The tumble of first impressions went something like this: Street photographs. Striking colors. Not that large. In-your-face portraits—faces that looked as worn-out as old rugs, others full of confidence and a beauty rendered more intense by the way that what they were confident of was that the beauty wouldn’t last, so that the confidence too was touched by resignation.

The title of the group exhibition at David Castillo Gallery, Metabolic Bodies, implies that the strategy of using manipulated readymades is a corporeal action, a chemical change that transforms a substance (in this case found images or objects) into energy.

Reflecting television’s ability to both mirror and influence America’s middle class, in 1957 Lucy and Ricky Ricardo moved from Manhattan, where they had lived since 1951, to the suburbs. Rob and Laurie Petrie arrived in 1961, Samantha and Darren Stevens in 1964, Michael and Carol Brady in 1969. Helen and Morty Seinfeld moved there in 1989, but its unlikely their son Jerry or his pals are leaving the city anytime soon.

For all its regular crowd of artists and writers and creative hangers-on, the porch still isn’t Soho, or Greenwich Village, or even Coconut Grove. But it isn’t Hialeah, either.

The high-fives break out instantaneously like a saloon brawl.
Five dollar bill in front of the Kwik-Stop.
Surprise party patrons in paper hats crouching
underneath the dinette set. Spider web.
Bubble wrap. Kick-ass. Apollo pulling the stink of the night away
from his V-8 supercharged chariot. The stimulus check
comes in the mail! The stimulus check is cashed!

The work of Russell Maltz hovers in the fragile beats between two frequencies. One is the mark-making impulse of the human, while the other is the homogenous system of distribution of the inhuman. In his assemblages of generic building materials—concrete masonry units (cmu), metal studs, PVC pipes, and plywood—there are actions and operations rather than conceptual compositions. Thus the show title situates Maltz’s work as neither self-consciously elevated nor counterproductive.

In 1909 the Italian poet (and consummate self-publicist) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti introduced Italian Futurism to an international audience, through the publication of his first Futurist manifesto on the front page of leading Parisian newspaper La Figaro. Launched into the heart of the art world, Marinetti’s manifesto promoted Futurism as a new art borne of violent struggle, explicitly rejecting Italy’s status as the center for art of the past, with phrases such as “Set fire to the library shelves!”

Jenelle Porter is the Mannion Family Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, where she is currently organizing Fiber: Sculpture 1960 – present (October 1, 2014 – January 4, 2015). She spoke at Locust Projects on April 23rd. Soon after, she sat down with The Miami Rail to discuss craft, curating, and Boston.

If museums are places where art goes to die, then Churchill’s is the place where art goes to get sloppy drunk, make a loud, hostile scene, and end up akimbo under a table, staring into its dark, gum-ridden underside. Then die.

A marking moment in art history, Biennial 2014 is the Whitney Museum of Art’s 77th and final showcase of American art in the storied Marcel Breuer building before surrendering it to the Metropolitan Museum and relocating to the Meatpacking district downtown. Essentially a last hurrah, this effortful production manifests the exuberance of a party girl; with a few quiet exceptions, the overall presentation is in your face, dressed to kill, and having a very good time.