A see change in 2008

New owners, outlets, artists brought fresh color to Boston

Cristina Toro's ''In My Room'' was shown in Boston this year. (Courtesy of the artist and LaMontagne Gallery)

It's been a seismic year for Boston art galleries. More than a dozen commercial galleries moved, closed, or changed hands in 2008, precipitated by the flagging economy, rent hikes, the ending of several multiyear leases, and other factors. The dust is still settling from all the changes.

Big players on the scene, such as Allston Skirt, Bernard Toale Gallery, and Rhys Gallery, are gone, clearing the way for such newer spaces as Steven Zevitas Gallery, LaMontagne Gallery, Samson Projects, and Carroll and Sons (which took over Toale's roster) to cultivate audiences for fresh contemporary art.

Despite the economic challenges, brand-new galleries such as Walker Contemporary and the Anthony Greaney gallery have opened on Harrison Avenue in recent months, in newly developed spaces as well as vacated ones. With Howard Yezerski Gallery's move there from Newbury Street, the center of gravity for contemporary art galleries in the city has finally and truly shifted to the South End.

This year's highlights included new media and old, as well as the return of two curatorial lights who had left or lain low in recent years.

Joseph Ketner, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University and more recently chief curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum, is back to teach at Emerson College and curate shows at the school's Huret & Spector Gallery. He brought in an international name for his first show, "Erwin Redl: Fade: A Light Installation." Redl filled the two-story gallery with a hypnotic grid of red lights, rising and fading in a wave, a warmly enveloping installation that evoked the night sky.

James Hull ran Green Street Gallery, the cutting-edge MBTA station venue, until two years ago. Now he's back, overseeing three spaces: The Gallery at FP3, Suffolk University Art Gallery at the New England School of Art and Design, and Laconia Gallery. A champion of local artists, Hull has a history of working outside the commercial gallery system, mounting daring and thoughtful exhibits.

Nielsen Gallery rented out a second venue, Kidder Smith Gallery, to mount the brooding, restless, occasionally exuberant "John Walker: A Survey 1970-2008." Walker and Joan Snyder, whose ". . . and seeking the sublime" was also at Nielsen, paint thrilling, deeply expressive abstract canvases. At Alpha, "Eric Aho: Wilderness" offered bold winter landscapes that balanced attention to form with unfettered brushwork.

The late Herman Maril was the subject of a loving centenary retrospective put together by Chris McCarthy at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Maril didn't gain much notice in his lifetime. His warm-toned works edged toward representation at a time when abstraction was king, but he delved beautifully into space, tone, and surface.

Two local sculptors had outstanding shows at Barbara Krakow Gallery: Michael Beatty's taut wall sculptures also worked as drawings, weighing volume against line. Sally B. Moore's crazy-quilt architectural pieces embodied terror and hope.

Kudos to LaMontagne Gallery for bringing young, surprising artists to Boston. Lia Halloran's brilliant "Dark Skate" featured haunting, jazzy photographs of a lit skateboarder at night; her paintings based on those photos played with space and abstraction. Cristina Toro's vividly patterned paintings in "Throw Away the Lights and Say of What You See in the Dark" drew on a mind-boggling array of sources and were both captivating and endearing.

Juan Angel Ch??vez's "Speaker Project," a giant walk-in speaker made of scrap wood, blew the roof off of the Stephen D. Paine Gallery of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Wildly interactive, engaging, community-based art and sonic experiment all in one, "Speaker Project" had local musicians playing in the gallery most of the fall.

On the quieter end of the interactivity spectrum, the thoughtful and sly "Many Kinds of Nothing," organized by Shana Dumont, explored meditation in the Montserrat Gallery at Montserrat College of Art. The exhibit prompted viewers to contemplate what the art provoked within them.

Mary Ellen Strom and Ann Carlson's riotous video installation "Madame 710" at Judi Rotenberg Gallery took a feminist spin on Joseph Beuys's 1974 performance "I Like America and America Likes Me." He sat in a gallery for three days with a coyote. In "Madame 710," Carlson danced in a gallery with a cow. The video wittily skewered agribusiness, but its selling point was its humor.

Allston Skirt closed out its nine-year run with Jane D. Marsching's pointed "Test Site," based on her months as an artist-in-residence at the Blue Hill Observatory, a weather station in Milton. Video works, a kite modeled on one designed by the Wright Brothers, and weather flags quoting Woody Guthrie's Depression-era song "Black Wind Blowing" elegantly tied together economic and environmental issues in a show that still inspired wonder.