Saints, sinners, paint
• WESTERN CANON
Somerville artist Raul Gonzalez's jam-packed installation about the life of an imagined boxer at East Boston's New England Gallery of Latin American Art last year won him the critics' pick for best painting show from the Boston Art Awards (which I organize). He followed that up with an even more substantial and assured series of paintings that tapped folk art and cartoony street styles to plumb our Old West legacy via a fever dream of desert, skulls, buffalos, and stereotype Injuns. They debuted at that Tufts's summer show and then electrified the back room at Carroll and Sons in November. No wonder he took home an Artadia grant in August.