Museum of Modern Art

The designer of the first laptop computer (1980) Bill Moggridge was named Director of the Smithsonian's New York based Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the National Design Museum. He is the first designer to be given this administrative post. After a wonderful career designing strategic elements for a rapidly changing technological society, he will be attempting to add depth and breath to a museum that should better reflect our aesthetic as well as functional past, present and future. However, will the skills of the master designer resonate as a museum administrator or Smithsonian bureaucrat?

Yet again Lynda Benglis is experimenting with materials. The artist recently showed a series of new relief sculptures at Cheim & Read in Chelsea. She is the subject of a retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, through January 24. The exhibition is scheduled to tour in the United States.

The Bauhaus 1919-1933 was the most influential school of avant-garde art and design in the 20th Century. It is famous for its faculty, students and its extraordinary cross discipline conversation about thee nature of art in the modern age. MoMA's exhibit is probably the best presentation ever organized about the quality, craft and depth of this visual and cultural dialogue. There is much to learn and see here. It should not be missed.

The Baroness Hilla Rebay and her patron Solomon R. Guggehneim visited the Bauhaus studio of Vasily Kandinsky in 1930. The acquisition of his work was the basis of the Museum of Non Objective Art which opened in 1939 with Rebay as director. In 1952 it was renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and 50 years ago it opened its Wright building. This spectacular Kandinsky exhibition celebrates that history.

Jay Milder has long been a powerful and influential artist in the New York art scene. His third show at Lohin-Geduld, showcases his colorful and mystical recent work.

At 75, sitting in a wheelchair paralyzed by an unknown virus several years ago, Michael Graves ruminated on his education and career at his 50th reunion at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. This was a personal journey of the kid from Indianapolis to the architecture professor at Princeton emeritus, Target's object maker, Post Modern's pater and Corot-like painter.

The theatrical lighting designer, Julie Seitel, has curated the exhiition "Illuminati" at the Eclipse Mill Gallery in North Adams, Mass. The switched on theme includes the light artists: Brian Jewett, Marjorie Minkin, John Powell and Richard Harrington as well as Seitel's pieces. It is one of the best shows of the Berkshire summer season.

James Ensor was Belgium's greatest modern painter. MoMA treats us to a diverse look at a unique master painter. A rare chance to encounter the works in depth. With its fantasy mix of macabre elements he anticipated Expressioniam and Surrealism. His work continues to be an influence for young figurative/ exprssionst painters.

When Igor Stavinsky's ballet "Le Sacre du Printemps," with choreography by Vaslav Nijinski, premiered in Paris with the Ballets Russes on May 29, 1913 it provoked a riot. A light attendance for James Levine conducting at Tanglewood indicates that after almost a century it is still a hard sell. Judging by a standing ovation and encore it was clear that much of the audience had come to hear violinist Christian Tarzlaff perform Brahms.

Along with architecture, since the 1930's, the Museum of Modern Art has been a showcase for the best designs in furniture, appliance, textile, graphic and functional object design. With the supervision of Edgar Kaufmann Jr, MoMA featured highest levels of contemporary design through competitions, museum shows and traveling exhibitions. However, through the years, controversy has followed choices and selections in terms of critiques of elitism and crass commercialism.

One of the first major buildings constructed after German reunification, the Jewish Museum (Judisches Museum Berlin), was, after winning a competition, designed by prominent and often controversial architect Daniel Libeskind. One of the foremost proponents of Deconstructivist theory, Libeskind illustrates this design approach by the museum's architecture. The museum exhibits are underwhelming and somewhat confusing, but the museum structure is daring and compelling.

Drawing on great depth in its collection the Williams College Museum of Art, from July 18 through September 20, will present "Prendergast in Italy." The exhibition features works by Maurice Prendergast (American, 1858–1924). The exhibition will be accompanied by a major catalogue and will travel internationally.

While teaching at the Metropolitan College of Boston University, where he chairs the Arts Administration program, Daniel Ranalli became intrigued by the palimpsests left on blackboards by professors. He began to photograph these serendipitous texts. Later they were manipulated to form the Chalkboard Series which is on view at Gallery Kayafas in Boston. He also shows with artSTRAND Gallery in Provincetown.

Music Director James Levine conducts a new production of Tosca on Opening Night as well as four other operas Many of the world's greatest singers are featured in new roles. Debuts include conductors Pierre Boulez, Riccardo Muti, Andris Nelsons, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Esa-Pekka Salonen; directors Pierre Audi, Luc Bondy, Patrice Chéreau, Richard Eyre, and William Kentridge; designers Herzog & de Meuron, Rob Howell, Richard Peduzzi, and Miuccia Prada In its fourth season, The Met: Live in HD series will include nine live transmissions to more than 35 countries around the world

Spending money it can ill afford during a time of financial crisis, Jehudah Reinharz, President of Brandeis University hired Rasky Baerlein Stategic Communications, a PR firm than specializes in crisis management, to draft a carefully worded apology for a rash and irresponsible decision to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its renowned collection.

Arguably the greatest architecture critic of the last half century, Ada Louise Huxtable is as iconic as some of the buildings that she has superbly written about over the years. Her new book, On Architecture, is a joyful guide through the last five decades of design and construction of our urban environment. This is a must read for anyone interested in architecture, cities or contemporary culture.

There are 60 artists, familiar and not, in the exhibition "Beyond the Canon: Small Scale American Abstraction 1945 to 1965" at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York. The Smithsonian American Art Museum has organized "Modern Masters: American Abstration at Midcentury" which is now on view at Florida International University through March 1,2009. It will tour six museums through 2012.

Buckminster Fuller died in 1983, but his visionary concepts still resonate today. Though his attempt at real world applications--Dymaxion House, Geodesic Dome, etc., never proved practical, his concern for the protection of the natural environment and interest in shared global information make this eccentric almost clairvoyant.

On September 27, 2008, the often controversial building at Two Columbus Circle reopened to the public as The Museum of Arts and Design. This building not only celebrates the best craft, studio furniture and object design, but it also marked the end of a truly contentious and hard fought battle about architectural styles, historical preservation and politics.

Between now and 2010 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is under construction with a massive renovation and additions designed by Lord Norman Foster. But for visitors it's business as usual with and enticing schedule of special exhibitions.

Simultaneous exhibitions of large scale digital images of piles of excrement were recently featured by Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York and Paris. It sustains the controversial reputation of Andres Serrano that started in 1987 when his "Piss Christ" was denounced from the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Frank Lloyd Wright is synonymous with brilliant architect. However, besides being gifted and a genius designer, he was also quirky, rather eccentric and an egomaniac. His life was full of ups and downs from great acclaim to a has-been status, acts of bigamy to a murder of his mistress at his home. Yet, he died at age 92 or 94 (people were not really sure because he lied about his age) at the top of his profession. Frank Lloyd Wright's name now means great American architect.

After a provocative keynote address on Thursday evening, an all day symposium looked at a variety of compelling ephemeral art projects in London. UK curators discussed the nuts and bolts of temporary project work of artists and architects. The Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square, The Serpentine Gallery's Pavilions, The Tate Modern's Public Space and the Sultan's Elephant were all striking. London's public art energy was persuasive.

In the past few years Mass MoCA has presented major installations by the leading Chinese artists, Cai Guo Qiang and Huang Yong Ping. The current exhibition presents a diverse group of Western artists inspired by visits to China and encounters with a rapidly changing economy and culture.

If all goes according to plan in April gallerist Ralph Brill will light up a section of the Hoosic River between the Eclipse Mill and Mass MoCA in North Adams. He is involved in the development of a World War II Museum that would become the Northern Berkshires' "Fourth Museum."