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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Controversial Design By Maya Lin For Newport, RI Architecture
Park Memorial to Doris Duke Sparks Heated Debate
By: - Apr 24th, 2012The most famous memorial designer of our time, Maya Lin, was commissioned to create a place to celebrate the contributions of philanthropist Doris Duke in traditional Newport, RI. The Queen Anne Square project has brought criticism and upset to several prominent members of the Newport community. The controversy and tension among the old guard has shaken up the notion of what fits and does not fit in venerable Newport. Last December (2011), the Newport City Council approved the $3.6 million privately funded design. It will be completed by early summer.
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Brilliant The Luck of the Irish At Huntington Theatre
A Compelling Boston Story Extended to May 6
By: - Apr 10th, 2012This is the World Premiere of a play about the tricky process of breaking the rules of segregated house ownership by means of a ghost or straw buyer . When an upwardly mobile African-American family wanted to buy a house in an all-white neighborhood of 1950s Boston, they often paid a struggling Irish family to act as their front. Fifty years later, the Irish family asks for "their" house back. Moving back and forth across the two eras, this intimate new play explores the complex impact of racial integration in Boston, the notion of benevolent fraud and the universal longing for property, house and home. Do not miss this wonderfully crafted play!
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ICA Announces Summer 2012 Programs Theatre
Performance, Events and Talks
By: - Apr 10th, 2012The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) presents performing arts programming at its Boston Harbor location for Summer 2012. Programming includes perennial summer favorites Talking Taste, Harborwalk Sounds, and DJs on the Harbor, plus dance performances and the return of Experiment, bringing 50 writers, dancers, actors, and performers to the museum for an immersive theatrical experience.
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The Temperamentals At Lyric Stage Company Theatre
A Clever Story of 50s Pioneering Gay Rights
By: - Apr 05th, 2012This hit off-Broadway play tells the story of two men, the communist Harry Hay and the Viennese refugee and fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, as they fall in love while forming the first gay-rights organization in the pre-Stonewall United States. "Temperamental" was a necessary code word in the early 1950s for Gay or Queer. Few were out in the open and there was an underlying danger (societal, political and legal) of being honestly homosexual.
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Architect Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe At 126 Architecture
A Modernism Founder Reconsidered
By: - Mar 29th, 2012Considered one of the true pioneers and early practitioners of Modernism or the International Style, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe has influenced several generations of architects and designers. Mies work was ridiculed and reacted against. At the worst, it was soulless design; at the best, it was corporate American architecture, the sleek style of the establishment. Today, Mies work is being reassessed. Perhaps less is sometimes more?
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August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom Theatre
First Play Brilliantly Completes Huntington's Cycle
By: - Mar 17th, 2012With wonderful performances, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is one of the 10 play Cycle by playwright August Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of the 20th Century African-American experience. Set in Chicago in the 1920s, it is an ambitious discourse about race, art, God and religion along with exploitation of black recording artists. This fact based drama is brilliantly performed and produced-- a must see.
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Goethe-Institut Boston Film Series Film
Cutting Edge German Language Films At Coolidge
By: - Mar 12th, 2012Adding to the world class film banquet of greater Boston, the Goethe-Institut Boston and the Coolidge Corner Theatre have partnered to present provocative new films from Germany highlighting young directors who, with their first or second features, demonstrate that there is more to New German Cinema than just the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others. Monthly Sunday Matinees showcase a sampling of new and award-winning German films rarely shown outside Europe.
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The Real Romney, A Questionable Political Drama Word
Boston Globe Insider Series At The Boston Athenaeum
By: - Mar 06th, 2012The Late Former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox once said. "The problem with the Georgia Prison System was the quality of the prisoners." This is like the current Republican Primary season. On March 5, there was a forum at the Boston Athenaeum to discuss The Real Romney, a 400 page tome about the former governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The political drama was in the retelling of the facts and focus.
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Viggo Mortensen Receives Coolidge Award Film
Independent/Mainstream Film Star Honored for Acting
By: - Mar 06th, 2012For the past nine years, the Coolidge Corner Theatre has honored outstanding artists for contributions to the film industry. This year's recipient, Viggo Mortensen, is the consummate actor's actor who women are attracted to and men admire, playing killers to kings, hippies to Freud. Wonderful actor, wonderful man and a wonderful event.
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Isamu Noguchi, Poetic Sculptor/Designer Design
Erasing The Line Between Form and Function
By: - Feb 26th, 2012The line between what is art and what is design is a wonderful area of connected delight. The late Isamu Noguchi was one of the greatest practitioners of this hybrid form usually as creative functional sculpture. His elegant furniture and furnishings are still in production and cherished today. His minimalist abstract sculpture are still strong statements of his eloquent visual language. Noguchi erased the line between form and function.
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Time Stands Still At Lyric Stage Company Theatre
Couple Wrestles With Relationships And Events
By: - Feb 20th, 2012Hailed as one of the best new plays on Broadway, Time Stands Still is the story of Sarah, a photojournalist, and James, a foreign correspondent, who are picking up the pieces of their lives after a recent brush with death while fighting with their own individual humanity. With excellent acting, this production looks at intense lives in our contemporary turbulent time.
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Panoramic Wild Swans At American Rep Theatre Theatre
Visually Spectacular But Problematic Drama
By: - Feb 17th, 2012Based upon Jung Chang's 20th Century family memoir, A.R.T.'s presentation of Wild Swans is visually stunning but dramatically flat. The drama follows three generations of a family of strong-willed women facing the political and social problems of the Chinese Communist regime the late 1940s through the exploding urbanization after Mao's death. Needing polishing and a better ending, this drama has theatricality and epic proportions that can be built upon.
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The Esplanade Vision Unveiled Architecture
Vision To Make Esplanade Best Park in The World
By: - Feb 13th, 2012It is where the Boston Pops play on July 4th each year. The 101 year old beautiful 2.5 mile linear waterside park hugging the Charles River has been in part loved, if not to death, then to decrepitude. It needs to be enhanced-- refreshed, refurbished and restored. With this in mind, a number of like-minded designers led by The Esplanade Association decided to do something about it. After 25 months and countless hours of research, design and meetings, the Esplanade 20/20 vision is finally unveiled.
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New Gardner Museum Expands Isabella's Mission Architecture
Brilliant Architectural Addition By Renzo Piano
By: - Jan 15th, 2012The gleaming new wing at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum demonstrates how great design can preserve a historic structure. Through great vision, hard work and patient persistence, Executive Director Anne Hawley, her staff and board worked over seven years to complete a brilliant reconfiguration of a venerable art institution. Starchitect Renzo Piano masterfully created a gem.
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God of Carnage Lays Witty Waste at Huntington Theatre Theatre
A Comedy of Good Intentions but Bad Manners
By: - Jan 11th, 2012Two upper middle class couples meet to negotiate the damage done by one couple's eleven year old hitting the others' eleven year old with a stick. Add wit and today's lifestyles and the result is comedic carnage. The play goes from a polite discussion of child rearing and soon escalates into verbal fireworks. Award winning God of Carnage lays waste to each of the four characters and our notions of parenting. It should be seen and heard.
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Red Masterpiece at SpeakEasy Stage Company Theatre
Thomas Derrah Channels Mark Rothko
By: - Jan 08th, 2012Winner of six 2010 Tony Awards including Best Play, Red is a glowing colorful portrait of an artist’s ego, ambition and vulnerability. After he lands the biggest commission in the history of modern art, first generation abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko begins work on a series of large paintings (murals) assisted by a new young artist assistant. What takes place between the two men is a master class on the methods and purpose of art and the dynamic relationship between an artist, his creations and his life purpose.
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Superior Donuts Delicious At Lyric Stage Company Theatre
Tasty Comedy/Drama Food For Thought
By: - Jan 08th, 2012Set in a shabby Chicago neighborhood, a downtrodden former hippy donut shop owner hires a street-savvy aspiring young writer with hustle and bright ideas. Elegantly directed by Spiro Veloudos, this is a play full of pathos, laughs and compelling characters. Written by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of August: Osage County, this drama mixes the challenge of embracing one's past with the redemptive power of friendship. This is a must see and tell your friends comedy/drama.
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Eva Zeisel, Ceramic Designer Dies At 105 Design
A Playful Search For Beauty
By: - Dec 31st, 2011Eva Zeisel, one of the most influential industrial designers of the 20th Century who created beautifully lyrical yet practical tableware and ceramics, has died at the amazing age of 105. Zeisel estimated that she had designed 100,000 pieces of tableware. Many of her elegant curving organic pieces often appeared to have human qualities, particularly in the way they tended to hug and nestle. These playful, simple designs first produced in the 1940s are still popular.
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Movie Mania Film
Major Films In Seasonal Abundance
By: - Dec 27th, 2011Starting around Thanksgiving, filmmakers and studios start showing there wares for consideration of major recognition and box office rewards. Some years there are just a few notable movies. For some reason, this 2011 holiday season there are many. Looking at some of the major cinema presentations, there is something for everyone and probably a lot more than was expected. These few holiday weeks collectively have been like a film festival of good movies.
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MFA Boston Fills Void By African American Artists Fine Arts
Acquisitions From John Axelrod Collection
By: - Dec 26th, 2011Greatly strengthening an extremely thin area of its American collection, the Boston MFA acquisition of works by major African-American artists includes 67 works from collector John Axelrod. Now the Boston institution holds one of the major groupings of African-American Art anywhere. Axelrod is selling the works to the MFA at below market values, between $5 million and $10 million.
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Christmas Memories Opinion
Recollections of a Non-Participant
By: - Dec 25th, 2011With thoughts of hope and joy, peace on earth and good will to men, sugar plums and candy canes, Mark Favermann tells how he has over the decades celebrated Christmas, a holiday that he really does not celebrate.
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Vaclav Havel Dead At 75 People
Czech Playwright, Poet, Dissident Conscience and President
By: - Dec 18th, 2011George Abbott White met and admired Vaclav Havel, and Havel's death has brought back memories of Havel's impact not only on the Czech Republic democracy but even more so on his historic contribution to his time and place.
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From Train Tracks to A Public Art Walk Design
Newburyport's Triumphant Clipper City Rail Trail
By: - Dec 17th, 2011After 11 years of planning, meetings, grantsmanship, engineering oversight and curating public art, Geordie Vining established the Clipper City Rail Trail on the west side of the City of Newburyport, MA. He took an unused Boston & Maine railroad right of way and created a walking, jogging and biking pathway that was enhanced by public art. The result is a true pride of place.
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Lynda Benglis Sculpture Added to RISD Collection Fine Arts
RISD Museum Announces Art Donation By Bank of America
By: - Dec 12th, 2011The Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design announced a significant donation from Bank of America. Pleiades (1982), an important wall-relief sculpture by American artist Lynda Benglis, was recently added to the Museum's collection.
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Eames Film Opens MFA's Architectural Series Film
Architecture & Design Is Focus of Four Documentaries
By: - Dec 10th, 2011A series of four films about contemporary architecture and design is now being shown at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Including in the program are an interesting range of design, architectural practice and national attitudes. Beginning with a film about multidimensional designers Charles and Ray Eames, the next three films focus upon more architecturally-oriented subjects, the UK's Lord Norman Foster, Atlanta-based John Portman and the story of the on/off architecture for the Cuban National School of the Arts.
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