Whitney Museum of American Art

Patricia Hills is a leftist/ feminist scholar, professor and curator. Since retirement from teaching art history at Boston University she has continued with research and writing. This essay is a chapter from her soon to be published memoir Feisty Feminist Challenges the Art World. Here she vividly relates the Boston Massacre when MFA director Malcolm Rogers fired renowned curators pursuant to his vision of One Museum. In a corporate, manner unique to the well mannered art world, they were escorted from the museum. Hills organized protest against this initiative. She endured a counterattack from the museum but was supported by Boston University.

Leir Stage performances will be held Wednesdays through Saturdays for all nine weeks of Festival 2025, offering one-night and two-night engagements by companies dancing Afro-Caribbean, contemporary, swing, tap, ballet, jazz, Indigenous, modern, West African, and more. Performances by artists of the Berkshires on Community Day, and by the Contemporary Ballet, Contemporary, and Tap Dance ensembles of The School at Jacob's Pillow, round out the schedule.

Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival 2025 will feature indoor performances in the landmark Ted Shawn Theatre and the newly-opened Doris Duke Theatre, as well as outdoor performances on the Henry J. Leir Stage. The return of the Doris Duke Theatre restores Jacob’s Pillow to its full presenting capacity for the first time since 2020, reuniting the Festival’s three core performance spaces and offering audiences an unparalleled range of dance experiences across the Pillow’s grounds.

In 2005 Astrid and I met with Jaune Quick-to-See Smith in her Corrales, New Mexico studio. Several months later she had an exhibition of new works on paper that I curated for New England School of Art & Design, Suffolk University. She remained a mentor and friend with our last e mail exchange, about Katherine Porter, just a month or so ago. She has now died at 85. Jaune was a life long activist, artist and mentor to many. In 2023 she was the first Native American Artist to have a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Late in life she received long overdue respect and recognition.

In 1986 I organized an exhibition of four African American artists who lived and worked in Provincetown. That fall Kind of Blue traveled to the gallery of Northeastern University. In Boston there was a panel discussion chaired by Edmund Barry Gaither, then the director of the National Center for African American Artists and an adjunct curator for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In addition to myself, there were two other panelists. Patricia Hills was then a professor of art history at Boston University. She has long championed issues of social justice and wrote a monograph and curated an exhibition of the work of Jacob Lawrence. Dana Chandler is an artist and activist.

The modernist Umberto Romano (1906-1982) is the subject of a retrospective, curated by Martha Oaks, at the annex of the Cape Ann museum through December 29, 2024. The main museum is closed for renovation. The exhibition is free to the public in the 12,000 square foot Janet & William Ellery James Center, which was completed in 2020. It includes 2,000 square feet of flexible exhibition and community programming space. 

Earle Montrose Pilgrim (1923-1976) was an artist, jewelry maker, and experimental filmmaker. His role in the advanced art of Provincetown remains unheralded. With his wife Lily they resided in the back of their jewelry shop at 393 Commercial street. They invited artists like Lester Johnson and Alan Kaprow to show their work. After 1954 their shop housed Sun Gallery.

Jeffrey Gibson’s POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT is a newly commissioned immersive installation that will occupy MASS MoCA’s signature Building 5 gallery and follows Gibson’s highly celebrated United States representation at the 60th edition of La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition opens on November 3.

Darrel Ellis & Miguel Ferrando, delves into the intertwined lives and artistic journeys of two figures who were more than just friends—they were creative soulmates. Though their careers spanned only a handful of years (Ellis died of AIDS in 1992 at 34, and Ferrando in 1996, at 38 ), their work, showcased side-by-side, offers a rare glimpse into a  unique artistic creative partnership from the 1980s.

Bill Viola is remembered by Bostonians for his early installation "Room for Saint John of the Cross" at the Institute of Contemporary Art. He also created a video triptych for the Fulller Museum of Art. A champion was David Ross who hired him as an assistant at the Everson Museum in 1971. Ross later showed him at the ICA and Whitney Museum.

In the late 1960s a new generation of artists revitalized the Boston art world. They created Studio Coalition the nation's first open studios event. Katherine Porter emerged with immediate recognition and success. She was shown twice in Whitney Biennials and exhibited in major galleries. Social concerns informed her work. She moved a number of times seeking a like minded community. We reconnected when for several years she lived in Vermont. In her final recent move she settled in Santa Fe.

Mark Morrisroe, who died at 30, was the most innovative of the artists shown as the Boston School at the ICA in an exhibition curated by Lea Gangitano. Since his premature death his reputation has continued to grow. This is his fifth solo with Clamp Gallery. His work has been acquired by numerous museums.

Currently Native American artist, Jeffrey Gibson, is the first to be honored by an exhibition in the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. We first encountered him when he exhibited with Camillo Alvarez in his Boston based Samson Gallery. At the time I was researching and curating Native American art. We met for a studio visit in 2006.

With minimal marketing and fanfare the Cape Ann Museum launches its 2024 season with the special exhibition In the Round: 20th Century Cape Ann Sculpture which opens April 6 from 3 to 5 pm. It focuses on major sculptors who lived and worked on Cape Ann. In July there will be a survey of women artists. The museum has pulled back to business as usual following last summer's blockbuster Edward Hopper and Jo Nivison exhibition in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Carol K. Brown’s latest work "Someplace Else" consists of watercolor paintings and a series of drawings titled "Modified Husband." This exhibition is a culmination of Brown’s desire for detail, layered with humorous subject matter.

As a painter Jeff Weaver is a man for all seasons. Some of the most engaging works are winter scenes. It’s the Gloucester that tourists never see. He creates meticulous paintings of weathered, storm battered, Gloucester commercial and residential landmarks. The works document vintage images of a working port and fishing community undergoing a change to an economy based on tourism and a glut of generic condos.

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.

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.

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.

The Cape Ann Museum’s auditorium was packed for a Sunday afternoon book launch. Edited by Martin Ray, Gloucester Encounters: Essays on the Cultural History of the City from 1623-2023, is a compendium of 37 largely community based essays on aspects of Gloucester’s lifestyle, issues and concerns.

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.

Unionized employees of MASS MoCA voted by a 96% vote to engage in a one-day work stoppage on August 19, 2022. Employees will be picketing the Museum all day and asking visitors to express support for a fair contract for staff.

Exhibition reconsiders the multidisciplinary practice of one of the twentieth century’s great artists,