Luisa Rabbia

From my review of “Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008,” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum:

In the fall of 1883, Isabella Stewart Gardner — more than a decade before she would develop her museum on Boston’s Fenway — traveled to China. As she toured Shanghai and Beijing, Hong Kong, Canton, and Macao, she purchased photographs from local photographers of sights she’d seen as well as of people and things she hadn’t. She pasted all these sepia-toned pictures into a scrapbook, and that became a spark of inspiration when Luisa Rabbia was an artist-in-residence at the Gardner Museum last summer. The result is “Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008,” in which the Italian-raised, Brooklyn-based 37-year-old transforms Gardner’s old travel photos into a dream journey.

Read the rest here.

“Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008,” Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 The Fenway, Boston, June 26 to Sept. 28, 2008.

Pictured: Luisa Rabbia, details of her video “Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008.”