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Fine Arts

  • Bauhaus in Chicago

    100 Years Celebrated at Elmhurst Art Museum

    By: Nancy Bishop - Mar 01st, 2019

    The Whole World a Bauhaus, the 100th anniversary exhibit of Bauhaus work, is now on display at the Elmhurst Art Museum. There are national and global Bauhaus exhibitions. This one is on view in Chicago.

  • Andy Warhol—From A to Z and Back Again

    Whitney Museum of American Art

    By: Nancy Bishop - Mar 12th, 2019

    The Warhol exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art leads you through the commercial illustrations, personal drawings, paintings, prints, photos, silkscreens, films, videos, music production, his Factory years and more. The last galleries show his giant Mao painting, works in collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the 35-foot mural titled Camouflage Last Supper 1986, a rendition of the Last Supper under camouflage print.

  • A Creative Camelot: The Bauhaus and Harvard

    100th Anniversary of The Bauhaus

    By: Mark Favermann - Mar 21st, 2019

    Founded shortly after World War I in Germany, the Bauhaus was the most famous and influential avant-garde art and design school in the 20th Century. Its artists, architects, designers craftpersons and students generated a creative, all-encompassing conversation about the nature of architecture, art and design in the modern era. Over the course of its relatively short, 14-year history, Bauhaus was at first located at Weimar, then Dessau, and finally Berlin (closed by order of Nazi Party, 1932). Outside of Germany, Harvard University became the center for all things Bauhaus

  • Reconnecting: MCLA Alumni Show

    At Gallery 51 in North Adams

    By: Charles Giuliano - Mar 29th, 2019

    The current exhibition at Gallery 51 “Reconnecting: MCLA Alumni Show” is eclectic, fun, and here and there, somewhat whimsical

  • Artist Arthur Polonsky at 93

    Last of the Boston Expressionists

    By: Charles Giuliano - Apr 07th, 2019

    With the passing of Arthur Polonsky (June 6, 1925 - April 4, 2019) the last link to the greatest generation of Boston artists has been broken. They are known and somewhat misrepresented as The Boston Expressionists.

  • SOWA in Springtime

    April Exhibitions

    By: Charles Giuliano - Apr 08th, 2019

    During a week in Boston we attended the First Friday gallery openings in SOWA the Harrison Avenue based gallery district. It proved to be a lively adventure catching up with so many artist and gallerist friends

  • DeCordova New England Biennial 2019

    On View in Lincoln Through September 15

    By: Charles Giuliano - Apr 11th, 2019

    The impact of DeCordova New England Biennial 2019 is its focus on inclusion and diversity. There is a spectrum from traditional forms of painting, sculpture and photography to social justice approaches to a range of hot button agendas. The latter work conforms to Marxist theories of art as agitation and propaganda.

  • Frida Kahlo at Brooklyn Museum

    Also MAD fof Museum of Arts and Design

    By: Nancy Bishop - Apr 12th, 2019

    Chicago critic Nancy Bishop hunkered down for an extended stay in New York. She toured museums during the day and attended theatre at night. Here she covers the Mexican modernist Frida Kahlo. She also reports on the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbua Circle.

  • Otto Piene at Fitchburg Art Museum

    Fire and Light: Otto Piene in Groton, 1983-2014

    By: Astrid Hiemer - Apr 14th, 2019

    The current Otto Piene exhibition at the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts will close on June 2nd with a conversation titled: 'Fire, Light and Protest.' Photographs by Joe Landry, 'The Summer of 1969' are also on view at FAM. The photographer and curator Lisa Crossman on the work of Piene will be in conversation. First, however, the museum is inviting the public to participate in an outdoor Sky Art Event on April 27 near the museum. Art that flies!

  • Major Otto Piene Donation to Harvard

    70 Artist Sketchbooks

    By: Astrid Hiemer - Apr 16th, 2019

    Elizabeth Goldring, the widow of internationally renowned artist Otto Piene, recently donated 70 of his sketchbooks to the Harvard Art Museums and Archives. Piene sketched what he saw and what concerned and motivated him throughout his life. Now, researchers and the public can have access to this trove of drawings and ideas by contacting Harvard Archives.

  • MFA Director Matthew Teitelbaum

    Embracing Modern and Contemporary Art

    By: Charles Giuliano - Apr 20th, 2019

    Since the 1960s and Perry T. Rathbone I have interviewed every director of the Museum of Fine Arts. Sitting recently with Matthew Teitelbaum was refreshingly different. We were renewing a relationship that started in 1989 when he was a curator for Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. In 1993 he returned home to become senior curator at Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario. He became director there before coming to the MFA in 2015 as its eleventh director. While in the thick of staff changes and policy strategies he invites us to evaluate progress over the next five years.

  • Hilma af Klint, The Opera

    Guggenheim Presents Benjamin Staern's Chamber Opera

    By: Susan Hall - Apr 23rd, 2019

    The Works & Process series at the Guggenheim Museum is full of surprise and delight. The notion that one’s experience of art can be enhanced by music is not new. Yet in the case of Hilma af Klint, the exhibit of whose works has been the sensation of the New York art season, using a chamber opera to take us inside her experience, was enormously helpful for a better understanding of the woman and her work.

  • Bauhaus Centennial a Global Celebration

    Numerous Exhibitions and Publications

    By: Charles Giuliano - Apr 25th, 2019

    In 1919 Walter Gropius retrofitted the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts into what he dubbed Bauhaus. In its centennial year there are global celebrations through media coverage, publications and exhibitions. It has been reported that there are 600 shows in Germany. We have been reading and visiting work on view at the Museum of Fine Arts and some 200 objects from the 50,000 donated through Gropius and others to Harvard University. He joined the Graduate School of Design as its director in 1937.

  • Toulouse Lautrec and the Stars of Paris

    Collaboration of MFA and Boston Public Library

    By: Charles Giuliano - Apr 26th, 2019

    The special exhibition “Toulouse Lautrec and the Stars of Paris” is a collaboration of the Museum of Fine Arts and The Boston Public Library. Their great combined depth in prints and posters is supplemented with loans from other museums. In addition to his signature graphic works the exhibition is expanded with paintings, photographs, and sculptures by other impressionist and post impressionist artists.

  • You Me and Art: Artists in the 21st Century

    A Book of Interviews by Marta Gynp

    By: Charles Giuliano - Apr 27th, 2019

    A book of interviews by Dutch art historian Marta Gynp "You Me and Art: Artists in the 21st Century" is lively, eclectic and informative. Of the twenty individuals she interacts with some are well known and others less so. In several instances what artists had to say about their work changed how I respond to it. In an engaging and familiar manner she was able to get behind the facade to probe intimate thoughts and insecurities. That approach reveals a humanistic view of how work evolves from studios to galleries and museums.

  • Social Commentary by Canadian Kent Monkman

    Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience

    By: Charles Giuliano - May 12th, 2019

    The special exhibition "Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience" by the First Nations artist Kent Monkman is a game changer. With ferocious wit the artist deconstructs horrific aspects of Canadian history through a series of narrative, social realist paintings. We viewed the work at the McCord Museum in Montreal where the traveling exhibition closed on May 5.

  • Henry Moore Sculpture Centre

    900 Works at Art Gallery of Ontario

    By: Charles Giuliano - May 13th, 2019

    The Art Gallery of Ontario owns 900 works by Henry Moore including large plasters for bronzes, maquettes, drawings and related materials. The 1,200 square foot gallery and its ancillary displays comprise the largest public collection of the artist's work. Simply put, it is one of the most magnificent experiences of 20th century sculpture on a global level.

  • Refus Global to Intersectionality

    Rethinking Paradigms for Canadian Art

    By: Charles Giuliano - May 14th, 2019

    In a complex reconfiguration of permanent collections of Canadian museums there is a mandate for integration of First Nations work with galleries of post war abstraction. While change is welcome and necessary, for now, the juxtapositions are complex and disorienting. There is more contrast than confluence.

  • Albright-Knox Art Gallery Plans AK360

    Buffalo’s Great Museum Gets Even Better

    By: Charles Giuliano - May 15th, 2019

    Founded in 1862 as Buffalo Fine Arts Academy today Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery is regarded as one of America's foremost small, regional museums. Its first building opened in 1906. In 1962 a wing was added and a new 30,000 square foot structure will begin construction at the end of this year. It will double space for the permanent collection and special exhibitions.

  • The Power Plant

    Toronto’s Renowned Contemporary Art Kunsthalle

    By: Charles Giuliano - May 16th, 2019

    Occupying a former municipal structure, since 1987, The Power Plant in Toronto has been a renowned presenter of Canadian and global contemporary art. We visited during the final days of three solo exhibitions: “Same Dream” by Omar Ba a Senegalese artist who divides time between Dakar and Geneva, Switzland. Shuvinai Ashoona, a member of a renowned family of Inuit artists, presented “Mapping Worlds.” For twenty years, Alicia Henry, a graduate of Yale, has resided in Nashville, Tennessee where she teaches at Fisk University. Her show was titled "Witnessing."

  • Kathleen Jacobs’ Natural Abstraction

    Echos at TurnPark Art Space in West Stockbridge

    By: Charles Giuliano - May 19th, 2019

    During four years in China Kathleen Jacobs learned calligraphy from a master. That entailed rubbing ancient reliefs and copying the inscriptions. Several years ago she developed a technique of making paintings by attaching canvas to trees. The surfaces are rubbed and the canvases left outside to endure a year of seasons. The paintings are finished in the studio. Through Echos finished paintings and works in progress are on view at TurnPark Art Space in West Stockbridge, in the Berkshires.

  • A Cultural Trip Through Canada

    Encountering First Nations Artworks

    By: Astrid A. Hiemer - May 23rd, 2019

    On the spot, fully packed and ready to travel, we decided on a car trip to Canadian locations: Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Niagara Falls, after we were denied boarding an airplane to Chicago. Our final destination was (not) to be Edinburgh, Scotland and London, England. Here's a cultural overview of our ersatz-trip, which turned out to be just great!

  • Spring Awakening at Hancock Shaker Village

    Borrowed Light Watercolors by Barbara Ernst Prey

    By: Charles Giuliano - May 24th, 2019

    Working "24/7" over several months the renowned, Williamstown-based artist, Barbara Ernst Prey, created Borrowed Light. The suite of watercolor renderings of interiors is on view in a converted chicken coop of Hancock Shaker Village. It is a part of expanded contemporary programming under the director Jennifer Trainer Thompson. She was a founding member of the MASS MoCA team. They have been neighbors and friends for many years. It was intuitive for them to undertake this remarkable project.

  • MASS MoCA Launches Summer Season

    Annie Lennox Life of the Party

    By: Charles Giuliano - May 26th, 2019

    For the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend general admission to MASS MoCA was free. For the launch of it's 20th summer season the museum was mobbed. There were food and drink stands as well as many family oriented activities. For tickets ranging from $100 to $1000 there was a performance by British rock star Annie Lennox. There was also an installation of her memorabelia and legacy which will be on view for the coming months. The museum launched many new temporary exhibitions. There are also long term displays of contemporary masters.

  • Deep Dirt on Annie Lennox

    Installation of Detritus at MASS MoCA

    By: Charles Giuliano - May 31st, 2019

    As an epic memento mori the 64-year-old British pop star has created “Annie Lenox: Now I Let You Go…” A huge mound of earth scattered with her memorabilia will be on view long term at MASS MoCA. The ambitious installation will be of great interest to her global fans.

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