Fine Arts

Boston artist, Ellen Schön, participated last December in a two week Arts Festival in Sasaran, in the province of Selangor, Malaysia. The long travel was well worth her effort. She explores here global arts, the Malaysian people and culture, and moments that impressed her most.

This is the seventy-sixth in the ongoing series of Biennials and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932, two years after the Museum was founded. The 2012 Biennial takes over most of the Whitney from March 1 through May 27, with portions of the exhibition and some programs continuing through June 10.

The sculptor John Chamberlain passed away recently. On February 24 the Guggenheim Museum opens a retrospective of his work John Chamberlain: Choices. It will remain on view through May 13. The New York museum has posted its schedule through May, 2013.

There are too few museums quite like the eclectic Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. It has a parallel interests in the natural sciences and fine arts.The current tandem of exhibitions Taking Flight: Audubon and the World of Birds, (January 12 to June 17) and Morgan Bulkeley Bird Story (January 24 through March 4) neatly demonstrates that disparity.

The Cartographer's Conundrum is a major multi-disciplinary installation By New York-based artist Sanford Biggers. This new work is inspired by the Houston, Texas based artist, scholar and Afro-futurist John Biggers (1924-2001). A cousin of his subject, Sanford Biggers' goal is to both study and expand the emerging genre of Afro-futurism, which engages science-fiction, cosmology and technology to create a new folklore of the African Diaspora.

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute presents its latest exhibition, Copycat: Reproducing Works of Art. Exploring the line between innovation and imitation, the exhibition features 50 prints and photographs that are both original works of art and repetitions of drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and architecture created by other artists.

The Artist-in-Residency Program at the Gardner Museum is 20 years old. Now, with a dedicated gallery and two resident apartments, it is poised to take on a higher profile. Curator Pieranna Cavalchini talks about the program.

You can take the boy out of the city but you can’t take the city out of the boy. No, cancel that. The former lizard prince, who performed the famous Whip Dance with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, has gone country. Big time. Can you believe it? He’s showing landscapes at Architecture for Art Gallery.

Greatly strengthening an extremely thin area of its American collection, the Boston MFA acquisition of works by major African-American artists includes 67 works from collector John Axelrod. Now the Boston institution holds one of the major groupings of African-American Art anywhere. Axelrod is selling the works to the MFA at below market values, between $5 million and $10 million.