Charles Suggs, "Body Stare 2"
CFA painting alum, Charles Suggs (CFA'20), was featured in the Boston Globe on December 28, 2021. By Cate McQuaid
Excerpt
When you run a salon-type gallery out of your studio, you can do anything you please. VERY’s proprietor, painter John Guthrie, makes audacious connections in a mesmerizing three-person exhibition, “Transfixed.”
Charles Suggs (CFA'20), a BU College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts alum, pins viewers with the fixed stare of a Black man in the monotype series “Body Stare.” The man, depicted bare from the waist up, gazes at us through sorrowful, haunted eyes filled with a vulnerability that, more than anger, held this white viewer accountable. Suggs works over each print with agitated marks that read like scars. “Body Stare” is a somber, understated counterpoint to Confederate monuments. It represents the man white supremacy has erased: humane, strong, battered. Suggs’s prints should be plastered at monument sites in the wake of their removal.
Tammi J. Meehan’s paintings hang on either side of Suggs’s prints. Thematically, they have nothing in common: Suggs depicts a figure; Meehan’s abstractions spring from her mind’s eye. But like Suggs, Meehan is a nuanced and energetic mark maker, and her ethereal paintings make a canny complement to his loving, blunt focus on the body.