BGSP in the Community

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About Gallery 1581

Gallery 1581 was founded by several BGSP faculty members, artists themselves, who wanted to bring their artistic and analytic lives together.

Our mission is to keep open a visual and a conversational space where artists and psychoanalysts can enrich each other's work. We host a series of rotating shows and dialogues in which established and emerging artists are welcomed.

Current Show

Students at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis are organizing an art exhibition, "Contact", that will bring two distinct groups of students into a shared dialogue. The show will exhibit art student’s photographs alongside psychoanalytic “responses” created by current BGSP students. The responses will involve many different creative media, including: music, painting, writing, poetry, plant-life and drawing.

The project began in September 2007 when a “call for submissions” was put out to many of Boston’s local art schools, asking for students to submit work relating to the theme of “contact”. The show is being both juried and curated by world-renowned photographer Shellburne Thurber, who herself has a personal interest in psychoanalysis and recently had an exhibition called “Psychoanalytic Interiors” that showed in both New York and Boston (see link at the end of this article for details).

The jurying process led to the submission of eighteen framed photographs by seventeen different artists. Fifteen BGSP students then volunteered to respond to the photographs in whichever creative medium they chose.

To make the process truly reflective of the show’s title, the photography students were given the contact details of the BGSP responder so that they might make contact to discuss their photograph, their work or anything else about the process that might come up for them. Consequently, the two sets of students are in an active dialogue that will affect and shape the creation of the psychoanalytic responses.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the project will be the discussion that is due to take place on the opening night (Friday March 7th 7.30pm at BGSP). Both groups of students will be on a panel to discuss the process of creating the show and their experiences of creating the original work, of first impressions, of having a dialogue with a responder, of being responded to, of responding, of viewing another’s response, etc.

In many ways the process of the show mimics an analytic exchange, where experience is represented in a medium (words/photographs) that is communicated to another (analyst/responder). What happens next in the exchange (how the analyst/responder responds to the initial contact) is the visual subject of this show.

“Contact” opens on Friday March 7th at BGSP, Boston. All are welcome. For further details contact: gallery1581@bgsp.edu.

- Provided by Ali McKnight, BGSP Student

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Upcoming Shows

Check back for information on upcoming shows.

Past Exhibits
Gallery 1581 is in our fourth year. Past shows have included work from:

*BGSP affiliates (students, faculty, visitors, analysands)
*the Brookline Arts community during Brookline Open Studio Weekends
*featured artists in joint or solo shows (Shaun McNiff, Randy LeSage, Dana Kim Wolfson, Gunta Kaza, Valerie Spain and others)
*existing arts groups (The Womens’ Caucus for Art, the Putney School Summer Program, The Faith Quilt Project)
*and others selected at open calls for work on a given themes of interest to artists and psychoanalysts.

Contact Us
Please visit us:
a: Gallery 1581
1581 Beacon Street
Brookline, MA 02446
t: (617) 277-3915
e: gallery1581@bgsp.edu