Fine Arts
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David A Ross Opposes Berkshire Museum Sale
Renowned Former Whitney Museum Director Posts Statement
By: - Aug 13th, 2017The renowned former Whitney Museum director, David A. Ross, in an exclusive statement posted to Berkshire Fine Arts strongly opposes plans initiated by the Berkshire Museum. “This is a sad affair. Perhaps the board, if unwilling to raise funds in the way all museums have to, should resign (along with its feckless director). My feeling is it should merge administratively with another educational non-profit in the region, and then begin the process of stabilization. It would be preferable to see the museum close for a few years of re-organization, than to forever destroy the core of its irreplaceable art collection.”
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Pickets Protest Berkshire Museum Meltdown
Orderly Demonstration in Front of Museum
By: - Aug 13th, 2017From 9 AM to noon there was an ordely and peaceful demonstration in front of the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. Pickets came and went with between 40 and 80 individuals linuing the sidewalk at any given time. Most passing cars honked their support. There was a media presence. While museum director, Van Shields, remained hunkered down in the bunker, board president Elizabeth "Buzz" Hayes McGraw delivered her boilplate message to a TV crew from Albany.
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Centerbeam at ZKM/Karlsruhe, Germany
Exhibition and Symposium until October 1st
By: - Aug 11th, 2017The exhibition to celebrate 'Centerbeam’s' 40 th anniversary has been open since mid May in Karlsruhe. On September 2nd ZKM will host ten representatives of the original participants on location or via skype. The symposium should deliver lively discussions of the past and perhaps a way forward to recreate 'Centerbeam,' a third time, in the near future.
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Protesting Berkshire Museum's Unethical Sale
Pickets Planned for Saturday Morning August 12
By: - Aug 10th, 2017The artists and their supporters in the Berkshires will take to the streets on Saturday, August 12, from 9 AM to noon. There will be picket lines in front ot the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. They will provide a visible presence of those protesting the pending sale of 40 choice works and plans to gut and "reboot" the historic museum and collections.
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Emergence of St. Francis Gallery in Lee
Art With A Cause
By: - Aug 08th, 2017St. Francis Gallery, once a church, hosts a gallery opening and artists reception this weekend in Lee, Massachusetts from 3-6pm on Saturday, August 12th
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JACK Quartet at the Whitney Museum
Accompanying Alexander Calder
By: - Aug 06th, 2017Members of the JACK Quartet are scattered across the eighth floor exhibit space at the Whitney Museum in which many Alexander Calder mobiles hang and stand. In the center of the room on the south wall, cellist Jay Campbell and violinist Austin Wulliman are conventionally seated with their music stands before them. They do not seem to notice violinist Christopher Otto who stands at the east entrance, only a music stand dividing him from a roaming, and finally seated and standing-still audience. At another entrance Jay Pickford Richards, violist, is completely in his own world, oblivious to in your face cameras, and the wandering audience. John Cage wrote the Quartet they will perform, not for a quartet, but for four soloists.
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Rockwell Family Opposes Berkshire Museum Sale
Game Changer and Time to Rethink the Reboot
By: - Aug 05th, 2017When Laurie Norton Moffett, director of the Norman Rockwell Museum, in a Berkshire Eagle op-ed piece asked the Berkshire Museum to "pause" in its plan to sell 40 works the story broke as national news. In daily coverage since then the pro and con has rocked back and forth. I seemed like game over when Joe Thompson, director of MASS MoCA, endorsed the sale and radical plans urging readers to "get real." Then lawyers waded in questioning that the works may or may not be "unrestricted." The controversy went into extra innings when the Rockwell family, in an Eagle letter, stated that the artist never intended for his works to be sold as a last ditch bailout for the poorly managed and curatorially aenemic museum.
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Trident Gallery Update
From Sphere to Edge in Late Summer
By: - Aug 04th, 2017There is always something provocatice going on at Gloucester's Trident Gallery. The arts are the visible cloak of the bonds -- both empowering and restricting -- of community and heritage. The cloak of the arts reveals the shape of the present, bears the patterns and must of the past, and declares ourselves on our journey into the future.
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Berkshire Museum Stonewalls Critics
Hires Costly PR to Spin Its Reboot
By: - Aug 02nd, 2017When ethical concerns and second guessing of its "reboot" plans surfaced the Berkshire Museum has spent money it doesn't have for expensive PR and marketing. Heavy hitters have been hired to deflect tough questions from the media and flack the museum's strategy to sell 40 works of art and change its mandate.
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Berkshire Artist Arthur Yanoff's Exhibition
Reynolds Fine Art in New Haven
By: - Jul 29th, 2017The Thimble Islands are an archipelago of more than 100 pieces of land in Long Island Sound, off northeastern Connecticut. Some are big enough for people to live on, but many more are just tiny granite outcroppings. Arthur Yanoff visited them a year or so ago, and created a sequence of abstract paintings about them. They will be shown at Reylonds Gallery in New Haven.
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Berkshire Museum Ignores Outcry
40 Works to be Sold at Sotheby’s
By: - Jul 27th, 2017In compiling a list of 40 works to deaccession the Berkshire Museum opted to sell no works given by living artists or donors. When Norman Rockwell gave two works to the museum the letter, which is referred to in media coverage, states his wish to share them with the people of the Berkshires. In selling the works is the museum in legal violation of that trust? GIven the sensitivity of what is at stake we demand that the museum make public the artist's letter.
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Christian Marclay Performs Calder
Small Sphere, Heavy Sphere at the Whitney
By: - Jul 24th, 2017Small Sphere, Large Sphere was Alexander Calder's first mobile construction. Hanging in the center of the Hess Theater at the Whitney Museum in New York, it is set in motion, not only to delight the eye, but the ear as well. Christian Marclay makes music with the small wooded sphere carved by Calder.
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I'll Drink to That at Eclipse Mill Gallery
National Exhibition of Pottery
By: - Jul 23rd, 2017The Eclipse Mill Gallery, in North Adams, is featuring a special exhibition of unique drinking vessels "I'll Drink to That." It opens with a reception for the artists on Friday, August 4, from 6 to 8pm. It remains on view, Thursday to Sunday, from 10 am through 5pm, through August 27. Some 25 renowned potters from coast to coast will display their work.
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Artist Stephen Hannock On Berkshire Museum
How Selling the Art Betrays the Community
By: - Jul 22nd, 2017Works by Stephen Hannock are in global museum collections. His Oxbow painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be included in a survey of Hudson River artist Thomas Cole. Hannock's mate Sting will also be involved in the project. When he created paintings for his friend's hometown of Newscastle the studies were shown at the Berkshire Museum. He gave one of the studies to the museum to honor philanthropist Nancy Fitzgerald. The fact of that work and the entire fine arts collection of the museum is unknown. We talked at length with the Berkshire based global artist about the impact of the museum's strategy to sell its fine arts collection with a radical makeover as an interactive educational museum for history and science.
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Berkshire Museum Dumps the Fine Arts
Selling Two Paintings by Norman Rockwell and 38 Other Works
By: - Jul 21st, 2017When the Berkshire Museum announced plans to focus on science and history there was initial euphoria. To reach a goal of $60 millon, $20 for renoivation, and $40 million for endowment it will sell 40 works of art including two paintings by Norman Rockwell which the artist gave to the museum and his Berkshire neighbors. In so doing it violates deaccession restrictions for art museums. In a shuffle Van Shields, the director of BM, has stated that he does not run an art musuem and is not bound by ethical guidelines. That may change as coverage evolves from local to national news.
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Rembrandt at the Frick
The Artist's Divine Encounter
By: - Jul 08th, 2017It’s often said that in some museums you go from a masterpiece to something less in a step. The Frick, mainly the inspiration of the daughter of the steel magnate from Pittsburgh who dueled with Andrew Carnegie, each work that hangs on the walls of the Frick home in New York is perfection.
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DeYoung Museum Celebrates Summer of Love
Special Exhibition Has Flowers in Its Hair
By: - Jul 06th, 2017The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock & Roll is celebrated at the De Young Museum in San Francisco through August 20. Fifty years ago kids from all over the nation flocked to Haight Ashberry with flowers in their hair. This amazing exhibition displays the artifacts of that phenomenon.
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Takashi Murakami's Pop Kitsch in Chicago
Enormous Exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art
By: - Jun 08th, 2017Takashi Murakami is best known for his work related to Japanese anime and manga, as well as his sweeps into commercial and pop art and collaborations with artists such as Kanye West and Pharrell Williams. During last week’s press preview, he was articulate in discussing his work and his inspirations with curator Michael Darling (although the artist occasionally needed help from his translator).
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Jane Hudson Exhibition in Williamstown
Exploring Modernism and Updating Abstraction
By: - Jun 07th, 2017Jane Hudson is known to the Berkshire arts community as the other half of the rock duo, Jeff and Jane, as well as for tending shop at various incarnations of Hudson's Antiques. On Sunday, June 17 from 3:30 to 5:30 PM., an exhibition of her abstract works on paper will open at Hudson Art, 112 Water Street in Williamstown.
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Clark Features Summer Double Header
Tandem Exhibitions of Picasso and Alma-Tadema
By: - Jun 03rd, 2017This summer the Clark Art Institute features four special exhibitions Picasso Encounters, an exhibition of prints with a few key paintings, as well as Orchestrating Elegance; Alma Tadema and the Marquand Music Room and two focused on prints and paintings by Helen Frankenthaler. The museum launched its expansion with a spate of blockbusters but is now moving into a new era with less hoopla under its reserved and scholarly French-born director Olivier Meslay.
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Centerbeam of CAVS/MIT Reintroduced at ZKM
40 Years Post documenta 6 at Kassel, Germany
By: - Jun 03rd, 2017The exhibition: Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of 'Centerbeam,' A Performative Sculpture by CAVS, can be seen at ZKM, Karlsruhe/Germany, until October 1st. The museum is also presenting in an adjacent gallery Aldo Tambellini’s, 'Black Matters.' He was one of the 21 artists, who participated in the spectacular, collaborative and participatory outdoor sculpture.
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Reconstructions by Sarah Fagan
Eclipse Mill Gallery Exhibition Through June 24
By: - May 30th, 2017The exhibition Reconstructions by Sarah Fagan at the Eclipse Mill Gallery through June 24 combines abstract works on paper and modular geometric objects. The artist created the works over several months while focused on applying to graduate school. She will enroll this fall in the MFA program at the University of Texas in Austin.
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MASS MoCA Celebrates
32 Years from Thought to Finish
By: - May 29th, 2017It was a challenge to find a legal parking space anywhere near the museum in North Adams. On Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, from dawn to dusk, there were long lines and a constant stream of visitors. There may have been some 6,000 during the day and another 10,000 attended the rock concert by Cake on MASS MoCA's Joe Thompson Field.
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Nick Cave at MASS MoCA
Sound Suits on Parade
By: - May 29th, 2017As part of the dawn to dusk celebration of the launch of Building Six of MASS MoCA there was a titubating parade of the Sound Suits of the artist Nick Cave. The event was choreographed by Williams College professor Sandra Burton. Cave was present for the occasion.
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Expanded MASS MoCA Galleries
Preview of May 28 Opening
By: - May 16th, 2017During a media tour of the final phase of build out for the 17 acre MASS MoCA campus artists, curators and installlers were working around the clock. While some of the works were not ready for prime time we caught an exciting glimpse of what visitors will encounter this summer in North Adams. The development of Building Six adds 130,000 square-feet of usable space. For renovations, programming and endowment the museum has raised $65 million.
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