Each time I come back, the sculpture of a woman’s head has changed.
“It definitely does, sort of, rethink how sculptures work, I guess?” said Alisia Cubero Cora, one of seven teenage artists whose work is on display this weekend at the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, a slice of the high art world dropped into post-industrial New England.
Cora, who is from nearby New Bedford, allows visitors to rearrange her sculpture and photograph the changes with an instant camera. The snapshots are then hung chronologically on a corkboard nearby, creating a time-lapse of the sculpture’s evolution.
Visitors from the art worlds of Boston, Providence and New York City discussed Cora’s piece with her at the exhibit’s opening last week. Soon, they wandered off to the other teenagers’ booths. Robert Antuan Medrano’s featured a satellite dish hooked up to a synthesizer.
Medrano, a high school student from Fall River, said the dish captures a radio frequency emitted by the Milky Way, which the synthesizer manipulates to create music.
Both teenagers completed their piece during a three-week residency at FR MoCA. Their weekday mornings began with lectures on contemporary art and exhibition design from working artists.
The residency’s culminating exhibition, titled “Overthrow the Citadel!”, up through Sunday, August 2, reflects FR MoCA’s mission as clearly as ever.
Harry and Brittni Harvey often describe their museum as an unorthodox investment in their hometown’s creative potential. Their goal is to build lasting social ties between the hard-luck neighborhoods where they grew up and the wealthier art world they have hustled their way into.
After meeting as teenagers in Fall River, Harry and Brittni Harvey spent years bouncing around Narragansett Bay towns and major cities as they pursued art careers. Harry’s work is now collected by the RISD Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Fry Art Museum in Seattle and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, while Brittni has shown at prestigious galleries in New York, Boston, Munich, Paris, Shanghai, Reijkjavik and Lima, Peru.
The couple returned to Fall River in 2020 to buy a house, and wound up renting a former wallpaper store near their new home. In a sort of tongue-in-cheek fashion, they named the second space the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art.
Located in a desolate district of parking lots, dormant factories, an abandoned police station and the city’s Brutalist city hall, FR MoCA exhibits work from world-renowned artists who are otherwise showing in places like Art Basel and the Venice Biennale.
Admission to see those works at FR MoCA is always free.
The latest show, “Overthrow the Citadel!” makes another statement about what it means to invest in Fall River’s artistic potential.
To promote the show, Harry Harvey posted a deliberately controversial criticism of public murals on his Instagram page, where it received over 1,100 likes.
“ART IS A SOCIAL RIGHT,” the post began. “IT SHOULD NOT EXIST PRIMARILY AS A TOOL FOR DEVELOPERS TO BEAUTIFY BUILDINGS WHILE NEGLECTING THE EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE THAT MAKES ART POSSIBLE.”
“FALL RIVER’S GREATEST PROBLEM IS NOT A LACK OF TALENT. IT IS A LACK OF INVESTMENT IN ITS OWN PEOPLE,” the post said. “IF YOU WANT TO SEE WHAT INVESTING IN PEOPLE ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE, COME SEE THE WORK OF OUR STUDENT ARTISTS.”
FR MoCA provided each artist with $130 for materials and a $900 stipend for completing the residency. During their daily sessions at the museum, they were also introduced to artists and educators with ties to universities and art colleges.
“We really wanted it to be a holistic accelerator program that helped some kids that might not traditionally call themselves artists have a leg up into contemporary art practice,” Harvey said in an interview. “In our experience, there seems to be a bottleneck with transferring their lived experience at the local high school into a life of upward mobility with an expansive network.”
The Harveys invited the artists to make the museum space their own. They hung their works alongside pieces left behind by professional artists and graffitied the blank walls.
Inside a greenhouse they erected, the teenagers hung invasive plants and filled a fish tank with murky water they carried in buckets from the nearby Quequechan River, which flows through much of Fall River in an underground culvert.
Sam Mulveny, whose father, a car mechanic, learned about the residency from a customer, said she felt inspired by nature for the first time while preparing the greenhouse.
Her own piece, titled “Faraway,” is a miniature horse corral. An eccentric My Little Pony doll stands apart from more realistic horse figurines, who appear to be socializing without her.
In a statement about the work, Mulveny wrote that she has always thought of herself as “a weird kid.”
“Now that I've grown up, I’ve learned to carry that label with pride,” Mulveny said. “For anyone who’s ever felt faraway either in their childhood or now, know that I made this for you.”
