Boston Globe

Huntington Norma Jean Calderwood Artistic Director Loretta Greco and Executive Director Christopher Mannelli announce seven titles in The Huntington’s electrifying 2025/26 season, featuring poignant fresh works, a bitingly funny comedy, and a love-affirming contemporary musical – powerful stories about love and family, both epic and intimate in scale and scope.  

Music producer John Sdoucous was a force during the era of Boston’s Counterculture. Commissioned by Mayor Kevin White he curated the important series Boston On the Common. It brought major musicians to perform in the heart of the city. He also worked with George Wein and his Newport Festival. For many years he resided in Florida and Cape Co

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.

Ravel: The Piano Concertos, in which the pianist is joined by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its Music Director Andris Nelsons, comes out digitally and on CD on February 21. A deluxe edition presenting the complete recordings will be issued digitally and as a 3-CD box set on May 2. Vinyl versions of the two individual albums will be released later this year. The Piano Concerto in G’s central Adagio assai is available to stream/download beginning  February 7, while the Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn will be released in advance of the deluxe edition, on March 7, the exact anniversary of Ravel’s birth. 

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.

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.

Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival welcomes the internationally- touring modern dance company Parsons Dance back to the Ted Shawn Theatre, 25 years after their last engagement with the festival in 1999.

The A. R.T. season will begin in September with a production of Romeo and Juliet, directed by Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director Diane Paulus and choreographed by two-time Olivier Award winner Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Jagged Little Pill; Beyoncé at the 2017 Grammy Awards and APESHIT; Madonna’s Celebration tour). This powerhouse duo reunites for the first time since their Tony Award-winning collaboration Jagged Little Pill, staging a bold new production of Shakespeare’s iconic love story.

Always on the move the artist Katherine Porter died in New Mexico at 82. For several years in the late 1960s she was an integral part of a movement of emerging Boston artists. She was part of the Studio Coalition which mounted the nation's first Open Studios. She was the first new Boston artist selected for the Whitney Annual. Until the tide changed she was among the most admired abstract artists of her generation.

A large show featuring “The Anchors of the Berta Walker Gallery” will celebrate the artists who keep the gallery thriving: Director Grace Hopkins, Gallery Assistant Laura Shabott and Gallery Assistant/Installer Bert Yarborough. Accompanying this show will be a group show of art by former staff, including Sky Power and Erna Partoll (both of whom worked at the gallery for ten years), as well as photos of individuals, friends, and family who have made the Gallery’s existence possible (a visual “introduction of gratitude,” if you will, in our book of visuals.)

Jacob’s Pillow announces that tickets are now on sale to the general public for the full schedule of programming at this summer’s Dance Festival, which will offer nine weeks of performances by world-class artists, live music, and free and paid family-friendly events, on indoor and outdoor stages. In addition to featuring local and regional artists, the festival will include dance companies traveling from across the United States, Canada, England, Switzerland, Italy, Argentina, Spain, and beyond. 

The nine companies to perform for one week each in the Ted Shawn Theatre are, in chronological order: Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, The Royal Ballet of the United Kingdom, Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, Social Tango Project, MOMIX, Camille A. Brown & Dancers, Parsons Dance, Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca, and Dance Theatre of Harlem.

As co-founder (with Ralph Gleason) of the most influential rock and popular culture magazine of its era, Jann S. Wenner is anointed and had the platform to make Zeus-like Olympian statements. But pure ego consumes his assumption that his short list of “friends” represents “the greatest rock stars and cultural icons of our time.” The seven that he crowned in his book The Masters are all white, straight and male.

Drawing from the collection of the late Leslie and Johanna Garfield, this exhibition focuses on the work of six artists: Ada Gilmore Chaffee, Maud Hunt Squire, Ethel Mars, Mildred McMillen, Juliette Nichols, and B. J. O. Nordfeldt—the first pioneering group that came together in Provincetown to practice color woodblock printing.

MASS MoCA has promoted veteran curator Denise Markonish to become its new Chief Curator, the first in MASS MoCA’s nearly 25-year history. Markonish joined MASS MoCA in 2007.

In response to these difficult times, artist Justin Freed, former owner and programmer of the Coolidge Corner Theatre, has created An Evening of Jazz and Healing with live music, photography, drawings, projection and film.

The ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance unveiled its live, in-person performances celebrating diverse and challenging theatre, music, and dance programming for the Williams College community and beyond.

On opening day, August 12, we went on one of our Berkshire country drives to South County to celebrate Beth Galston and her installation, 'Ice Forest.'

The Board of Trustees of Hancock Shaker Village announced today that director Jennifer Trainer Thompson will step down in July. Thompson has been widely credited for her transformational leadership of the museum and is recognized as an innovator in the museum community. Since her appointment in September 2016, Hancock Shaker Village has grown in size and stature and has been infused, as The Boston Globe noted last summer, “with great gusts of contemporary vitality”.

“Spring at Hancock Shaker Village is a joyous time,” said Director Jennifer Trainer Thompson. “Our farm literally ‘springs’ to life and there may be nothing cuter than a baby animal. When you add to that 20 historic buildings, and a lot of creative programming --- from farm talks to concerts to the spiritual richness of brooms --- you find a union with content that creates an unparalleled experience. Welcome back, and welcome to our 2022 season!”

Since its 1897 founding, the Boston Marathon has regularly transformed in its appearance, its demographics, and its meaning.  As its 126th running on April 18 nears, The Lotvin Family Gallery examines how the marathon’s changes have been reflected in the pages of another Boston institution, The Boston Globe, now celebrating its 150th year of publication.

Folk and Baroque—Performed Live at Historic Saint James Place in Downtown Great Barrington, MA, February 26, 2021 at 6 PM  

After a critically acclaimed run, the Lyric Stage Company of Boston announces that streaming of the World Premiere production of Mr. Parent by Melinda Lopez with Maurice Emmanuel Parent* and co-conceived and directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian° will begin on February 7 and be available through February 20.