of anxiety, danger and impending disaster. Each scenario is designed to “address the human condition, attempting to thrive in times of turmoil.”

“Satanic Mechanic” 2024, from the series No Bitter Fruit by Kevin Bennett Moore, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

Feature Image: “Big Star” 2024, from the series No Bitter Fruit by Kevin Bennett Moore, courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

From a demonic, oversized eye, to a tremulous “Big Star,” to the untethered symbol of American broadcasting tumbling through the sky,  Moore perches on a high wire between hope and anxiety.

“Tubes” 2023, from the series No Bitter Fruit by Kevin Bennett Moore, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

“Back in the Garden” 2024, from the series No Bitter Fruit by Kevin Bennett Moore, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

Frequently, his angled, off-kilter body positioning underscores a sense of discomfort which accentuates the differences between outward appearances and inner feelings. No Bitter Fruit embodies the conundrums of our time, asking: where are we and how did we get here?

“No Bitter Fruit” 2022, from the series No Bitter Fruit by Kevin Bennett Moore, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

“Oath Keeper & Landscapes” 2022, from the series Democracy Under Siege by Robert Moeller, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

Photography has always been at the heart and soul of Gallery Kayafas. Nonetheless, as time went on, Arlette began introducing other art forms, leveraging a multi-pronged approach to deepen and broaden the themes that unified her exhibits. She has enriched her final show in the same vein. The late Robert Moeller’s lively acrylics in Democracy Under Siege places brutalist, fictional portraits of individuals who stormed the Capitol on January 6^th alongside a series of small, equally frenzied, imagined landscapes of an America ravaged by political violence.

“Charles Coe at Home” 2024, from the series Portraits: Personal Spaces by Karen Moss, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

Karen Moss’ Ink drawings in Portraits: Personal Spaces explore the way artists like her lived within the confinement and isolation of Covid. By investigating their personal surroundings and possessions, Moss uses context to characterize and honor individuals. When viewed collectively, her fanciful, buoyant drawings describe the warmth of community. In Small World, Laura Evans creates charming, diminutive sculptures of “thingamajigs” she constructed with found objects. Her delightful retort to “the emotional trauma of the Covid-19 epidemic and the upheaval and constant friction of socio-political forces” beckons a return to the joys and curiosity of childhood.

“Thingamajig” from the series Small World by Laura Evans, courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.

The five solo artists featured in Gallery Kayafas’ final exhibition approach themes such as isolation versus community and individual struggles with volatile political, economic and cultural polarization with an inviting variety of viewpoints, media and genres. In the last hurrah for the gallery, we are reminded of the remarkable and inventive ways Arlette Kayafas has inspired, challenged and galvanized visitors over twenty-one years, elevating our experience of the world through art.

NOTE: Exhibits will be on view through Saturday, August 10th, 2024 with a First Friday Gallery Reception on August 2nd from 5:30 – 8:00pm and a special Celebration of the late Robert Moeller on Thursday, July 18th from 5:30 – 7:30pm.

For more information, go to: https://www.gallerykayafas.com/