Category: Uncategorized

You are invited to ROOTED Armory Cafe and Farmstand to check out the new exhibition by Zachary Torres that is up through April 3rd, and to join us for an Opening Reception with Zachary Torres and Exhibition Coordinator Hank Fay on Saturday, March 5th at 2pm.

This series of landscapes and cityscapes captures the ephemeral quality of the city. They are explorations into the moments that make Boston Boston, Cambridge Cambridge, or Somerville Somerville. The deep contrast lends a dreamlike quality to the images, while the rooftop views study the gradient of urban layering, from the domestic to downtown skyscrapers. This collection of photographs challenges the definition of cityscape by focusing on specific moments that become more like portraits than landscapes — a car under a streetlight; blurred reflections in the Charles; the glow of an interior apartment.

These photographs are deeply rooted in their local context and, in the tradition of the flȃneur, offer fragmentary views into the private world of the individual navigating the city. In a sense, they flip the view of the self-portrait and capture the solitude of urban wandering.

Zachary Torres is a local artist and architectural designer. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies, French, and Visual Arts from Boston University before completing his Masters of Architecture at the Boston Architectural College. He currently works as a designer at an Allston-based architecture firm and teaches courses in architectural theory and history. His photography work is concerned with the queer self and urban solitudes.

You are invited to ROOTED Armory Cafe and Farmstand to check out COLLAGE: SELECTION-DISSECTION-CONNECTION, a new exhibition by Alexandra Rozenman.

“This project started with a quarantine. After an unexpected and needed move out of my studio space, I started working on smaller pieces of paper adding ink and watercolor to my older drawings that I found around the house. Everything felt disconnected. My thoughts began separating older images into shapes first, inside the watercolors, and combining watercolors to drawings and watercolors to watercolors and drawings to drawings. I was choosing sections and making shapes out of old ideas – selecting.

Dissecting and connecting pieces of my older work gave me room for new ideas.

I was inside the process – when paintings, drawings, or anything else you are creating at the moment makes themselves for you because you are giving them everything they need in exactly the right way at exactly the right time. 

My thoughts materialized into shapes, shapes into images and images into untold stories. I now know that this is an ongoing project. Movement, light, or sound has not entered this project yet and collaboration may be the word missing in its title.”

Alexandra (Alya) Rozenman was born in 1971 in Moscow, USSR. She was classically trained at the Soviet Academy of Arts for two years and later studied with dissident artists, well-known today, from Moscow’s underground movement. While still a teenager, she became part of Moscow’s alternative scene of the 1980s. After immigrating to the US, she spent the early 1990s in New York, becoming a part of what later became the International Art Alliance on the Lower East Side and earning her BFA from SUNY in 1993. She later relocated to Boston, earning an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in 1998, and studying with Gerry Bergstein and Robert Ferrandini. Her paintings and drawings blend the styles and symbols of folk art, Russian Underground Conceptualism, illustration, and Jewish art.

She was the recipient of the MacDowell Foundation Fellowship in 2006. Rozenman exhibits nationally and internationally, and is a member of Fountain Street Gallery in Boston. Her studio and school are located in the Joy Street building, and she lives at Brickbottom. www.alexandrarozenman.com

We are thrilled to announce that we will be hosting The Moth’s Spring Season in the Armory Performance Hall starting January 25, 2022. The Moth is an acclaimed non-profit organization based in NYC dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. Arts at the Armory will be hosting The Moth’s monthly Boston StorySLAM, which is an open-mic storytelling competition, open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night’s theme.  Click here for press release.