Museum of Modern Art

The MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston present the first museum survey of the work of media art pioneer Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984). Surveying the artist's remarkable body of work in collage, experimental film, performance, participatory, and computer-generated art over several decades, Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom highlights the artist's pivotal contributions to today's media-based artistic practices.

A major exhibition of Walker Evans' photographs is currently being shown at Highgate Gallery in North London. University of East Anglia cultural historian Eric Homberger gave a lecture about the photographer and some of his most famous pieces. His speech gave a thorough interpretation, warts and all, of the prickly but precise photographic master.

In certain aspects of its collection, Old Kingdom Egypt and Asiatic Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is a world class museum. With the creation of the Art of the Americas wing the museum hopes to rank second to none among American museums. But, as the Bard would say, "What's in a name?" A closer look reveals formidable depth and glaring gaps in the attempt to cover 3,000 years of art on two continents.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum announces the nominees for Rob Pruitt’s 2010 Art Awards, the second annual celebration honoring the notable individuals, exhibitions, and projects that have made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art during the past year. Awards in 14 categories will be presented at a fundraising event to benefit the Guggenheim Foundation and visual arts non-profit White Columns on Wednesday, December 8, 2010, at the nightclub and music venue Webster Hall.

Compared to Sweeney Todd the second production of the season at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield is as different as black and white. Well, more white on white actually. The Tony Award winning play by Yazmina Reza, Art, focuses on the divisive responses of two friends to a collector's acquisition of a minimalist painting. The evening of theater brings out the worst in everyone. To the amused delight of audiences.

Lester Johnson, who died recently at 91, was one of the leading artists of the Figurative Expressionist movement which developed in the 1950s and early 1960s. Much of this activity occurred at the Sun Gallery in Provincetown as well as in New York. The two other primary artists were Jan Muller who died in 1958 and Bob Thompson who was 29 when he died in 1966. Although there was no direct connection Figurative Expressionism saw related developments in San Francisco and Chicago. The movement was pushed aside with the emergence of Pop art then reformulated as Rhino Horn from 1967 to 1978.

Jacob’s Pillow kicks off Festival 2010 on June 19 with the Season Opening Gala, the world-renowned dance organization’s biggest annual fundraising event. Following an exclusive Gala performance in the Ted Shawn Theatre and the presentation of the prestigious Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award to choreographer and director Bill T. Jones, guests are treated to dinner and dancing to live music. This evening is widely celebrated as a signature summer event in the Berkshires and attracts a multitude of dance lovers, celebrities, government dignitaries, and visitors from around the world every year.

Originally constructed in the 1930s to lift dangerous freight trains off Manhattan's streets, the High Line is an abandoned elevated train track. When completed, this piece of dormant infrastructure will be a 1.5 mile public park running through Manhattan's Lower West Side neighborhoods. Created as an integrated landscape, designed by landscape architects James Corner Field Operations, with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the High Line combines meandering concrete pathways with naturalistic plantings. It is already an urban jewel.

Every three years, the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt has its Triennial. Every three years, it is a mix of truly good sometimes great design along with examples of eccentric sometimes simple-minded objects and systems. The jurying process has always been questionable and less than transparent. Too often it seems friends of friends are chosen. This year the Tricentennial of the Unites States' design museum has gone global with designs from both emerging and industrialized countries. No other country's design museum would feature foreign designers. Instead, they would celebrate their own country's best design and designers. In addition, the exhibit is rather strangely laid out, captioned to confuse and badly focused. Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

Jack Tworkov: Against Extremes / Five Decades of Painting is curated by Jason Andrew and presented in association with the Estate of Jack Tworkov. This major retrospective offers an extraordinary opportunity to experience many of the artist's most celebrated canvases. The exhibition includes important loans from private and public collections including The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN). The show also features rarely exhibited works from the artist's estate, as well as works from Provincetown Art Association and Museum's own permanent collection.

Emily Fisher Landau, the noted philanthropist and art collector, and one of themost generous Whintny trustees, has made an important gift of 367 works of art, including works from the Fisher Landau Center for Art, that have been pledged to the Whitney Museum of American Art. The gift comprises works by nearly one hundred key figures in American art, including Carl Andre, Richard Artschwager, Carroll Dunham, William Eggleston, Peter Hujar, Jasper Johns, Glenn Ligon, Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Rothenberg, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, and Andy Warhol.

Dr. Lakra, is a renowned tattoo artist who lives and works in Mexico. Under his pseudonym, loosely translating as Dr. Delinquent, he draws (tattoos) over vintage printed materials and found objects rather than skin, manipulating images of pin-up girls, 1940s Mexican businessmen, Mexican professional masked wrestlers or luchadores, and Japanese sumo wrestlers. Playful, witty, rather sleazy, and often intentionally vulgar, his work challenges social norms by blurring cultural identities and art forms. Included at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) are works presented from a variety of series and a newly-commissioned mural.

Petah Coyne's baroque works, delicately combining tinted, waxed flowers and taxidermy, will rise up from the floor, and hanging sculptures will descend from the ceiling, taking full advantage of the multiple vantage points of MASS MoCA's vast gallery spaces. The exhibition titled Everything That Rises Must Converge (after a short story by Flannery O'Connor) will open at Mass MoCA on Saturday, May 29, with an opening reception from 5-7 PM.

Artist/composer Christian Marclay (b. 1955), known for the distinctive fusion of sound and image in his art, is the subject of a major exhibition this summer at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Activated by daily musical performances, the show explores Marclay's approach to the world around him with a particular focus on his graphic scores. Approximately fifty renowned instrumentalists and vocalists, some of whom have collaborated regularly with the artist over the course of the past three decades, are scheduled to interpret the scores exhibited, enabling museum audiences to experience Marclay's work brought to life. The exhibition curated by David Kiehl opens on July 1 and remains on view until September 26.

It seems that some visitors to the Marina Abramovic retrospective, which features nude performance artists, have not been well behaved. Vigilant security guards have ejected individuals caught groping the models. But we were surprised to find the exhibition, one of the most provocative in decades, curiously unarousing. Nude bodies? Endurance? Pain? Ho hum.

During the opening gala of Jacob's Pillow on June 19 the dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones will receive the festival's Fourth Annual award. Jones won a Tony Award for Spring Awakening and is the director of Fela a musical which is now on Broadway. The Jacob's Pillow award comes with a prize of $25,000.

This summer the Whitney Museum of American Art focuses on the work of the visionary artist Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) in an exhibition curated by acclaimed sculptor Robert Gober. Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield features more than one hundred watercolors, drawings, and paintings from private and public collections, as well as selections from Burchfield's journals, sketches, scrapbooks, and correspondence.

Tania Bruguera's work in "On The Political Imaginary," an exhibition on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase, brings together many powerful statements through the use of both live performance and installation. The first survey of the artist's interdisciplinary work focuses on the relationship among art, politics, and life.

The Neue Galerie in New York organized the first American retrospective of the German artist Otto Dix (1891-1969). The exhibition traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal. While the New York installation was widely viewed as a mess the exhibition had a profound impact. Many critics and publications list the Dix survey as among the best exhibitions of 2010.

The low key, scaled back, modest and manageable Whitney Biennial 2010 curated by Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari has been dubbed the Obama Biennial. He is even on the cover. The Whitney has used this occasion to reflect on its history and critical reception since the series started in 1932. It begs questions about its mandate, the status of American art, and its relationship to a former partner, the Museum of Modern Art.

The London hit Red by John Logan, starring Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko, and Eddie Redmayne as his assistant Ken originated at the tiny Donmar Warehouse. It has been restaged at the Golden Theatre. It is one of the best new plays on Broadway this season.

Peter Gelb,in a brilliant stroke, brings together Dimitri Shostakovich and William Kentridge at the Metropolitan Opera. The Nose had sixteen productions in Russia and then vanished. One critic noted a new musical language based on rhythm and timbre, rather than arias and cantilenas, everyday speech is set in music.

Recently the Museum of Fine Arts acquired three paintings by the African American artist Felrath Hines. For most of his career he worked as a framer and then as one of America's foremost painting restorers. After his death in 1993 he was twice shown at New York's June Kelly Gallery. Works from the estate have been acquired by major art museums.

Filmmaker John Waters will converse with artist Roni Horn. It is but one of the many events planned for the Winter/Spring at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art.

In the art world equivalent of musical chairs Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art has snatched its new chief curator, Helen Molesworth, from Harvard. Not long ago the ICA lost a young curator, Jen Mergel, to the MFA. What next in these musical chairs with an empty seat at Harvard which has put on indefinite hold its plans for a new modern/ contemporary museum.