There’s something, tender, comical and on point about Tony Gray’s mixed-media paintings and collages, now up at the Boston University Sherman Gallery. The works, from the “Panther Series,” are mostly populated with black men. Some look like Black Panthers, in bell bottoms, turtle necks, and shades. But others come in all skin tones and body types, drawn in a flat, economical, faux naive style. They often interact with newspaper clips which invoke the popular culture of Gray’s youth in the 1960s and 1970s. There are surprising hints of homoeroticism. Much of the series is a deconstruction of the stereotypes of African-American masculinity of that era. The sweetness comes with the main characters in these drawings, striving to find and be themselves amid all the representations of black men and other media messages, mining the rift between who they are, and who they’re supposed to be.
Over at Steven Zevitas Gallery, Alex Lukas has a show of extravagantly detailed and crafted cityscapes – overgrown and deserted, post-civilization. The theme is not new – I recently saw strikingly similar images on a trailer for one of the coming fall television shows – but the rendering is exquisite. Lukas uses silkscreen, ink, acrylic, watercolor, and gouache. He creates so many textures, one can only describe the devastation he portrays as lush. Also in this week’s galleries column, at NK Gallery Ken Hruby’s cast sculptures of ancient helmets in many mediums including glass, metal, and handmade paper, address traumatic brain injury. Their surfaces ripple like the surface a brain. They convey both the nobility and the vulnerability of the warrior. And Deborah Davidson’s miminalist sculptures are coated with pulsing pastels, with jittery marks that seem to arise from within, like something yet to be revealed but erupting.




Megan and Murray McMillan




Bob Raymond

