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Brookline artist Sam Fish wants to shake up the local art scene
Gaurav Bagur / brookline@wickedlocal.com
A mannequin’s torso, dressed in a blue hoodie, lies on the floor. Its severed jean-clad legs are strewn just a few feet away, behind zebra-striped traffic cones and yellow barricade tape.
A framed canvas hangs backward overhead. Across the back of the wooden-framed piece of art, visitors are met with a message that’s equal parts melancholic and threatening: “CONTACT ME.”
This is the space visitors step into at 254 Newbury St., but it won’t remain that way for long. “Contact Me” is the latest installment in Sam Fish’s project Exit Galleries, a series of pop-up art exhibits that transform vacant storefronts and retail spaces into what he calls “immersive experimental environments” – temporary galleries, covered from floor to ceiling in paintings and murals.
Local artist Sam Fish in his temporary gallery at 254 Newbury Street in March 2020, days before his gallery opening was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Jenn Stanley/WBUR)
With Christmas right around the corner, Newbury Street is missing its usual crowds of holiday shoppers. For blocks, it’s just roadwork and masked residents walking dogs in sweaters nicer than mine, and then, in what would otherwise be another grey window in a long line of quiet storefronts and empty patios, a vibrant scene of an artist squatting in a vacant space.
Well, sort of…
Sam Fish is a local painter and creator of EXIT Galleries, a series of pop-ups that take advantage of Boston’s vacant real estate. He has permission to be there.