By Lauren Kaufmann

A look at three exhibitions by New England artists who are concerned about climate change and gun violence.

Danforth Art Museum: My Dear Americans, It’s Not Enough; Suzanne Révy: A Murmur in the Trees; Ecologies of Restoration, and Boston Artists and the Holocaust, through January 26

Ileana Doble Hernandez’s Not Enough. Photo: courtesy of the Danforth Museum

Boston’s biggest art museums — the Museum of Fine Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — are stars in the city’s cultural galaxy. With big budgets and large staffs, they can dazzle with impressive exhibitions, attracting broad visitation and media attention. The major museums offer a variety of concerts, lectures, classes, and tours that extend their reach. With special Friday night happenings, complete with DJs spinning hits, the MFA and ICA are doing a good job of attracting a younger crowd — key to their future success.

Ileana Doble Hernandez’s My Dear Americans. Photo: courtesy of the Danforth Museum.

If you venture a little way out of the city, there are some wonderful small museums and local historical societies that shine, even if they cast a dimmer glow. While you’ll need a car to get to some of these museums, you’re likely to discover free parking and more reasonable entrance fees than what you pay at the big museums. No DJs here, but some strong exhibitions that will get you thinking.

Because of Boston’s many colleges and universities, there are several academic museums to consider — the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the McMullen Museum at Boston College, the Harvard Art Museums, and the MIT Museum. Going a little further out, you’ll come upon the Danforth Art Museum at Framingham State University (FSU). Parking is free and admission is reasonable — $7 for adults, $6 for seniors and FSU alumni, $5 for high school and college students, and free for children under 13. (By comparison, adult admission to the MFA is $27; it’s $22 at the Gardner, and $20 at the ICA.)

In 2019, the Danforth Art Museum and Art School reopened in the Maynard Building after officially sealing its partnership with Framingham State University. While its permanent collection emphasizes American art from the 19th century onward, the museum is currently featuring three exhibitions by New England artists concerned about climate change and gun violence.

My Dear Americans, It’s Not Enough, the largest of the three exhibitions, features the work of Ileana Doble Hernandez, who dubs herself an artivist as a way to link her political activism with her artwork. The introductory text panel explains that the term is rooted in the Chicano movement, a powerful political force in the ’60s that drew attention to the rights of Mexican Americans.

A Mexican immigrant, Hernandez has devoted herself to activist art, focusing primarily on gun violence and immigration. The exhibition at the Danforth directly addresses gun violence in the US, and Hernandez uses a variety of media — collage, photography, and a three-dimensional tableau — to express her views. Every text panel appears twice — once in English and again in Spanish.

DM Witman’s Ecologies of Restoration 18, 2023-24. Archival Pigment photograph from hand-cultured salt crystals. Photo: courtesy of the Danforth Museum

In Not Enough, Hernandez has created an altar devoted to the memory of the 26 people — twen20ty children and six adults — gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, in 2012. Her grouping of candles and flowers draws attention to the awful tragedy, while linking it to the Dia de los Muertos, the traditional Mexican holiday when people stop and remember loved ones who have died. The title of this piece underlines Hernandez’s belief that remembering those who have died from gun violence is not enough to prevent another mass shooting.

In Pollage: Scrolling Experiences, Hernandez presents a collage of words clipped from magazines during the pandemic. The word pollage is a portmanteau of the words “politics” and “collage.” Hernandez explains that she subscribed to magazines as a way to stay off screens, but then she discovered that she was drawn to specific words that she kept seeing on her screens. It’s an apt statement for our times. Hernandez started the work as an old-fashioned, hand-cut collage, but she ended up scanning the images, printing them on transparencies, and putting them in lightboxes that look like tablets. The pollage on display at the Danforth centers on the word resistance and includes photos of Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, and gun-toting police officers.

My Dear Americans is an ongoing project, designed to be a visual representation of the overwhelming number of Americans who die from gun violence. It’s composed of a tall tower of stacks of white paper arranged on a pedestal. Each paper is a condolence letter that Hernandez has written to the relatives of a victim of gun violence. Because 120 people die from gun violence every day, a stack of 120 letters is added to the pedestal every day of the exhibition. By January 26, when the exhibition closes, there will be 12,840 letters.

What Can I Do? provides museum visitors with ready-made postcards, pens, and a list of elected officials. The aim is to send a message that implores elected officials to do more to address the gun violence epidemic. Hernandez will mail the postcards to our senators and other elected officials.

In a separate exhibition, Ecologies of Restoration, photographer DM Witman uses still images and video to convey her concern about climate change, as well as the emotional state known as ecological or climate grief. This condition results from the sadness that we feel as we witness tangible changes in our environment — beach erosion, flooding of our favorite vacation retreats, and the reduction in fish or shellfish population as a result of warmer ocean temperatures.

Witman’s concern about the loss of New England’s protective salt marshes led her to produce a series of photographs spotlighting salt crystals. The images look like magnifications of crystals — not unlike what you might see under a microscope. And yet, they also evoke sea-foam, feathers, and pine needles. There’s a delicate, natural beauty to these images that makes you think about the natural environment — lovely, yet increasingly precarious.

Suzanne Révy, Fog Along the Concord River, 2019. Photograph Triptych. Photo: courtesy of the Danforth Museum

The third exhibition, Suzanne Révy: A Murmur In the Trees, is a series of polyptychs, or multiple-panel photographs. Révy took these light-filled photographs while walking through the woods in Concord, Massachusetts. The accompanying text explains how her hikes spurred her to think about the history of the area, and the people who have shaped the land and its history — the Penacook Indians, the Transcendentalists, and the soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War. Her photographs are meditative glimpses into her state of mind while hiking, strolls that endeared the natural world to her, while also sparking an appreciation for those whose lives have left an indelible mark on the area.

In addition to these three exhibitions, the Danforth has also installed a small exhibition called Boston Artists and the Holocaust, featuring several works from the museum’s permanent collection. There are three sketches by Hyman Bloom — Rabbi with Torah — that depict his memories from his childhood in a Jewish village in Latvia. There are two paintings by Karl Zerbe, born in Germany, that capture the struggle that Jews endured in surviving their separation from the rest of the population before the Holocaust. Renee Rothbein’s Torah Covering is an intensely fiery depiction that could be an expression of the artist’s feelings about the threat posed to the Jewish religion at a time when so many Jews perished in concentration camps. Her fears are visualized through a blazing image of its most sacred book.

Lauren Kaufmann has worked in the museum field for the past 14 years and has curated a number of exhibitions. She served as guest curator for Moving Water: From Ancient Innovations to Modern Challenges, currently on view at the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum in Boston.