Fine Arts
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Cape Ann Museum Reopens
Tour with Director Ronda Faloon
By: - Aug 15th, 2014The Cape Ann Museum has raised $5 million with $3.5 for a renovation of its eclectic warren of buildings and galleries. Just prior to the recent reopening we were given a tour of the collection by the museum's director Ronda Faloon. The collection displays all aspects of life on historic Cape Ann. Its heart and soul comprises 40 paintings and 100 drawings by America's most renowned 19th century painter of seascapes Fitz Henry Lane. There are also many works by leading artists who were a part of the art colony.
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Rudd Art Museum in North Adams
Presenting Berkshire Artists
By: - Aug 06th, 2014As artists approach their senior years familiar issues arise. Unless they reach a level of broad recognition and market value for the work there is the challenge of legacy and handling of estates. North Adams based artist/ author and developer, Eric Rudd, has written a book on these concerns and by creating his own museum in North Adams is taking action to address them. Art historian and former Berkshire Eagle critic, Keith Shaw, is assisting Rudd by curating exhibitions based on artists living and working in the region. Here he discusses what that entails.
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Animating the Everyday by Robin Rhode
Winner of the Biannual Roy R. Neuberger Exhibition Prize
By: - Aug 02nd, 2014Animating The Everyday - running through August 10 – is a ten-year survey of the work of South African born, Berlin based artist Robin Rhode. Curated by Helaine Posner, the museum’s Chief Curator of Contemporary Art, along with co-curator Louise Yelin. High definition projectors, and advanced musical composed sound tracks by Arenor Anuku, feature the artist’s digital animations, as well as a selection of his still photographs, the latter elegantly hung on charcoal gray walls.
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Ann Hamilton Bangs on a Can
Paper Sounding Premieres at Mass MoCA
By: - Jul 30th, 2014With just four rehearsal sessions in less than a week installatin artist, Ann Hamilton, returned to Mass MoCA to create a piece for some thirty individuals "Paper Sounding" as a part of the annual Bang on a Can festival. The spontaneous and lively work was co directed by Mark Stewart and David Cossin. The performance was our introducton to an area of the vast Building Six which the museum hopes soon to develop. We spoke with Hamilton about the significance of paper in her practice.
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Ann Hamilton's Corpus at Mass Moca
2003 Installation in Building Five
By: - Jul 30th, 2014In 2003-2004 Ann Hamilton installed a paper based work Corpus in the vast building five of Mass MoCA. It was a relatvely early project in the space. This article is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.
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Native American Repatriation
National Museum of the American Indian
By: - Jul 29th, 2014When the NMAI was established in 1989 with the passage of the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAI Act), it included the first U.S. repatriation legislation that provided for the return of Native American human remains and certain cultural items in the collections. Since the museum's inception, one of the highest priorities has been the return of Native American human remains and their associated funerary items back to their communities of origin.
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Marjorie Minkin’s Lexan Painted Reliefs
Collaborations with Her Son Mike Gordon of Phish
By: - Jul 28th, 2014During the final days of her exhibition at the Eclipse Mill Gallery in North Adams, Mass. we spoke with Marjorie Minkin about her painted Lexan reliefs. We discussed the current exhibition and background of her relationship with renowned critic, Clement Greenberg, and curator/ critic, Kenworth Moffett. As well as a 2005/06 project in collaboration with her son Mike Gordon of the rock band Phish and engineer Jamie Robertson.
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Pipaluk Lake's Planned Accidents
Multi Media Works at Maria Lund Galerie in Paris
By: - Jul 28th, 2014Pipaluk Lake takes a long time to conceive her glass and metal “bundlesâ€; she cuts, hammers, attaches, knits, sews… Putting into practice a know-how acquired during a quadruple training in fields as diverse as textile, glass, metal and wood. Once her complex preparation work finished, she abandons her “bundle†to the alchemy of heat and gravity inside the kiln.
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Love Made Visible by Jean Gibran
A Complex Book on Her Husband Kahlil Gibran
By: - Jul 27th, 2014Decades ago the sculptor Kahlin Gibran and his wife Jean purchased a shell in Boston's ethnically mixed South End. A meticulous craftsman the home evolved as a museum of his work and collection. Together they wrote a definitive 1974 biography "Kahlil Gibran, His Life and World." Now Jean has published "Love Made Visible: Scenes from a Mostly Happy Marriage" about a complex relationship with her late husband.
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Re-Introducing The Rhino Horn Group
Evolved from Figurative Expressionism
By: - Jul 24th, 2014When Pop Art dominated the art world and mass-media a group of New York expressionists said no thanks. The primal, raucous, and confrontational approach to painting exhibited by the group’s members kept the emotional impact of Figurative Expressionism alive. However, aesthetic tradition was less important than the moral obligation of depicting the reality that the artists perceived. This put the Rhino Horn artists at odds with many of the mainstream artists that had turned away from expressionism and humanist art.
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Jim Hodges at the ICA
Summer in the City
By: - Jul 23rd, 2014The artist Jim Hodges came to New York in the 1980s at a time when AIDS was decimating the arts community. Like others of his generation his work responded to a sense of devastation and loss. A retrospecitve of his eclectic conceptual work is on view at Boston's ICA until September 1.
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Jamie Wyeth at the MFA
Good Genes
By: - Jul 22nd, 2014Outgoing populist and vulgarian, MFA director Malcolm Rogers, has orchestrated yet another celebrity based, crowd pleasing exhibition. The traveling restrospective of paintings by Jamie, a third generation manifestation of the famous Wyeth dynasty, is actually kind of fun. Where the work fits in the canon of the art of our time, however, is another matter.
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Group ZERO Co Founder Otto Piene at 85
Guggenheim ZERO Exhibition to Open in October
By: - Jul 19th, 2014From 1974 to 1994 the German/ American artist Otto Piene was the director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. With a farm in Groton he continued to commute to his studio in Dusseldorf. He died this week, at 85, while working on a major museum exhibition and sky art event in Berlin. While celebrated internationally, there will be an exhibition of Group ZERO this seaon at the Guggenheim, he was snubbed by the Boston art world and media.
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Preserving Mother Cabrini
The Religious Art of Mummification
By: - Jul 14th, 2014Once inside the Mother Cabrini sanctuary I found myself transfixed by her mummified corpse. I wondered: How does anyone worship God in this space? What is it like to take communion with a mummified corpse in the same room? Then I noticed the late afternoon light pouring through the stain glass representation of her on the back wall of the sanctuary. The light poured across the room with the full spectrum of color, it flooded the pews, and led my eye back to her remains.
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Raw Color: The Circles of David Smith
Special Exhibition for The Clark Art Institute
By: - Jul 03rd, 2014As a part of its expansion and renovation, taking advantage of appropriately scaled new special exhibition space, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Insitute is progressing beyond its tradition roots by showcasing modern and contemporary art. Currently there is Raw Color: The Circles of David Smith. In August the museum will feature Make It New master works of American modernism from the National Gallery.
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Remembering the Artist Robert De Niro, Sr.
The Actor Celebrates His Father
By: - Jun 26th, 2014"Remembering the Artist Robert De Niro Sr." is a short documentary tribute in which the actor pays homage to his father. It examines the art and life of a Figurative Expressionist painter from the New York School.
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Adrian Ghenie’s Golems at Pace London
Figurative Works by a Romanian Artist
By: - Jun 21st, 2014Adrian Ghenie highlights an era that questioned man’s significance, the existence of God, and the question of Creationism —through a use of paint that suggests the anamorphic nature of identity through the evolution of scientific understanding, and contradiction of the Baconian flesh that presents it.
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Franz West at Mass MoCA and WCMA
From Actionism to the Absurd
By: - Jun 21st, 2014The Austrian artist Franz West (16 February 1947- 25 July 2012). is being featured this summer in the Northern Berkshires. There is a display of several large scale, puffy, pink phallic sculptures at Mass MoCA and a tandem exhibition of works on paper and smaller scale sculptures at Williams College Museum of Art. The artist was widely included in global biennials and museum exhibitions including a retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art. We consider West in the milieu of post war artists in Vienna including its outrageous Actionists.
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Emotional Impact: American Figurative Expressionism
April Kingsley's Catalogue for Michigan State University
By: - Jun 19th, 2014While curator of Kresge Art Museum at Michigan State University from 1999 to 2011 April Kingsley had the resources and inspiration to collect works by the undervalued and poorly understood artists of the Figurative Expressionist movement. It was widely felt among artists that there would be a return to the figure informed by but diverging from abstract expressionism. Aspects of this experimentation occurred with little or no direct communication in New York, Provincetown, Boston, and the Bay Area of San Francisco. This book fails to present a cohesive overview of those complex developments.
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The New Realism: Ananian, Deyab, Lee and Mugar
Why We Fight
By: - Jun 18th, 2014The Neo-Expressionism of the 80’s seemed to be the last gasp of that self-centered version that came out of Germany in the 20’s and 30’s.I wanted a language that would embody the state of things of things as they are. Things as they are swimming in a sea of forces bigger than themselves
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Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges
Bringing Iconic American Art to Arkansas
By: - Jun 11th, 2014During our visit to Crystal Springs Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas we met with museum spokesperson Diane Carol. Fending off questions of media controversy regarding aggressive acquisitions she emphasized that the museum is free and serves a region that lacks resources of its quality. As she pointed out since opening in 11/11/11 some 1.3 million visitors have viewed "Kindred Spirits" by Asher B. Durand which formerly hung in the New York Public Library.
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Crystal Bridges in Bentonville Arkansas
All the Museum that Walmart Money Can Buy
By: - Jun 10th, 2014After extensive renovation and expansion the Clark Art Institute reopens this summer. Much is being made of how its Tadeo Ando designed low lying horizontal line and large reflecting pool embrace nature and the background rolling mountain range. The paradigm for architecture set into natural surroundings, however, is the Moshe Safdie design for Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas. It is nestled into a ravine with a series of pontoon "bridges." The museum which opened on 11/11/11 has some 500,000 annual visitors for its controversial collection of American art.
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Betty Vera Hiding in Plain Sight
Jacquard Weavings at Eclipse Mill Gallery
By: - Jun 09th, 2014Cotton was the material that drove the economy of numerous mills in the Northern Berkshires. That left a terrible legacy of involvement with slavery and child labor during the era of King Cotton. As a part of a healing process the fabric artist Betty Vere is bringing cotton back to the gallery of the Eclipse Mill in North Adams. In the exhibition Hiding in Plain Sight she is displaying a series of Jacquard weaving.
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Searching Yet Again for Aviator Amelia Earhart
America’s Most Famous Missing Person
By: - Jun 04th, 2014This review was written for the Amelia Earhart Image and Icon exhibition at International Center for Photography from May 11 – September 9, 2007. Published here for the first time Rubin considers it as one of his best articles.
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Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010
German Master Surveyed at MoMA
By: - Jun 03rd, 2014Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) was one of the most important Post War German artists. He is the subject of a dense, sprawling and and messy retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art through August 3. It would be a folly and conceit to attempt to review such diverse and eclectic, mind boggling work. For that we refer you to mainstream critics all of whom fail, to varying degrees, to nail down the work of one of the most fascinating and daunting artists of our time.
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