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The Clark Art Institute’s popular First Sundays Free program returns on Sunday, October 3. Admission to the galleries is free to all visitors for the entire day, but advance registration is strongly recommended.

It’s been almost a year since November 2020 when Mr. Trump lost his presidential reelection bid but secretly refuses to accept his defeat.  And “the big lie’ theory continues to poison the political well being of the nation.

In Otto Zitko’s work, space determines form and content. The central design element is the seemingly endless line running across large-format picture panels, sheets, or walls, which is applied with paint rollers or thick oil pens. Behind the supposedly purely expressive character of his works lies a complex structure of self-organization, the sounding out of physiological movement in space, and different levels of consciousness and energy.

Cleo Parker Robinson is celebrating the 51st anniversary of the founding of her dance troupe. Covid buried the 50th. This celebration had added sizzle.  Live dance is happening at last.

Today tattoos are ubiquitous in our culture. The Museum of Fine Arts offers a timely echibition Tattoos in Japanese Prints from November 20 to February 20. The exhibition features nearly 80 works by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861) and his contemporaries—including his colleague and rival Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1864) and his pupil Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892).

“Shout! The Mod Musical” is a musical revue of the ‘60s shown through the experiences of five young adult women living in London, as conceived and curated by three American men (of course)!  The songbook draws from tunes of the era, predominantly those popularized by English songbirds, especially Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark (“Wishin’ and Hopin’” and “Downtown” for starters.)  

In "Wood Play" both artists are having fun with the materials and the forms. The work in this exhibition evokes that joy. Steve Muller's assembled sculptures play with sticks/lines, broken, abrupt, and jagged. They are simple intelligent collages, with a touch of wry humor. Jared Abner discovers forms by following the shapes and grain of the wood he is carving.

Melvin Van Peebles, the black entrepreneur, died on September 21. Over the years, brief encounters revealed many of his sparkling facets.

Carolyn Newberger is a Berkshire based polymath. From October 1 through 31 she will exhibit Drawing From Life:  The Nude as Mirror and Muse at Boston's Galatea Fine Arts. "Typically working in broad strokes on paper with watercolor and charcoal or ink, in twenty minutes or less I seek to bring onto the page the ineffable personhood of the model, his or her thoughtfulness, mental state, humor and distinctiveness," she says of this new work.

The Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) announces that Kristy Edmunds has been appointed as its new Director, following a 10-month international search and a unanimous decision by the Board. Edmunds comes to MASS MoCA from UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA), where she has served as the Executive and Artistic Director since 2011.

Barrington Stage Company (BSC),welcomes Tony and Emmy Award winner Billy Crystal in a presentation of a new musical in development, Mr. Saturday Night, on the Boyd-Quinson Stage (30 Union Street) for nine performances. A new musical comedy, Mr. Saturday Night is about one man’s meteoric rise to the middle. The musical is a work in development and will be presented with minimal set and costume pieces.  

Theater for the New City, Executive Director Crystal Field presents Andrea Fulton's Was it Me? Directed by Kymbali Craig, the play gives us a poignant peak into everyday life. Fulton probes the anguish of a woman burdened by an unresolved memory of a traumatizing assault in her childhood. Fulton brings the question of self blame to the fore as the woman asks:  “Was it something about me that made this happen?"

John Adams writes about his release from the shackles binding  him as a Northeastern composer in the US.  Coming to California as a young man, he was at last able to write the music he heard, whatever shape it took.  He was free to be an individual. Each of the young composers featured prominently in Ojai 2021 has clearly benefited from Adams’ experience.

Jacob’s Pillow announces this season’s artist residencies offered at the Pillow Lab, its year-round incubator of new work. The Fall 2021 recipients include jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham, Indigenous Enterprise, Taylor Stanley and Shamel Pitts, and Yve Laris Cohen.

Just be aware. The premiere of Nora at Berlin's smallest theatre, The Gorki Theater, offers anything but the expected story line of Henrik Ibsen's famous 1879 play about a woman stepping out of a comfortable upper middle class family life to become independent.

The annual Ojai Music Festival is arguably the most exciting music event in this country.  It “monitors the everchanging mood and directions of our musical atmosphere.” A challenge to be sure. A challenge which is richly met and then some.

The Last Five Years is a very popular musical with theaters; in part because it only needs two performers and minimal sets/costumes and partly because it tells a universal story of falling both in and out of love.

This new book by Jerry Olejniczak is filled with images of sites demolished, transformed by decay, and sometimes overtaken by nature. Olejniczak (pronounced Oh-lay-KNEE-chalk) is an urbex photographer—a photographer as urban explorer.

Terkel’s hometown beat was a great laboring town, Chicago, the City of Broad Shoulders.  From a lifetime of communing in his community and across the country, he produced powerful oral histories based on interviews, particularly “Working” (1974) and the Pulitzer Prize winning “The Good War” (1985).

Inspired by the light and wonder of fireflies, 16 Boston Sculptors Gallery artists have been invited to exhibit their site-specific sculptural works on the grounds of the Manship Artists Residency + Studios (MARS) in Gloucester, MA. Paul Manship, celebrated sculptor of the Prometheus Fountain in New York City’s Rockefeller Center, established his summer residence and studio amid Cape Ann’s granite quarries.

Angela’s Ashes, a musical based on Frank McCourt’s fictionalized memoir of his early family life, is presented now in its musical version by Irish Repertory Theatre.  It is a conventional musical. Yet the memoir’s conventionality did not diminish the story’s deep resonance not only with immigrants, but with all readers who have experienced difficult childhoods. 

The Clark Art Institute announces its fall/winter 2021 exhibition schedule featuring two new exhibitions. Competing Currents: 20th-Century Japanese Prints explores two parallel Japanese print-making movements through the Clark’s collection of shin-hanga and s?saku-hanga works while Hue & Cry: French Printmaking and the Debate Over Colors explores the surprising but steady opposition to printed color over the nineteenth century in France. The yearlong exhibition Erin Shirreff: Remainders is on view through January 2, 2022. 

A resident of Western Massachusetts, Morgan Bulkeley was the subject of a retrospective at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. His career began as a seminal artist of the Boston scene. His exhibition at Yezerski Gallery remains on view through October 15.

From September 23 to November 6, 2021, Forum Gallery will celebrate William Beckman’s 50 years of self-portraiture with an exhibition of seventeen paintings and drawings made between 1976 and 2021. The exhibition, William Beckman: Five Decades of Self-Portraits, will present important examples from each decade beginning with 1976 and will include a group of current paintings, illuminating the Artist’s singular and ongoing contribution to the field.

Marjorie Kaye is a painter and sculptor residing and working North of Boston. Her work is an exploration of Sacred Geometry, organic forms, the relationships of color, and are kinetic and energetic. Her exhibition, Energy Fields and Artifacts, opens at Galatea Fine Art on October 1.