Museum of Fine Arts

From 1989 to 1993 Matthew Teitelbaum was an ICA curator under director Milena Kalinovska. On August 2, after some 22 years at the Art Gallery of Ontario, he will take over as the 11th director of the Museum of Fine Arts. It is anticipated that he will bring a more welcoming management style than the autocratic Malcolm Rogers who cleaned house and instilled fear in the staff under the mantra of One Museum.

Recently the Clark Art Institute completed a $145 million expansion and renovation following the master plan of Tadao Ando. Now 69 the director Michael Conforti will retire this summer following 20 years in Williamstown. Widely regarded as one of America's finest mid size regional museums on his watch the endowment grew from $128 million to $357 million.

Recently Kenworth Moffett posted a succinct account of his theoretical views and tenure as founding curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine arts. This is part one of a followup interview with Moffett. Here we explore his education at Columbia and Harvard as well as a unique relationship with Clement Greenberg the leading critic of his generation.

Conceptual artist and merry prankster, Jay Critcholey, will have his first museum retrospective at the Provincetown Art Associatrion and Museum from May 1 through June 21. it will present an ove view of three decades of work and residence as a humorous activist in the renowned artists colony. Through his inventive annual events such as Provincetown Harbor Swim for Life Critchley has been instrumental in raising some $4 million for a variety of charities that benefit the community.

For the past decade Edmund Barry Gaither has been primarily focused on developing a mixed use parcel in Roxbury which will include a new home for the National Center for African American Artists. That has entailed suspending his projects as an adjunct curator to the Museum of Fine ares and maintaining NCAAA as a skeletal operation in a 19th century former mansion in Roxbury. Despite many setbacks he hopes to get the museum up and running in the next couple of years. This is the second and final part of a dialogue with Gaither..

While a graduate student at Brown University, in 1970, the art historian Edmund Barry Gaither was recruited for a shared appointment as adjunct curator of the Museum of Fine Arts and working with Elma Lewis as director of the National Center for African American Artists. He still holds those positions. In this first part of an extensive interview Gaither describes jumping in to curate the major MFA exhibition African American Artists from New York and Boston. He was soon multi- tasking while being pressured by a diverse range of individuals and groups.

In 1973 the studio of Dana C. Chandler, Jr. was looted with most of his work destroyed. The studio was then torched. He was assisted by a dean of Northeastern to find adequate space. That led to establishing the African American Master Artist-in-Residence Program (AAMARP). It continues to exist although Chandler relocated to New Mexico where he has lived for the past decade.

The protest artist Dana C. Chandler, Jr. was an activist who charged the Museum of Fine Arts with institutional racism. That initiated the special exhibition African American Artists from New York and Boston and the appointment of its curator, Edmund Gaither, as an adjunct curator of the MFA. Chandler was later instrumental in forming African American Master Artist-In-Residence Program for Northeastern University. This is the first of a two part interview with the artist.

When Thomas Messer served as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston there was a plan to merge it as a department of the Museum of Fine Arts. This was confirmed when I asked him about it during an unrelated press conference. Belinda Rathbone also found related documents in the MFA archives when researching her book The Boston Raphael. Related to his time at the ICA these are excerpts from an extensive interview with Messer in the public domain at the Archives of American Art.

In 1970, on the occasion of its centennial, the MFA commissioned Walter Muir Whitehill, a trustee, to write its two volume history. Some 44 years later The Boston Raphael by Belinda Rathbone is the only published update examining that venerable Boston institution. In an extensive interview we have examined the legacy of her father as well as probed into issues and conundrums that were thoroughly researched but beyond the scope and agenda of her book. This is the third and final installment of that dialogue.

In this installment of an extensive interview the pratfalls of modern and contemporary art in Boston are explored. It was a peripheral topic in Belinda Rathbone's biography of her father, former MFA director, Perry T. Rathbone.

The Boston Raphael is the first major book on the Museum of Fine Arts since Walter Muir Whitehill's centennial history in 1970. This is part one of an in dept interview with biographer Belinda Rathbone about the New York Times best selling profile of her father, former MFA director, Perry T. Rathbone.

In August of 2010 Sidewalk Sam was on hand, at the invitation of Gail and Phil Sellers of Art About Town, to create one of his renowned public art projects on Holden Street.During a Boston blizzard yesterday he died in his sleep. We first met the artist as an activist and prankster in the 1970s.

The Open Call NNE (North Northeast) at Brattleboro Museum & Arts Center will be on view to February 7, 2015. During the breakfast opening we were pleased to encounter artists we haven't seen for decades. The Vermont kuhsthalle featured several simultaneous exhibitions including celebrity photographs by senator Patrick Leahy.

After giving away more than 50,000 artworks by Andy Warhol and making approximately a quarter of a billion dollars in cash grants, the Warhol Foundation is now approaching its 30th anniversary with a renewed focus on grant-making programs, as seen in the grassroots activity it is seeding through Common Field and the exhibitions resulting from its last round of gifts.

During the 1960s I was an intern in the Egyptian Department and Jim Jacobs worked in the Classical Department. In the decades since the MFA we have remained friends back in the day celebrating holidays in the Berkshires. Recently we met to discuss his career from classicist to artist and then private art dealer. He started working for Charles Alan and Leo Castelli. In particular he was close to the sculptors John Chamberlain and Donald Judd We discussed minimal and pop art as well as the museums Dia Beacon, Mass MoCA, Chinati and Judd Foundations.

At the age of 28 Kara Walker won a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Now middle aged she has enjoyed success with work focusing on ante bellum slavery and more recently the triangle trade in slaves, molasses and rum. Our critique about her show at Sikkema Jenkins Gallery has more to do with marginal execution than its polemical subject matter.

Jane Eaglen and Greer Grimsley with a student orchestra led by Robert Spano put on an incendiary performance of Act III of Wagner's "Die Walkure." The big question remains: when will Boston get a proper opera house?

The Boston Raphael by Belinda Rathbone is the first book to focus on the Museum of Fine Arts since the two volume official centennial history by Walter Muir Whitehill in 1970. She writes about the scandal that brought disgrace to her father's brilliant career. This attempt to rehabilitate his reputation also provides a rich and compelling overview of the era in which he was the paradigm of a successful museum director.

James Turrell is best known for developing Roden Crater in Arizona as an epic scaled celestial observatory and light work. The project is incomplete and not accessible to visitors. But it is the heart and soul of work that is world renowned. In 2013 there was a touring retrospective of his work. The approximate scale of that exhibition, some 32,000 square feet, will be used for a 25-year-long Turrell installation at Mass MoCA.

Jay Milder came of age during the Second Generation of the New York School as one of the seminal Figurative Expressionist painters and one of the SoHo loft pioneers. Today Milder's influence on painting is widespread and he has been cited as influence of both Neo-Expressionism in the United States and the graffiti art movement in Brazil.

Recently we were among the 1.3 million annual visitors to the Getty Center in California. The Richard Meier designed complex opened in 1997 at a cost of some $1.3 billion. While spectacular in scale and cliff top site the museum is oddly generic displaying a thin permanent collection with a handful of very expensive acquisitions through some curatorial hanky panky.

Through October 13 the new special exhition galleries of the Clark Art Instiute feature Make It New: Abstract Painting from the National Gallery of Art 1950-1975. This is part two of a dialogue with Clark curator David Breslin who worked with Harry Cooper of the National Gallery. We discussed how this changes art history and the impact of the exhibition on showing modern art in the Berkshires.

The Barons of England forced King John to sign Magna Carta in 1215. It limited his Divine Rights and created a Constitutional Monarchy laying a foundation of British Common Law and the eventual creation of Parliament. A less than perfect document it was annuled a few months later then revived several times in later years. One of only four copies of the original document is on display as the special exhibiton Radical Words: From Magna Carta to the Constitution on view at the Clark Art Institute through November 1.

Magna Carta comes to the Clark courtesy of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral as part of the United Kingdom’s preparations for celebrating the document’s 800th anniversary in 2015. The Lincoln Cathedral Exemplar of Magna Carta is widely regarded as the finest extant copy of the document due to the fact that it is written in an ‘official’ hand and has remained at Lincoln since the time of its first issue.