Defunded/Defunked!

Featuring 18 artists working in Boston and the New England area, defunded/defunked! takes its name from the wordplay of funk, fund and defunct, tracing this relationship/binary between the artist and their material reality throughout time. Through the surrealism and imperfectability of works from artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Robert Arnerson, and Wally Hedrick, Funk art in the 70s, as narrated by curator Peter Selz, is "a matter of attitude...It is symbolic in content and evocative in feeling." Thus a never-ending knot throughout history that folds in on itself depending on the time period in which it's inflected - many artists rejected the Funk label because it denies a shared goal or motive, others because of the term's "datedness" and obtuse formality.

This exhibition is asking the same questions again about Funk, but with lower stakes and fewer answers. If Funk assumes an ungainly, loud, and bizarre position, defunked asks how funk objects can elicit laughter and humor besides irony. From J Grace Giordano and Julia McGehean's series of "utterance" objects, to Shiyeon Ku's depiction of sublime and metastasized bodies, as well as Daria Jin's performance with her intercontinental grass, defunded/defunked! holds space for artists to be irreverent, playful, and committed in a politically and technologically charged moment. Like Selz says about Funk and by extension defunked, "If there's any moral: it's for you to find out."