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Online OnlyApr 28, 2023

Benefit for the Art Writing Fellowship Fund: Crystalle Lacouture’s “Good Power from All Directions”

In partnership with Praise Shadows Art Gallery, the artist has produced an edition of ten 3-color reductive woodcut, with linocut, hand embellishments, and gouache prints. Available for $800.

Brightly colored, yellow and blue artwork from Crystalle Lacouture.

Crystalle Lacouture, "Good Power From All Directions," 2023. 3-color reductive woodcut, with linocut, hand embellishments, and gouache 20 x 16 inches image 30 x 22 inches paper, Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs. Courtesy the Artist.

In partnership with Praise Shadows Art Gallery, Crystalle Lacouture has produced an edition of ten 3-color reductive woodcut, with linocut, hand embellishments, and gouache prints with 100% of the proceeds benefitting our Art Writing Fellowship Program. The fellowship is a continuation of Praise Shadows’ Mentorship Program, which has fostered local talent since 2021. 

$800, available via Praise Shadows

The artist will also be featured in a forthcoming profile by Jessica Shearer in the next print issue of Boston Art Review magazine, Issue 10: Recall which will be released on May 20th.

Artist Statement

This print is a receptor for good power. It’s a sun, a flower, a clock, and a satellite dish ready to receive and emit energy to the viewer. I have spent years looking at the prints of Sister Corita Kent, whose text-filled screen prints literally shout and sing messages of love and social justice activism. In looking for inspiration for this special edition, I thought about Corita’s famous “10 Rules For Creatives” and in particular rule #7: The only Rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

I created Good Power from All Directions in celebration of Boston Art Review’s five year anniversary and the hardworking team who “work all of the time” for “good power” that greatly benefits the local and regional art community. The yellow and blue featured in the print are shorthand for sun and sky, but have also been ubiquitous in our current landscape as the Ukrainian flag hangs on buildings and houses in solidarity for an unjust war. They are also the colors of the Boston Marathon, which runs by my house and studio. The relief printed text “LOOKOUT FOR GOOD POWER” is a directive to stay open and ready for the good that may come with the noun LOOKOUT intentionally replacing the expected LOOK OUT to give the image a specific place from which to exchange energies.

Click here for a video of the artist’s process.

About the Artist

Crystalle Lacouture is an artist based in Boston and North Adams, MA. She received her BFA in Painting/Printmaking from Skidmore College in 2000, where she received the Pamela Weidenman Award for Excellence in Printmaking. While living in NYC, Crystalle was a longtime assistant to activist artists Nancy Spero and Leon Golub and a printmaker and Resident Key Holder at the Lower East Side Printshop. She has attended residencies at Surf Point Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Vanguard Mastheads, the Contemporary Artist Center, and Room 83 Spring. Her work is in the collections of Fidelity, the Hammond Museum, and Skidmore College. In addition to her full-time studio practice and other curatorial projects Crystalle is a curator at Tourists, a hotel near Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA. She exhibits her work throughout New England and New York.

Placeolder profile picture with a sprial graphic.

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