Museum of Fine Arts

About 2,500 years ago, the Acropolis of Athens was filled with statues of young women, called korai. Raised on high bases, these dedicated offerings created a forest of shimmering marble women honoring the goddess Athena. One of the finest examples of these objects, known as Kore 670, which rarely leaves the Acropolis Museum, has traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), where it is on view through January 8, 2024.

In a thoughtful introduction, Gadsden makes her case for Modernism, and then hones in on five wonderfully talented but quite different trailblazing industrial designers: Paul T. Frankl (1886-1958), Donald Deskey (1894-1989), Viktor Schreckengost (1906-2008), Harley J. Earl (1893-1969), and Belle Kogan (1902-2000).

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) visited Cape Ann initially at the invitation of his friend and fellow painter, Leon Kroll (1884-1974), and produced his first oil painting outdoors in the United States during that trip. The Whitney Museum is lending Hopper’s five oils painted in Gloucester in 1912, including Briar (sic) Neck, Gloucester (1912); Tall Masts (1912); Italian Quarter (1912); and Gloucester Harbor (1912). The exhibition will mark the first time these works have ever been shown together on Cape Ann.

Flynn has made hundreds, perhaps thousands of drawings over the last 50 years. Choosing just 50 (really 61) drawings is nearly an impossible task. William Flynn is an artist that spends days drawing. He finds ways to express the beauty in mundane objects; an old baseball mitt, ski boots, a bicycle that was run over and flattened, cars at junkyards, an old arm chair, pop-up books, whirly-gigs.

Now 82, at long last the Native American artist, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, is the subject of a retrospective at a major New York Museum. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from April 19 to August 13, 202

In 1923 Edward Hopper spent his second summer in Gloucester. He met and later married the artist Josephine Nivison. That summer he painted several pictures and created a number of water colors. They worked side by side. A century later, on the occasion of Gloucester 400 Plus their work will be on view at the Cape Ann Museum.

Cicely Carew, Venetia Dale, and Yu-Wen Wu have been named the recipients of the 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition. Their exhibition at the ICA, on view August 24–January 2, will encompass a wide range of media—from sculpture and installation to time-based media and works on paper.

In 2015 I wrote a book of poetry, Shards of a Life, which was launched with a reading and dialogue with director, Susan Wissler, at Edith Wharton's The Mount. It was an auspicious beginning. Each winter other books of poetry and oral history followed. There was a disruption in 2021 entailing recovery from spinal surgery. The eighth book, Annisquam: Pip and Me Coming of Age, is on track for a Spring/ Summer release.

Concurrent solo exhibits at Boston's Moakley Courthouse, present new abstract watercolors by Erica H. Adams and abstract Lexan wall reliefs by Marjorie Minkin that share transparency, color-light and layers that reveal content.    

The realist painter Alfred Leslie had a major impact on the Boston Art World. In 1976 he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. He also commuted to teach at the Boston University School of Fine Arts.

This major exhibition is the first dedicated to Hopper’s formative development on Cape Ann, marking the centennial of the pivotal summer of 1923 when Edward Hopper and his future wife, Josephine “Jo” Nivison, visited Gloucester. Edward Hopper & Cape Ann opens on Hopper’s birthday, July 22, 2023, and runs through October 16, 2023, and is presented in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, the major repository of the Hoppers’ work.

Thanks to the popularity of the instantly recognizable Great Wave—cited everywhere from book covers and Lego sets to anime and emoji—Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) has become one of the most famous and influential artists in the world. This major exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), takes a new approach to the work of the versatile master.

The artist Marjorie Minkin divides time between Boston and the Eclipse Mill in North Adams. Her Lexans have been shown in galleries and museums in MA, NYC, LA, Michigan, Canada, France, Belgium, Germany and Seoul. This is the first time a solo installation will be shown in Boston.  The work will be exhibited in the Atrium gallery at the Moakley Federal Courthouse in Boston from January 5th through March 30th, 2023.

The works in On the Town celebrate city life and community, illuminating a Boston area of the past through the vision of one of its more unique residents. Arnold Trachtman’s paintings tell stories and reveal an artist as deeply invested in his neighborhood as it was in him.  

Her father, an artist, took the poet Eve Rifkah to the Museum of Fine Arts. There the young girl became intrigued by Suzanna Valadon the model for Renoir's stunning Bal a Bougival. She has written a book of verse comprising conversations with and about herself and the legendary artist/ model. Our paths crossed at Manship Artists Residency.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, presents the first exhibition in the Americas dedicated to the art of Michaelina Wautier (1614–1689), a painter from Brussels all but forgotten until the recent rediscovery of her work.

Ellen Schön’s New Directions Home, her second solo exhibition at Boston Sculptors Gallery, features two discreet series of new ceramic sculpture. Inspired by diverse cultural traditions, Schön employs both ancient and contemporary technologies in her sculptural interpretations.  

Through January 29 the Institute of Contemporary Art is displayng a gallery with 11 totemic ceramic standing figures by Rose B. Simpson. A graduate of RISD she grew up in a culture noted for its distinctive pottery created by her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, her late grandmother, Rina Swentzell and her late great-grandmother, Rose Naranjo.

In 1936 Henry Luce bought Life Magazine and transformed it into a publication where pictures told the story. At his command to convey a narrow white supremacist fantasy of America's global dominance he employed the legendary photo journalists of his generation. Luce also published Time Magazine, Fortune Magazine and later Sports Illustrated. With a weekly circulation in the millions Life initially had a cover price of ten cents which at that time got you a cup of coffee. LIFE Magazine and the Power of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts captures its essence with an engaging but ultimately disappointing exhibition.

For the first time presidential paintings are by and of people of color. Kehinde Wiley’s depicted President Barack Obama and Amy Sherald painted Michelle. In the last of five stops the tour of portraits ends at the Museum of Fine Arts on October 30.

Through September 18 the Clark Art Institute is presenting the blockbuster exhibition Rodin in the United States: Confronting the Modern. More documentary than retrospective it tells the tale of Rodin in America and his great collectors. All but one of the 50 sculptures and 25 drawings are loans from American museums and private collections. This is the must see exhibition of summer in the Berkshires.

This summer, the Cape Ann Museum presents a special exhibition of works by contemporary artist Vincent Castagnacci. Notes from a Quarry will focus on Castagnacci’s drawings and paintings from the mid-2000s to the present, pulling in earlier works that reflect the strong influence Cape Ann has had—and continues to have—on the artist.

In August, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), is unveiling two newly renovated galleries for Italian Renaissance art as well as a newly renovated French Salon, an opulent setting for nearly 100 highlights from the MFA's Elizabeth Parke Firestone and Harvey S. Firestone, Jr. Collection of French silver.

Portia Gwen Harcus, 88, of Boston, passed away Thursday, July 14, 2022. Graveside services at Sharon Memorial Park, 40 Dedham St., Sharon, MA on Sunday, July 17, 2022 at 9:45 am.

The Peabody Essex Museum has long collected Native American material and is now doing so intensively. In that regard it is an outlier. Contemporary Native American artists have been egregiously neglected by the mainstream American art world — we lag far behind Canada. The PEM has just reinstalled its American collection, which runs from the Colonial era to the present, and it is an ambitious, intriguing, but problematic exhibition.