$20 Suggested Donation
***Please note this event is at Stanley, 494 Commercial St.***
Join us at Stanley for a conversation featuring curator Jen Mergel, artist Jeff Perrott and gallerist Russ LaMontagne.
Jen Mergel is a nationally respected Boston-based contemporary art curator and greenspace leader who invites creative exploration of her hometown’s histories to reimagine its potential futures. An alum of Harvard, Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, and the Center for Curatorial Leadership, she has organized more than 50 exhibitions for museum, academic, and outdoor venues. Her recent curatorial projects have focused on Boston’s Black Feminisms, Exquisite Corpse collaborations, and Boston’s first intertribal mishoon burn in centuries. From 2010 to 2017, Jen headed the Contemporary Art Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, after prior curatorial roles at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and Addison Gallery of American Art, among others. In 2017, she left the museum context to more freely connect people with art in public spaces. With the Emerald Necklace Conservancy in 2018, she organized the award-winning citywide exhibition “Fog x FLO: Fujiko Nakaya on the Emerald Necklace. ”She subsequently became the Conservancy’s Director of Cultural Partnerships & Parks Equity and led the award-winning initiative “Olmsted Now: Greater Boston’s Olmsted Bicentennial.” Since June 2023, Jen is the James & Audrey Foster Executive Director of the Esplanade Association, the non-profit that stewards Boston’s iconic landmarked state park along the Charles River (originally Quinobequin). She is actively building the Association’s capacity to co-create more impactful and inclusive experiences for the historic riverfront’s 4 million annual visitors, especially through the 2026 opening of new campus of indoor and outdoor amenities for year-round cultural, recreational, environmental and social connection.
Jeff Perrott is an artist and writer. His painting and installation work engages contingency, perception, sensation, and abstraction—both the pictorial language of art-historical ‘abstraction’ and abstraction as a space of thought—to explore and expand the possibilities of painting, art, thought, and praxis. By deploying the pictorial tropes and received art making, picturing, and interpretive practices of Modernism and Minimalism within a contingent, additive, and non-reductive methodology. Perrott’s work questions the problematic reductive teleologies of Modernism, while transforming its dominating hierarchies into sites of difference, expansion, and possibility. Perrott writes about art, critical theory, politics, and philosophy. He has written numerous catalogue essays, reviews, and online articles in a self-published blog, The (Art) Object, and in MetroWest Left, which he founded and continues to edit. Currently, he is inquiring into, and theorizing, a role for indeterminacy in pragmatic approaches to art practice and theory. Perrott’s work has been the subject of 18 solo exhibitions. His work is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Marsh Art Gallery, Richmond; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; and Yale Art Gallery, New Haven; and is included in many private collections. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Perrott received his MFA from Yale School of Art in 1992 after attending Williams College. He recently earned a certificate in Curatorial Research from The New Centre for Research and Practice, and continues to do research at the school. His work is represented by LaMontagne Gallery in Boston and Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York. Associated Galleries include Zevitas Marcus Gallery, Los Angeles, and S3 Contemporary, Boston. He lives and works in Massachusetts.
LaMontagne Gallery was founded in 2007 in a 2,300 square foot exhibition space located in South Boston on East Second Street and now resides at 450 Harrison Avenue in South End Boston. LaMontagne Gallery was founded to create an environment in Boston for the display and sale of emerging contemporary artists. The gallery features visual, sound, and performance artists based in Boston and beyond.
LaMontagne Gallery also provides a fresh platform to introduce international curators to the Boston art market. Russell LaMontagne was previously co-Founder of LFL Gallery in New York City.