Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

The 13th Season of the Williamstown Film Festival ended amidst the first Nor Easter during Fall season 2011. Call it lucky 13 ! This is the sixth and final BFA article, highlighting some of the 21 Shorts, which were screened throughout the two week long festival.

Recently the Clark Art Institute held a press conference to discuss the final phase of a $145 million project for construction and renovation. We approached Michael Conforti, for the past 16 years the director of the museum, with follow up questions. In particular its relationship with Mass MoCA and future programming for modern and contemporary art. We also discussed concerns for the conservation risks of Parading the Relics as the Clark sends it treasures on an extended world tour.

Over two weekends (October 21-23 and 27-29), the Williamstown Film Festival's "Lucky 13th" season will include two East Coast and four New England premieres, family and late-night slots, titles from Sundance, Tribeca, and Toronto, and films featuring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Carol Channing, Ezra Miller, Lewis Black, Kate Burton, Tony Shalhoub, Campbell Scott, and Christo. WFF will conclude with a salute to legendary director Sidney Lumet at the Clark Art Institute.

Michael Cassin, Director, Center for Education in the Visual Arts at The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute will present a free lecture on the Clark's major summer exhibition Pissarro's People on Thursday, July 7 at 7:00 pm at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center. In this special lecture, Cassin will introduce the people in Pissarro’s paintings.

During the 2011 season, June 25-September 4, Tanglewood is offering a number of ticket programs designed to give visitors and Berkshire residents a wide variety of options when planning their visit to the BSO’s summer home. Ticket deals and programs include free tickets to children and young adults 17 and under and discounted tickets for students 18 and over.

The works of contemporary European and African artists will take their place alongside French Impressionism in summer 2011 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. From June 12 through October 16, visitors will encounter the monumental sculptures of acclaimed artist El Anatsui in the Clark’s Stone Hill Center, and from June 12 through September 5, Spaces: Photographs by Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth will be on view in the Clark’s original 1955 museum building.

Aso O. Tavitian, a trustee of the Clark Art Institute and resident of New York and Stockbridge only started to collect Old Master portraits in the past several years. A selection of his acquisitions are included in the fascinating exhibition Eye to Eye European Paintings 1450-1850 which is on view through March 27.

Gaetano Donizetti’s tragic masterpiece, Lucia di Lammermoor, comes to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute on Saturday, March 19 at 1 pm, live from the Metropolitan Opera as part of the Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning series The Met: Live in HD.

The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. is offering for sale at TEFAF Maastricht, the world’s most influential art and antiques fair one of its 33 paintings by the French Impressionist master, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Femme cueillant des Fleurs (Woman picking flowers) depicts Camille Monet, the first wife of Renoir’s fellow Impressionist Claude Monet, who died tragically young. The important painting, estimated to be worth $15 million, has rarely been hung in the museum in recent decades.

Today Lisa Corrin called to let me know that as of June 30 she will be leaving as director of the Williams College Museum of Art. She is currently rehanging the permanent collection of the museum. It will reopen during the spring with eight major exhibitions and related programming. She will join the Willams fine arts faculty. Also she will be a fellow at the neighboring Clark Art Institute next year and serve as a visiting scholar in the Museum Studies program at New York University.

Storefront Artist Project announces the relocation of its gallery and office to 31 South Street at the corner of Park Square in downtown Pittsfield Massachusetts. Storefront will be leaving its present location in the Howard building at 124 Fenn Street, a space it has occupied since 2006, and share the new South Street space with local retailer Emporium.

This superb exhibit provides a look at over seventy prints by Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), the noted Northern Renaissance polymath. To explain how he made his compositions, we must also consider his use of geometry to layout symmetries, and meanings.

Jacob’s Pillow Dance, international arts presenter and home of America’s longest-running dance festival, now offers a curated online selection of informative and entertaining PillowTalks. Based in Becket, Mass., Jacob’s Pillow hosts more than 160 free pre-show talks, post-show interviews, and hour-long PillowTalks during its annual Festival. PillowTalks are a series of hour-long moderated discussions with choreographers, performers, historians, filmmakers, and experts in the arts and related fields.

Significant critical acclaim and widespread audience interest in its two exhibitions, Picasso Looks at Degas and Juan Muñoz, propelled attendance at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute to near-record numbers this summer. The Clark recorded total visitation of approximately 120,000 from its June 13 public openings through the close of the Labor Day weekend, making 2010 the second-highest attendance season in the Clark’s history.

Barrington Stage Company, under the leadership of Artistic Director Julianne Boyd Artistic Director and Producing Director Richard M. Parison, Jr., concludes the 2010 Mainstage season with Arthur Miller’s American classic The Crucible, with performances beginning October 6 and running through October 24.

Picasso Looks at Degas is among the best exhibitions currently on view in American museums. It remains at the Clark Art Institute until September 12. This is its only American venue before it travels to Barcelona.

June 13 through September 12, 2010: Focusing on two of the great artists of the modern period, Picasso Looks at Degas examines Pablo Picasso’s lifelong fascination with the life and work of Edgar Degas. The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown is the exclusive North American venue for this ground-breaking exhibition exploring the depth of the Spanish artist’s fixation through dramatic pairings and groupings of art that have never been brought together in this ambitious way.

Since its invention in the nineteenth century, photography has been used for documentary purposes, faithfully recording the details of archaeological artifacts, works of art, and natural specimens. Drawn from the collections of the Clark and the Troob Family Foundation, and featuring works by William Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton, and Eugène Atget, this focused exhibition considers how documentary images stand not only as material witnesses to times and places past, but as aesthetic objects that are at once accessible and uncanny. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute through April 11.

In the Berkshires they say never miss a Clark party. Particularly in the dead of winter. February 13: The party of the season takes place from 6 to 8 pm at the Clark. "Picture Yourself at the Clark" celebrates the opening of the Clark exhibition Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris with an evening of live music, delectable hors d'oeuvres, and fun with portraits

The Clark and the Williamstown Theatre Festival present a staged reading of Yasmina Reza's international hit Art February 5 at 7 pm at the Clark. Hailed as "a remarkably wise, witty and intelligent comedy" by The London Times, Art is sure to tickle your funny bone and brain. Reservations are required for this free event.

The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown has added to its depth in 19th Century French painting of the Barbizon School. The work by Étienne Théodore Rousseau has rarely been seen since 1946.

For 2009's Williamstown Film Festival the emphasis is on movies and film making, not what the starlets are wearing on the red carpet. Film makers and film lovers love the Berkshire's version of a film festival since the emphasis is on craft and content, not gossip and glamour.

During this rainy and mostly miserable summer the exhibition "Dove/O'Keeffe Circles of Influence" at the Clark Art Institute has provided shelter from the storm. Visitors have flocked to this populat exhibition which ends on September 7.

A new season of events kicks off July 5 with the reigning "Pied Piper of Music," Dan Zane and Friends and continues with opera, dance, theatre and "something for every taste."

The live in HD series of broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera were an enormous success this past year for the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington. There will be a preview of the season which starts in the fall with a broadacast of a vintage performance of Renee Fleming starring in Eugene Onegin on July 11. The Mahaiwe is planning a stunning schedule of dance, music, film and theatre for the coming season.