Fine Arts
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David Ricci’s Edge of Chaos
Studio Visit with a Berkshire Photographer
By: - Feb 14th, 2018For the past year the Berkshire based photographer, David Ricci, has been working on a large format, expensive and ambitious book. It has a working title of Edge of Chaos and surveys four decades of his oeuvre. During a studio visit we viewed the work and how it is evolving into a publication.
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Berkshire Museum Will Gut Its Collection
Matter to be Settled with Supreme Judicial Court
By: - Feb 10th, 2018A compromise is a deal that neither side is happy with. Other than a few hard fought concessions the Berkshire Museum will now gut the museum and its collection in pursuit of its vulgarian, populist New Vision. It's tarnished leadership, including director, Van Shields and board president, Elizabeth McGraw, will have a tough job earning back the trust and support of a community which they so adroitly alienated.
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David Hockney's California Dreaming
Subdued Met Retrospective of a Pioneer of Pop
By: - Jan 31st, 2018While described as a retrospective in eight galleries with just 60 paintings, 21 portrait drawings and five of his ground-breaking “Joiner” photo collages the David Hockney exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a bit of a tease. Now 80 when Hockney depicted homosexuality during the 1960s it was still illegal in Great Britain. He left for the laid back lifesyle of LA in 1964 and now commutes between continents. The exhibition is on view through February 25.
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Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed
Riveting Selection of 43 Works at Met Breuer
By: - Jan 29th, 2018With just 43 works Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed at Met Breuer through February 4 provides a small but succinct view of his work. He was a prolific artist, creating approximately 1,750 paintings, 18,000 prints, and 4,500 watercolors, in addition to sculpture, graphic art, theater design, and photography. More than half of the works on view were part of Munch's personal collection and remained with him throughout his life.
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Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World
Controversial Traveling Retrospective
By: - Jan 27th, 2018In 1993 I was intrigued by ersatz weapons fabricated from funky materials by Jimmie Durham in the Whitney Biennial. To explore creative freedom the artist left America in 1987 never to return. While acquiring a global reputation it is only now that the work is again being seen and debated in the States. A long overdue retrospective "Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World" organized by the Hammer Museum traveled to the Walker Arts Center and is finishing its run at the Whitney Museum. It states a case for Durham as one of the formost American artists of his generation.
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Broadway in Winter
Museums by Day and Theatre at Night
By: - Jan 25th, 2018The motive was not to miss a once- in-a-lifetime exhibition Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman & Designer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It remains on view through February 12. In addition to visiting museums by day we enjoyed four nights on Broadway. During the Big Chill we avoided threeh our holiday lines at the Met. There was easy access and a good selection for half price TKTS in Times Square.
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The Pioneering 1960s Art of USCO
Looking Back at Early Art and Technology
By: - Jan 14th, 2018When an opportunity to celebrate USCO’s pioneering work came along, I just had to curate it. This acknowledgement of our cultural past, still clearly resonates in our 21st Century present.
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Vermont’s Eclectic Shelburne Museum
How Sweet It Is
By: - Jan 12th, 2018Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960) founded the Shelburne Museum which has 150,000 objects and 39 buildings on 45 acres. Her father Henry Osborne Havemeyer was known as The Sugar King. With his wife Louisne they created a vast collection donating 2,000 objects, including French Impressionist masterpieces, to the Met. Electra married polo champion James Watson Webb II of the Vanderbilt family. Well before the controversies of the Berkshire Museum, in 1996, the Shelburne Museum sold $30 million of its art to pay expenses. During the winter just five buildings are open. We viewed two special exhibitions in the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education which opened in 2013. It was a lively and intriguing experience.
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The Jewel Of The Douro Valley
Since 1880 Ramos Pinto Has Produced Port
By: - Jan 07th, 2018The Ramos Pinto brothers founded Ramos Pinto in 1880 and marketed the port wine producing company to Brazilians. They commissioned remarkable artworks illustrating their products and guerilla marketing practices. Today, the posters are iconic and the new owners, Champagne Roederer, have been following in the footsteps of Antonio and Adriano Ramos Pinto.
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A Study in Contrast Two Museums in Lisbon
National Tile Museum and MAAT Bookend Art and Culture
By: - Dec 30th, 2017These institutions visually and physically reflected Portuguese art and culture, one embracing the nooks and crannies of history while the other exhibited a vibrant openness to contemporary urbanity.
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Berkshire Museum Top Arts Story of 2017
Coverage Morphed from Local to National News
By: - Dec 26th, 2017A decision on an appeal by Attorney General of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to halt the sale of 40 key works of art at Sothebys on behalf of the Berkshire Museum will be decided by the end of January. Van Shields, now on medical leave as director of the museum, and board president, Elizabeth "Buzz" McGraw, announced their $60 million plans for a New Vision in July. What started as a local story has morphed into national and global coverage. The outcome of this unethical attempt at deaccessioning by a pariah museum may have a game changing impact on the mandate of all American museums' commitment to preserve and conserve collections for future generations.
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MASS MoCA Update
Winter/ Spring Programming
By: - Dec 14th, 2017MASS MoCA heads into the winter/spring season with new works in the spotlight, on stage, and in the galleries. The season kicks off on January 20 with the museum’s annual Free Day, when MASS MoCA opens its galleries, free of charge, and activates its art with family-focused activities and performances throughout the day.
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Exploring Porto
Winding Down an Adventure in Portugal
By: - Dec 03rd, 2017My pre Thanksgiving travel in Portugal ended with a weekend in Porto. With 2.4 million inhabitants it is the small nation's second largest city. On a glorious, summer-like afternoon a highlight of the adventure was a river cruise in the romantic City of Bridges.
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Villa Dolores by Rafael Mahdavi
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
By: - Nov 30th, 2017Since the 1980s, the artist Rafael Mahdavi has been a colleague and friend. For many years, in addition to painting, photography and sculpture, he has been writing. Recently, he published a second book Villa Dolores a memoir of childhood and adolescence with another volume, already written to follow. He is also revisiting, editing and preparing for publication several novels. This memoir is relatively brief, just 173 pages, but compact , polished, explosively evocative and poetic. I took my time reading brief chapters of two or three pages. Each was a distilled and detailed anecdote, some horrific in nature, that flowed like an intimate conversation.
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Owens Pottery of North Carolina
North Carolina's Route 705 Is the Pottery Highway
By: - Nov 11th, 2017The oldest, continuously operating pottery along the Pottery Highway is Owens Pottery of North Carolina, also known as Original Owens Pottery. The Owens family has been involved in pottery since the early 1800s.
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Ersatz Cubist Dana Shutz
A Metaphysical Pratfall
By: - Nov 11th, 2017There were protests when Dana Shutz exhibited a painting of the mutilated black youth Emmet Till in his coffin. It was a controversial inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. It is not a part of a large overview of her work at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. There the curators have over expained the work with excessively detailed wall labels. It conveys the notion that the work in a kitchy, ersatz Cubist manner cannot speak for itself. Activists have petiitioned the ICA to shut down the exhibition.
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Guggenheim Bilbao at Twenty
An Inspiring Success Story
By: - Nov 06th, 2017The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao recently concluded a year-long celebration of its 20th anniversary under the concept "Art Changes Everything", inspired by the major changes that the city of Bilbao and its residents have experienced since the Museum's opening on October 19, 1997, while at the same time underscoring the transformational capacity of art. I felt fortunate to be able to visit this cultural treasure during a tour of the Basque region of northern Spain in late September.
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Arnold Trachtman at Galatea Fine Arts
More from a Concerned Artist
By: - Oct 29th, 2017Since the late 1960s I have curated and written about the work of the Cambridge based, activist and artist, Arhold Trachtman. A few of us- scholars, curators and critics- share a convicition that he is on the short list of most significant Boston artists of his generation. Given the highly charged and passionate focus of the work it has been in general too hot to handle for mainstream museums and curators. He has a staunch champion in Marjorie Kaye, the emeritus founder of Galatea Gallery, who co cuated the current exhiition with the artist's daughter Maxima Baudissin.
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Cape Cod Museum of Art
Promoting Regional Visual Arts Since 1980
By: - Oct 24th, 2017During our visit to the Cape Cod Museum of Art we viewed several special exhibitions: Salvatore Del Deo: A Storied History, extended through October 28, Discovering Cape Cod’s Museum Treasures, through November 26, and Judith Shahn Selections: A Tribute to Thomas Linxweiler through November 12. We met with Dr. Edith Tonelli who has been director for the past four years. She provided an overview of the museum and plans moving forward. We also learned why the museum and adjacent Cape Playhouse prove to have been uniquely moving experiences.
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Salvatore Del Deo: A Storied History
Co Founder of Provincetown’s Ciro’s and Sal’s
By: - Oct 23rd, 2017Now 92, the first generation Italian born artist, Salvatore Del Deo, settled in Provincetown in the post war 1940s. To pay for paint he did all the usual odd jobs. On summer he shippied out on a scallop boat. That experience richly informs a poignant triptych “Homage to the Patricia Marie” which was a part of his retrospective Salvatore Del Deo: A Storied History at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis. Famously he teamed up with another starving artist, Ciro Cozzi, to co found the legendary restaurant Ciro's and Sals. He later started his own Sal's Place.
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Group Fundraises to Block Berkshire Museum Sale
Save the Save
By: - Oct 13th, 2017“This is a classic case of confronting a well-organized, well-financed, misguided inside group, hoping to lead them to their better angels,” said Leslie Ferrin, founder of Save the Art. “That’s why we’re crowd-sourcing Save the Art’s legal action fund. We want to invite people to step up at whatever level they can, and say, “we support finding a better solution.”
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The Odd Couple Warhol and Rockwell
Populism as Commonality Explored at Rockwell Museum
By: - Oct 12th, 2017The artists Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol became rich and famous for giving the public what it wanted. It is this shared populism which is explored in an evocative exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Not surprisingly the exhibition has been mobbed with visitors.
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Morgan Bulkeley Retrospective at Berkshire Museum
Last of the Mohicans
By: - Oct 08th, 2017It was thrilling, poignant and terribly sad last night when many artists, friends and community packed the Berkshire Museum for a vernissage of the sprawling, eclectic, and dazzling retrospective Morgan Bulkeley: Nature Culture Clash. It may be the last such project focused on a Berkshire based artist. As a part of its New Vision the museum is dumping 40 works of art and reconfiguring. Van Shields and the board refuse to discuss the fate of the remaining collection of 40,000 objects and the role if any of the fine arts in its plans.
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Barbara Takenaga at Williams College Museum of Art
The Optics of Metaphysical Cosmology
By: - Oct 07th, 2017The Williams College Museum of Art, through the end of January, is presenting “Barbara Takenaga” a stunning overview of 60 works of varying scale, that represent two decades of her oeuvre. The selection was made in collaboration with independent curator Debra Bricker Balken.
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Berkshire Museum Stonewalls New Yorker
Van and Buzz Clam Up to Fake News Requests
By: - Oct 05th, 2017Relying primarily on published sources Felix Salmon in the New Yorker has reported on the deaccessioning and New Vision of the Berkshire Museum. As Solomon states “The story of the Berkshire Museum is more than one about a second-tier local institution selling off some art. It’s a story about how fragile museum-industry norms are, how unaccountable a museum director can be, and how much destruction can be wrought during a single secret trustee meeting. (The museum’s new P.R. representative, Carol Bosco Baumann, declined repeated requests to make anyone from the museum available for an interview.)” This is consistent with the museum's bunker mentality of playing hard ball with the media.
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