Belmont Gallery of Art

A community gallery showcasing regional visual arts

by

Boston Views

Photography by Ted Gartland and Tony Loreti

Opening Reception: Friday, March 11, 6-8 p.m.
Gallery Talk: Thursday, March 17, 7:00 p.m.

Views-wall-lrBoston Views combines the works of photojournalist Ted Gartland and photographer Tony Loreti at the Belmont Gallery of Art during the month of March in conjunction with One Book One Belmont 2011, a town-wide reading program presented by the Belmont Public Library. In support of the compelling story and historical themes of the featured title, Stephen Puleo’s Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, the black and white images on view reflect upon Boston’s rich history of culturally oriented life in its various neighborhoods and capture moments of history in its making.

 

Tony Loreti, Boston, 2003
Tony Loreti, Boston, 2003 

Tony Loreti’s selections—shot in downtown Boston and neighborhoods all over the city—depict everyday occurrences and show the “complex multicultural mix that makes up this ever-evolving city”. Loreti’s affinity for the colorful culture of Boston’s neighborhoods may have its origin in the memory of his Italian grandfather who made wine in the backyard of his home on the Norh Shore. Eventually, the space used for storing wine offered Loreti’s first darkroom experience under the tutelage of his uncle. Loreti’s burgeoning interest in photography as an adolescent continued, leading him to a degree in filmmaking from Boston University and a Master of Fine Arts in photography from Massachusetts College of Art. Today, Loreti is an instructor of photography at The Cambridge School of Weston where he has been a faculty member since 1997.

Tony Loreti, Charlestown, 2010
Tony Loreti, Charlestown, 2010

“I made independent films—including documentary films of the streets of Boston—before switching to still photography in 1980. Over the years, the streets of Boston (and surrounding communities) have been the most consistent subject of my photography” says Loreti. “My wish is to make an accurate and visually compelling record of the life of the city, as seen in its public places” and to “make a clear representation of an aspect of the workd as it existed at a particular moment”. Perhaps a measure of his success is evidenced by the 2010 purchase of ten of Loreti’s Boston street photographs by the Print Department of the Boston Public Library for their permanent collection.

Ted Gartland, Dukakis Dancing at Logan
Ted Gartland, Dukakis Dancing at Logan

Ted Gartland first walked into a Boston newspaper City Room in 1969. He hasn’t left yet. His photojournalistic coverage of Boston has been extensive, “like a map of the city, from the championship Celtics to the iconic Red Sox”, or as Gartland might say, ‘from the Gahden to the Pahk’. While personalities larger than life often have been the focus of Gartland’s lens, so too have been events larger than life such as the always changing meteorological landscape of the city’s weather, for which he shared the 1978 Pulitzer prize for photography as a member of the staff of the Boston Herald American, for its coverage of ‘The Blizzard of ’78’.

Ted Gartland, Street Corner Blues
Ted Gartland, Street Corner Blues

Outside the city limits, Gartland has chronicled events as disparate as the phenomenom of Elvis Presley’s Graceland to the opening of the Berlin Wall. ‘Its like a lifetime pass to the circus’, claims Gartland, who currently staffs the Assignment Desk for the Boston Globe.

Ted Gartland and Tony Loreti each have spent a lifetime behind the lens of a camera on the streets of Boston. They share a love of of the city. Together, they provide a window for us to view moments of both anonymity and influence spanning decades in Boston.

Read more about Tony Loreti and Belmont Public Library’s One Book One Belmont.

Share

by

Cantos, Fugues & Counterpoints

Sculpture, Photography & Drawings

Design of postcard by Georgia Flood
Design of postcard by Georgia Flood

Cantos, Fugues and Counterpoints: Sculpture, Photography & Drawings features the works of David Flood, Tony Loreti and Harry Ellenzweig. The exhibit highlights each artist’s chosen medium in which to create, while also emphasizing his shared interest in the interplay of form, mass, shape and texture.

David Flood - Sachem, 2004 (detail)
David Flood – Sachem, 2004 (detail)

David Flood creates contemporary, abstract, fine art wood sculpture at his studio in Ipswich, MA. He works with naturally formed pieces of wood using a subtractive and sometimes reconstructive technique to reveal inherent aesthetic qualities such as organic form, texture, and color.

“I look for raw materials that have various qualities important to the aesthetic I hope to bring to my work.” Flood considers the “figure” of the wood–encompassing qualities of grain, burling, coloration, dimpling and pigment among a host of others–from a three-dimensional perspective. Sometimes, depending upon on the wood, his pieces try not to reveal the hand of the artist, as it were. Others are highly chiseled. Ranging in size from miniature to massive, the process of working each piece is essentially the same. All of the pieces on display at the Belmont Gallery of Art are made of wood from Cape Ann and neighboring areas.

Tony Loreti - Weston, MA (2007),8" x 10" gelatin silver print
Tony Loreti – Weston, MA (2007),
8″ x 10″ gelatin silver print

Belmont resident Tony Loreti‘s photography reflects his deep personal interest in capturing the look and feel of the city, with a special interest in capturing public life in and around Boston. While most of Loreti’s images exhibited at the BGA were made in roughly the past ten years, they represent a decades-long project. Searching unobtrusively, “I walk the city streets alert to expressive human moments. The challenge (and the pleasure when successful) is to capture these fleeting scenes in a satisfying formal arrangement.” An instructor at the Cambridge School in Weston, Loreti is interested in capturing concerns both historical and aesthetic in his work as he “seeks a kind of poetry in the everyday”.

All images in this exhibit are 8″ x 10″ toned silver gelatin prints.

Tony Loreti’s website.

Seismic Shift (2007) Watercolor/Ink 7 1/2" x 14
Seismic Shift (2007) Watercolor/Ink 7 1/2″ x 14

Architect Harry Ellenzweig, founding principal of Ellenzweig Associates, has been creating elegant solutions to extraordinary technical challenges for over fifty years. His buildings can be seen throughout Boston and Cambridge, as well as in cities in over one dozen other states.

Simultaneously, in the privacy of his painting studio, Harry Ellenzweig has been creating art that feeds his soul in numerous other ways. Says Ellenzweig, “Architecture demands collaboration; interaction with clients, colleagues, consultants, community groups–work I found immensely rewarding and satisfying. In my studio, on the other hand, in my other life, I talk only to myself, constrained solely by the limits of technique and vision.”

Untitled I (2007) Watercolor/Ink 6 1/4" x 5"
Untitled I (2007) Watercolor/Ink 6 1/4″ x 5″

Ellenzweig describes his fine art this way, “My paintings and drawings reflect a vision informed by the architect’s eye, a passion for forms found in nature and images of cities–the shared heritage of real places in real time merging with an imagined and abstracted urban landscape.” Ellenzweig’s visions of “fanciful new worlds that are sometimes ethereal and floating sometimes rooted, often kinetic and even apocalyptic” are rendered in pen and ink and watercolor washes.

This exhibit at the Belmont Gallery of Art represents fifty years of work by Belmont resident Harry Ellenzweig; the majority of which has never previously been shown publicly.

Share