Fine Arts
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Trevor Paglen at Williams College
To Deliver Annual Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art
By: - Oct 22nd, 2020Artist, geographer and author Trevor Paglen will present a talk titled “Machine Visions” as this year’s Plonsker Family Lecture Series in Contemporary Art at the Williams College Museum of Art. The free talk will be held at 6 p.m. ET Friday, Nov. 6, online via Zoom.
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Richard Nielsen This Is Not a Gag
Opening at MASS MoCA on November 7
By: - Oct 21st, 2020In March 2020, Los Angeles-based artist Richard Nielsen began painting portraits of people in their COVID-19 face masks. On view at MASS MoCA, This is Not a Gag includes his first set of 49 paintings. Presented in a Zoom-like grid, the series shows the determination behind the eyes of artists, writers, and friends of the artist and MASS MoCA. The subject’s faces may be covered, but variations in masks and individual expressions speak volumes about our lives today. These paintings are not about the pandemic, per se, but about the fiercest and finest parts of human nature.
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Gardner Museum Faces Challenges
A $5 Million Matching Gift
By: - Oct 21st, 2020As part of a $65-million campaign called Renewing the Promise: For the Public Forever, which is raising funds to implement the Gardner’s bold Strategic Plan and ensure the continued success of the Museum’s vision and values into the future, a gift challenges the Museum to raise $5 million in endowment funds by 2024. These funds will be matched 1:1 with a $5 million contribution from the anonymous donor.
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Daniel Kershaw Stages the Show
The Art of Native America at the Met
By: - Oct 20th, 2020Before covid and shut-downs, millions of viewers each year passed through the galleries at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at Daniel Kershaw's stagings. He is a design star you’ve never heard of. As Senior Exhibition Designer at the largest museum in the United States, Kershaw’s job is to plan and build environments for up to a dozen shows annually.
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Franklin Einspruch at Familiar Trees
A New Gallery in Pittsfield
By: - Oct 16th, 2020Familiar Trees is a new gallery at 411 North Street, Pittsfield. There wiil be a reception for Franklin Einspruch on Saturday, October 17, 2020, 1-4 PM. The exhibition Half Step Half Fall runs through November 21. His Cloud on a Mountain is a book of comics poetry conceived during artist residencies in 2015 and 2018 at Bascom Lodge, at the summit of Mount Greylock in Berkshire County. Familiar Trees specialized in high-quality used books with an emphasis on art, poetry, and literature.
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Nick Capasso of Fitchburg Art Museum
Responding to Diversity and Social Justice
By: - Oct 15th, 2020After 22 years as a curator of the deCodova Museum, Dr. Nick Capasso, for the past 8 years has been director of the Fitchburg Art Museum. It is one of the poorest regions of the state. The community is 35% Latino and 55% of school children speak Spanish at home. The museum is unique for its bilingual initiatives and community outreach. There is diversity in all aspects of its exhibitions and programming. The museum shows New England artists. The collection has grown with an emphasis on photography, African, African American, and American art. Meeting daunting challenges the Fitchburg Art Museum is a remarkable success story.
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Rise Up by Ariel Klein
Urban Protest Art at Eclipse Mill Gallery
By: - Oct 08th, 2020This past summer the artist, Ariel Klein, was in the thick of New York’s protests against the police inflicted murder of George Floyd. He was a resident of Brooklyn and its community of artists. His take on that is on view as “Rise Up” at the Eclipse Mill Gallery in North Adams.
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Jay Critchley Takes on the White House
Tarred and Feathered in Provincetown
By: - Oct 06th, 2020The Provincetown based conceptual artist, Jay Critchley, is known for wit and outrageous projects. Trump has him mad as hell and he can't take it anymore. Rather than just get mad he's getting even. His latest stunt it literally to tar and feather the White House.
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Airborne Transmission
Prayer Flags for the Pandemic
By: - Sep 30th, 2020Suzette Martin's project of 200 'prayer flags' has been installed at the River Street Park in North Adams, MA, behind MASS MoCA. They have been fastened along a fence at 6' apart. A proto-project, also titled 'Airborne Transmission' of then 19 flags can still be seen on the grounds of the Eclipse Mill in North Adams. These 'flags' have been there since August. The new installation is impressive and will have a much larger impact, by reminding us that the entire Nation is still reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic, now with more than 200,000 deaths in the USA. Please read below.
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Philip Guston Now to Not Now
What He Meant to Boston’s Artists
By: - Sep 26th, 2020The retrospective "Philip Guston Now" was scheduled to open in June 2001 at the National Gallery. It would travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, then to Tate Modern in London, and finally, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Of 125 paintings and 75 drawings some 24 works caricature the Ku Klux Klan. Fearing backlash the museums have postponed to 2024 to develop programming that contextualizes the work. The MFA has a history of ambivalence to the artist's work. From 1973 to 1978 he taught a graduate seminar at Boston University.
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Raise a Glass to Michelangelo
Famous, Rich and...... Miserly!
By: - Sep 21st, 2020Ever wonder what the great artist, sculptor, architect, painter and poet, Michelangelo, ate and drank? According to his handwritten, and illustrated, 16th century grocery list, the Master thrived on a diet of fish, bread and lots of wine.
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Brooklyn Museum Deaccessions 12 Works
AAMD Sanctions Corona Emergency Measures
By: - Sep 17th, 2020While Trump's billionaire golf buddies are begging for a bailout the arts in America are left twisting in the wind. Closed for months museums are depleting reserve funds to survive. That has meant furloughs, pay cuts and staff reductions. As a desparate measure, in a lapse from guidelines for deaccessioning, the Brooklyn Museum is selling twelve works to raise $40 million. It recalls when the Berkshire Museum gutted its collection to raise $50 million. This is never a good idea but we discuss crucial differences.
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Former Boston Artist Miroslav Antic
Conceptual Painting of Roy Rogers and Trigger
By: - Sep 14th, 2020When Miroslav Antic moved from Boston to Florida, initially he continued to teach as he had for the Museum School. As sales picked up he was able to live modestly including buying a couple of houses. The kids are grown and he lives alone with all his time in the studio. There have been no sales this past year but he is replenishing inventory, It was great to catch up during a recent call to West Palm Beach. He sent along an image of a recent knockout painting of "Roy Rogers and Trigger." It brought back boyhood memories.
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MFA Reopens on September 23
The Director Welcomes Us Back
By: - Sep 11th, 2020The MFA will open over the next month or so in phases. First, and with great pleasure, we reopen the Art of the Americas Wing, reinvigorated with some new additions and enhanced interpretation. “Women Take the Floor,” on the Wing’s third level, has new works to see, presenting a refreshed narrative worth another look, and “Black Histories, Black Futures,” the groundbreaking display curated by Boston teens, remains on view in the Level 1 Rotunda, Sharf Visitor Center, and Hemicycle.
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Iris Love
Unforgettable
By: - Sep 11th, 2020The doorbell rang. I was in bed. It was about 9pm and I was a little hung-over from the birthday party I’d hosted the night before. Who could it be? Wearing nothing but a t-shirt and underwear, I opened the door just enough to see who it was. OMG. It was Iris Love, dressed in her full Scottish clan regalia of plaid tartan kilt, white shirt, knee socks, and jacket with kilt pins and clan badges.
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How George Seybolt Changed the MFA
Board President Initiated Business Concepts from 1968 to 1972
By: - Sep 11th, 2020George Crossan Seybolt (1915-1993) was president and chairman of the William Underwood Company, best known for its canned Deviled Ham. He was recruited to the board of trustees by the director, Perry T. Rathbone. When be became president of the board there was constant conflict. Seybolt mico managed the museum and ousted Rathbone over the Raphael incident. His personal appointment for director, Merrill Rueppel, proved to be a disaster. He was fired after a Globe exposé. Seybolt went on to be a museum lobbyist and visionary. It's what we discussed in 1977.
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Permafrost Melts at MASS MoCA
Blane De St. Croix: How to Move a Landscape.
By: - Sep 02nd, 2020The art of Blane De St. Croix comes at the viewer via a multivalent attack on the staggering challenges posed by irreparable climate change. The diversity of this artist’s media and its ecological content — driven by a political mandate — evokes the tradition of Social Sculpture by the postwar German artist Joseph Beuys. The MoCA project How to Move a Landscape draws on dramatically different approaches to convey the rapid erosion and melting of permafrost in the Arctic.
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Philippe David’s Happy Threads
Textile Designs Inspired by Nature
By: - Sep 02nd, 2020“I showed this fabric at an early stage of its existence to a professional in my industry. When he said, ‘you will never sell a yard of it,’ I knew I had a WINNER!” Textile designer Philippe David is referring to his bestselling creation – ever: “Bal d'Eté" (Summer Prom), a colorful and joyful silk fabric manufactured in India, the land of textile wonders.
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Without Gorky a Netflix Documentary
Film by the Artist's Granddaughter Cosima Spender
By: - Aug 27th, 2020The artist of Armenian heritage, Matin Mugar, reviewed "Without Gorky" in 2012. Cosima Spender filmed the tragic story of her grandfather the surrelist/abstract expressionist artist Arshile Gorky. He came to America as a survivor of the Armenian Genocide in which his mother died from starvation. Growing up in Watertown as a young artist he took the name Gorky and denied his heritage remaining distant with little contact to relatives. His wife Agnes, then in her late 80s, convyed memories of terrible suffering and its impact on their two daughters.; particularly coming to terms with his suicide. Gorky was among the greatest artists of his generation. This superb and compelling documentary is now featured on Netflix.
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What Joe Thompson Means to Northern Berkshire County
The Daunting Legacy of MASS MoCA
By: - Aug 22nd, 2020Joe Thompson graduated from Williams College in 1981. As founding director of MASS MoCA he has been here ever since. Stepping down in October he will sever ties next summer. Between now and then he will plan the next move. Other than some loose ends his remarkable work here is complete. Magnificently so.
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Joe Thompson's Letter to Members
Stepping Fown and Mass MoCA Director
By: - Aug 22nd, 2020With the decades long development of the MASS MoCA campus complete but for some loose ends director Joe Thompson is moving on. Since graduating from nearby Williams College, now in his early 60's it's the only job he's ever had. His work and MoCA development over the years has had enormous cultural and economic inpact on Northern Berkshire County.
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Kendall Messick’s "Blind Sight"
To See and to be Seen
By: - Aug 13th, 2020In October 2019, I was having dinner with my friend Kendall Messick, an artist who creates installations with still photography, film, video and ever-evolving two-and three-dimensional media. Over dinner he told me he was flying to Bogota, Colombia, the next day for a major installation of his work. The show is an achievement of both patience and memory. It was thirty-four years in the making.
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Eclipse Mill Artists, North Adams, Ma. 2020
Projects during COVID-19: Impromptu and Airborne Transmission
By: - Aug 11th, 2020Artists everywhere are communicating and presenting work virtually that was conceived and created or executed this year during the COVID-19 pandemic. Life and art had mostly moved from our physical to our virtual world. Artists at the Eclipse Mill have done the same. Here we present three projects, two 'real' and one online, just a slice of artistic work that's being created in 40 studios. 'IMPROMPTU' has become a virtual exhibition on August 15 and 'Airborne Transmission' has been installed as described below.
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Shaker Museum to Create Facility in Chatham, NY
Selldorf Architects to Design $15 Million Project
By: - Aug 03rd, 2020Housing its comprehensive collection of Shaker material, the new museum facility will embody Shaker values of inclusion, innovation and equality. $15 Million project is expected to break ground in 2021 and be completed in 2023.
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Fred Plotkin: Renaissance Man
Renowned Expert on Italian food and Opera
By: - Jul 23rd, 2020Fred Plotkin notes: “I am not a singer or musician, yet my working life has a lot of similarities in that most of my income is derived from appearing in front of audiences in places of public assembly. People buy tickets to what I do so, of course, that means that all of my contracts, all of my speaking engagements, have been canceled until November.”
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