Mark Favermann
Bio:
Architecture, design, film and theatre critic/associate editor Mark Favermann, is an urban designer and public artist who over the past two decades has written extensively on art and design. A former Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, he was the first leader of the Boston Visual Artists Union (BVAU), the 1970's Boston activist artists organization, served as the former Director of Visual and Environmental Arts for the City of Boston and has been an adjunct professor at several universities. He was a columnist and/or editor for a large number of prominent publications. His own design work has included creating the award-winning marquee for the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, designing the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, creating the look for the 2000 NCAA Final Four in Indianapolis and the 1999 Ryder Cup as well as the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, England. For the past eight seasons, he has been a design consultant to the Boston Red Sox. His 2005 public art commission, The Birds of Audubon Circle, was nominated by the Boston Art Commission as one of the best pieces of public art in America. In the Fall of 2007, his Recognition Gateway sculpture was installed in South Brookline.
Recent Articles:
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How I learned What I Learned by August Wilson Front Page
Provocative Journey of Self-Discovery At Huntington Theatre
By: - Mar 11th, 2016In this wonderful solo show, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson shares entertaining and provocative stories about youth-- his first few jobs, a stay in jail, various colorful friends, encounters with racism, music, and love as a young poet in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Directed by Todd Kreidler and featuring Eugene Lee, both longtime Wilson collaborators, this memoir charts Wilson’s journey of self-discovery through adversity, and what it means to be a black artist in America. This narrative journey, brilliantly performed by Eugene Lee, solidifies Wilson’s theatrical and cultural legacy.
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Stunning Intersections at Peabody Essex Museum Front Page
A Beacon for Remembering Beauty of Islamic Creative Culture
By: - Feb 26th, 2016In a period of radicalism and terrorism, Intersections serves as a beacon for remembering and cherishing the sensitive beauty of the best of Islamic creative culture. This is a must-see visual and environmental experience.
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Milk Like Sugar Compelling at Huntington Front Page
Teenage Angst In A Difficult World
By: - Feb 15th, 2016Annie and her two teenage best buds want the same things: the hottest new phones, cute boys, designer bags. But when they enter into a pregnancy pact, she wonders if there might be a different path and a brighter future. Huntington Playwriting Fellow Kirsten Greenidge (Luck of the Irish) finds raw humor and grit in this provocative production, torn-from-the-headlines drama.
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Nice Fish: A Brilliant Catch At A.R.T. Front Page
The Remarkable Mark Rylance
By: - Jan 24th, 2016On a frozen Minnesota lake, the ice is beginning to melt as is Salvador Dali's Melting Watch paintings. It’s the end of the fishing season, and two men are out on the ice angling for answers to life’s larger questions. TONY and Olivier Award-winning Mark Rylance, who co-wrote the play with the American poet Louis Jenkins is spectacular. Based on Jenkins' prose poems, it is a Waiting for Godot on ice. It deserves to be a contemporary classic.
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Disgraced Stirring At Huntington Theatre Front Page
Multiethnic Drama Underscoring Human and World Issues
By: - Jan 19th, 2016Disgraced is engaging, thought-provoking theatre. The narrative is about difficult situations in a compicated world. . It demands that you pay attention from the opening scene until the play's end. A stellar cast and perceptive direction make this an evening of theatre that you will not soon forget.
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Industrial Designer Richard Sapper (1932-2015) Front Page
Iconic Industrial Designer Dead at 83
By: - Jan 12th, 2016Iconic himself, Richard Sapper, an industrial designer whose sleek, precision-engineered prototypes spawned the Alessi espresso maker, the Tizio lamp and the IBM ThinkPad, died on Dec. 31 in Milan. He set the highest standards for industrial design in the latter half of the 20th Century and the early 21st Century.
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Giant White Bunnies at the Lawn on D Front Page
Down the Pop Culture Rabbit Hole
By: - Jan 12th, 2016In recent years several serious artists, Amanda Parer among them, have created giant inflatable pieces with the aim of making cultural and political statements. Last year, five giant white rabbits took over the Lawn on D for a few days. They were not just visually compelling but intellectually provocative.
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Design Biennial Boston 2015: Hit or Miss Front Page
Younger Architectural Firms Expressing Themselves Through Sculptural Forms
By: - Jan 11th, 2016Contemporary architecture is not an easy fit in Boston. Hoping to stimulate higher quality and innovative design in the region, Design Biennial Boston was introduced during the dark economic days of 2008. Its mission is to showcase the distinctive work of emerging Boston architects, designers, and landscape architects. This past year, four younger firms were chosen to create an architectural statement in the form of a sculptural form. Were these pieces metaphorical or symbolic or something else?
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M.I.T.’s Memorial to Officer Sean Collier Front Page
Mundane Rather than Marvelous
By: - Jan 11th, 2016Seeming to be set in an empty MIT campus corner space, this memorial does not elicit a strongly felt aesthetic or visceral reaction. Perhaps, it was a prose statement expressed too soon rather than physical poetry done with more thought?
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The Pentalum at Lawn on D Front Page
A Marvelously Trippy Light Show
By: - Jan 10th, 2016A temporary structure set up for a few days by an English/French consortium that uses maze space and color to transform awareness and spatial sensation. This environment is just a lot of fun to experience--an aesthetically infused inflatable bouncy castle to the nth degree for the whole family. This was one of two exciting environmental art events produced at the Lawn on D (a park adjacent o the Boston & Convention Bureau in South Boston) in 2015.
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Patrick Dougherty's Stickwork Front Page
Architectural Sculpture That Interweaves Myth and Reality
By: - Jan 10th, 2016By weaving and intertwining branches and twigs, environmental artist Patrick Dougherty crafts primitive yet metaphorical structures around the world. These structures are at once mythic and primitive touching chords on our human instrument. A wonderful installation was set adjacent to the Peabody Essex Museum for several months in 2015. Rather than just closing, the environmental statement had begun to deteriorate back into its earlier natural form.
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Dazzling Architectural Allusions at the deCordova Front Page
Exploring Presence of Architecture in Contemporary Sculpture
By: - Jan 08th, 2016After years of a yard full of junk, the current curatorial staff at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum has cleaned up its act and created a wonderful sculpture environment. Architectural Allusions is a stunning exhibit underscoring architectural gesture as sculpture and sculptural form as architectural statement. Now, everybody wins.
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Strandbeests — Theo Jansen’s Divine Machinery Front Page
Kinetic "Living" Sculptures Delight at Peabody Essex Museum
By: - Jan 06th, 2016A thought-provoking life work by Dutch artist Theo Jansen that explores the notion of movement, robotics, nature and artificial intelligence. It is gracefully done with a smile and a deft touch. Here engineering becomes art, and art becomes fantasy and even myth.
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Finally Public Art Booming In Boston Front Page
Boston’s Visual Art Ethos Safe and Non-experimental Beginning to Change.
By: - Dec 30th, 2015For decades, no centuries, public art in Boston was a bronze statue of mostly historical men sometimes on horses. Unlike most contemporary cities, there were few and mostly small examples of public art sprinkled throughout the city and the region. The long time Mayor Menino regime was frightened of public art. Conservative institutions and universities seemed to ignore what was happening outside the region as well. Public art was something other cities invested in, but not Boston. However, the year 2015 began to demonstrate that there was a new flowering of public art. And about time, too!
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Curious Sound Object At Boston Cyberarts Gallery Front Page
Hearing and Seeing As Part of the Visual Arts Experience
By: - Dec 21st, 2015Visual art is evolving in wonderful technical directions. Boston Cyberarts is continuing to foster this development. A Fall 2015 exhibition showcased a whole group of artists working not only visually but auditorially. Hearing and seeing was believing.
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Frank Lloyd Wright's Stunning Theodore Baird House Front Page
The Only Wright Structure in Massachusetts Located in Amherst
By: - Dec 20th, 2015A hidden jewel in a wooded residential neighborhood of Amherst, MA, the Theodore Baird House By Frank Lloyd Wright is an early Usonian style residence built in 1939 for an Amherst College professor and his wife. It is a unique example of the flamboyant master architect's craft. It is an architectural icon by an architectual legend.
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Journey Poetically Documents a Decade of Travels Front Page
Urban Designer/Artist Mark Favermann's Critical Eye to the Built Environment
By: - Dec 02nd, 2015For the past several decades, photography has been a creative media for urban designer/artist Mark Favermann. However, he came to it rather late only starting to take pictures when he was 33. His current exhibit at Newbury College in Brookline, MA displays his critical and appreciative eye for architecture, environment and culturally relevant structures and details.
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A Confederacy of Dunces At Huntington Front Page
An Adaptation of the Picaresque Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel
By: - Nov 21st, 2015Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by John Kennedy Toole by Jeffrey Hatcher, A Confederacy of Dunces tells the episodic tale of Ignatius Reilly, a snobslob, of the most eccentric kind. Set in New Orleans in the early 1960s, there are many outstanding performances and fine stagecraft. But the novel seems to overwhelm the theatrical production. Worth seeing for the performances, but it is a work in progress.
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A Little Night Music Sparkles At Huntington Front Page
Sondheim's Vintage Show Couldn't Be Any Better
By: - Sep 22nd, 2015It is the lilting story of lovers reuniting with passions reigniting while new romances flower. Set around famous actress Desiree Armfeldt along with a cadre of unforgettable characters, this is a fabulous production on every level. The action is focused during an eventful weekend in the country. This is Maestro Stephen Sondheim’s most romantic and popular work. It features a sumptuous score infused with humor, warmth flavored by a waltz. Sondheim’s best known song, “Send in the Clowns” integrates exquisitely into the narrative. Brilliantly directed by Artistic Director Peter DuBois, this extraordinary musical already may be one of the best productions of the 2015-16 season.
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After All The Terrible Things I Do At Calderwood Theatre
Self-Loathing and Acceptance Emotionally Wrestle
By: - Jun 05th, 2015What makes ordinary people do terrible things? Daniel, a young, gay aspiring writer, seeks a fresh start and a new job at the local bookstore that he loved as a child. When he meets Linda, the Filipina-American bookshop owner, they discover a connection that goes deeper than a love of literature. Artistic Director Peter DuBois directs the New England premiere of A. Rey Pamatmat’s at times gripping and intimate new play about changing attitudes, forgiveness and second chances.
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Stickwork: Interweaving Myth and Reality Fine Arts
Temporal and Mystical Public Art at Peabody Essex Museum
By: - Jun 01st, 2015Enigmatically, sculptor Patrick Dougherty bends, weaves and flexes saplings into architectural sculptures that dynamically relate to the landscape and built environment. Over the last 30 years, he has created more than 250 works throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. Constructed from saplings collected by area volunteers, "What the Birds Know" provides a wonderful and viscerally accessible counterpoint to the highly finished wood-frame early 18th Century Crowninshield-Bentley House. This is the first time PEM has commissioned an outdoor sculptural installation. And the bar has been set very high.
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Boston CyberArts Reaches into the Public Domain Fine Arts
From Desktop to Laptop to Public Art
By: - May 26th, 2015Making digital art even more accessible, Boston Cyberarts is fostering major public art installations. This is art with virtually no boundaries. Founder George Fifield is the "godfather" of new art forms being computer-generated. Cyberarts is a 21st Century entity bringing new mediums to the masses.
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The Last Two People On Earth Sings at A.R.T. Theatre
An Apocalyptic Vaudeville Full of Fun and Despair
By: - May 20th, 2015Literally Apocalypse Wow, it’s the end of the world as we know it. A flood of biblical proportions leaves the earth with only two people. An always happy one and a mostly despairing one discover their common language is song and dance. Together they chronicle the rise and fall and hopeful rise again of humankind through music. Song and dance run the gamut from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim, and R.E.M. to Queen.
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Light Up the Sky Beacons Us to Theatrical Laughs Theatre
Comedic View of Putting On A Show
By: - May 19th, 2015Set in the Ritz-Carlton Boston in the late 1940s, Light Up the Sky is a backstage comedy about the eccentric, colorful artists and producers involved in breathing life into a Broadway-bound play. Here we witness that frightening moment of anticipation and terror just before an audience sees the opening performance. We view the grand, charismatic leading lady, the hopeful young playwright, the high-strung director, the boorish producer and his comical wife along with a monster mother in this affectionate, hilarious and even a bit corny look at what used to be referred to as the "legitimate" theatre. With a wonderful cast, it is an entertaining way to spend some time smiling in the dark.
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Janet Echelman's Dazzeling Aerial Sculpture Fine Arts
With This Project, Boston Has Become A Public Art Player
By: - May 17th, 2015A major piece of public art was floated above the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Downtown Boston. The scale, complexity and the fact that it was even done at all makes a clear statement that Boston has joined the 21st Century. The artwork by artist Janet Echelman is a strong indication that the sky is now literally the limit.
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