PRESS
WBUR, Boston’s NPR News Station (2022)
Olmsted Now: Parks Equity & Spatial Justice Projects
“We were feeling very compelled by this question: if Olmsted was designing these parks, ‘for all,’ for everyone — that really isn't our reality,” Mergel said. “Because clearly structures are still in place that mean these parks don’t feel like they are for everyone.”
“It's about equity — I mean thinking about this sense of belonging,” said lead artist Ngoc-Tran Vu. “It’s about who belongs here, and who's not welcome.”
STIR World (2022)
Olmsted Now: Boston Design Week
“Speaking to STIR, Jen Mergel, a curator, cultural leader, and the inaugural Director of Experience and Cultural Partnerships for Boston's Emerald Necklace Conservancy, reveals her impressions of a multifaceted individual who was far before his time in every respect, while outlining the series of events that celebrated his achievements both during this year's edition of Boston Design Week, and in the months following it.”
Boston Globe (2022)
Olmsted Now: Greater Boston’s Olmsted Bicentennial
“Olmsted really had a vision, he said: Boston is a mere nucleus of the city that it will become,” said Mergel, paraphrasing an 1870 talk Olmsted gave at the Lowell Institute. “Olmsted could do something in Boston that he couldn’t do with the given rectangle of land in New York. He could interconnect all of these neighborhoods and actually heal in a way that he couldn’t do in other cities.”
Boston Globe (2021)
Combahee’s Radical Call, BCA
“Berry’s mural, which kicks off a months-long series of events at the BCA called “Combahee’s Radical Call: Black Feminisms (re)Awaken Boston,” captures the group’s spirit of inclusion and its clear-headedness about the struggle. The artist writes, ‘Black women … heal generations by allowing others to make a home out of who they are.’ ”
Boston Globe (2020)
Public Art
“The problem with historic monuments, Mergel said, is exactly their immutability in a world in constant flux. In a moment where equity is at the fore of every conversation, resources also play in. With the decapitated Columbus statue, Mergel weighed the right way forward. Should money be spent restoring the statue? Or do you take that money and run a series of public talks that addresses colonial legacies, and what Columbus represents to different people? ‘When you’re not a monocultural society, public space is a space for debate,’ she said. Mergel said the traditional monument strategy, that depends on ‘single statements to last in perpetuity,’ stifles that debate.”
Boston Hassle (2020)
Storefront Project, Area Code Art Fair
“I immersed myself in the Storefront Project, finally able to quench my thirst for an opportunity to see new work in person after many months of half-heartedly viewing a screen. While I was ready to get out into the city and view the art, my legs, having been largely sedentary since lockdown began, were not. The Storefront Project is expansive, featuring work by 11 artists in the windows of stores, restaurants, and offices across the Greater Boston area.“
Washington Post (2018)
Fog x FLO, Emerald Necklace
“Fog x FLO was commissioned by the Emerald Necklace Conservancy to mark its 20th anniversary and was organized by curator Jen Mergel. Can something as evanescent as fog be described as sculpture? If fireworks paint the night sky, and dance is drawing with the whole body, fog can surely be sculpture. Nakaya’s fog squirts out of nozzles, spills into the atmosphere and interacts with the air all around. It is intimately concerned with experience in three-dimensional space. That makes it inherently sculptural.”
Boston Globe (2020)
Storefront Project, Area Code Art Fair
“‘It’s one thing to say a model is collaborative. It’s another to make that happen,’ Mergel said. ‘It’s been wonderful to be part of a team of such great human beings.’ AREA CODE’s bare-bones business model puts artists first. Unlike most fairs, it includes artists who have no gallery representation. If a work sells, half the proceeds go to the artist (which is standard for a gallery sale) and 35 percent to the sponsoring commercial gallery or nonprofit. If there is no sponsor, that 35 percent supports the cost of administering the fair. The remaining 15 percent will be split equally among all the participating artists.”
WBUR, Boston’s NPR News Station (2018)
Fog x FLO, Emerald Necklace
“Mergel acknowledges plenty of people don’t know this artist’s name. ‘She deserves to be known as well as James Turrell or Robert Smithson and these other figures who have been doing art with light and space and nature for decades,’ the curator continues. ‘She has been too — and she's been doing something that has been consistent, it has been timeless, and right now it is timely in terms of climate responsive art.’ Beginning last October, Mergel and Nakaya spent hours wandering along pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s five-mile chain of waterways and parks.”
Artforum (2017)
The Armory Show, New York
“Jen Mergel, an independent curator who was once the senior curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Gabriel Ritter, the head of contemporary art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, have been hired to organize special sections within the 2018 Armory Show. Ritter will oversee the fair’s Focus section, while Mergel will be in charge of Platform, an area devoted to site-specific and large-scale artworks.”
New York Times (2017)
Political Intent, MFA
"Still, Jen Mergel, senior curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, said: “My job as a curator is to make decisions about what to include, or what to show and what not to,[...] I see that as a political decision. The role of the museum is to present art, prompt dialogue.”
![Boston Globe Sonic Blossom, MFA"[The songs] revolve around a central idea, said Jen Mergel, the MFA’s senior curator of contemporary art: “The beauty of a fleeting moment. Moonlight recalls lost love. The sun shimmering on water, the brevity of life…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5998232003596eb442b34bc7/1504209745142-Y9DF7W1KNCH29MG0SKME/Screen+Shot+2017-08-30+at+9.17.54+PM.png)
Boston Globe (2015)
Sonic Blossom, MFA
"[The songs] revolve around a central idea, said Jen Mergel, the MFA’s senior curator of contemporary art: “The beauty of a fleeting moment. Moonlight recalls lost love. The sun shimmering on water, the brevity of life.”
Boston Globe (2014)
Shinique Smith: Bright Matter, MFA
"Then there’s a magical installation, “Breath & Line,” in which Smith fills a shadowy room with mirrors written over with black paint in her elegant graffiti. Oblique lights cast reflections of those liquid gestures over the walls."
Improper Bostonian (2014)
Permission To Be Global/Prácticas Globales, MFA
“This is not meant to be a general overview or survey,” says Jen Mergel, the MFA’s Beal Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art. “This is meant to be an exhibit with teeth.” She’s talking about Permission To Be Global/Prácticas Globales: Latin American Art from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection."
WBUR, Boston’s NPR News Station (2014)
Permission To Be Global/Prácticas Globales, MFA
Mergel feels the weight of the art here — not just physically, but symbolically. It hails from some of the world’s most repressive and dangerous countries — Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Cuba. The curator talks about the show’s title, “Permission to be Global,” and calls globalization “an ideal.” In Latin America, she says, the reality of globalization exposes damaging and dramatic inequalities between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the controlled. “Of any artists across the planet who have had decades of experience dealing with that disparity, artists from across Latin America have," Mergel said. "I would say it’s been fundamental to a lot of the work that many of these contemporary artists look at.”
New York Times (2010)
The New Guard of Curators Steps Up
“I started teaching studio art courses at Harvard,” she said. “But I loved talking about other artists’ work rather than doing my own.” Now she is the senior curator for contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston [...] "This is a big, big step for Boston."
Boston Globe (2009)
From the ICA to the MFA
"Jen Mergel, 33, now associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, will arrive at the MFA in February, at a critical moment for Boston’s biggest museum. In November, the MFA will open a huge new wing. And in 2011, as part of a long-planned $500 million expansion [...]"
Artforum, Critic’s Picks (2008)
Tara Donovan, ICA
“Nicholas Baume and Jen Mergel, who together curated this traveling exhibition, succeed in revealing the New York–based artist’s process of creating lyric, often figurative minimalist works, which are made through countless repetitions of a single action applied to one material.”