Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum uses it galleries and collections to present events. The Shanghai Opera's production of Farewell My Concubine, based on a 3rd century BC story, fit perfectly in the Chinese Courtyard modelled on the Ming Dynasty Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets.

This summer the Clark Art Institute features four special exhibitions Picasso Encounters, an exhibition of prints with a few key paintings, as well as Orchestrating Elegance; Alma Tadema and the Marquand Music Room and two focused on prints and paintings by Helen Frankenthaler. The museum launched its expansion with a spate of blockbusters but is now moving into a new era with less hoopla under its reserved and scholarly French-born director Olivier Meslay.

Five Boston museum directors have signed a letter of concern over reports that the National Endowment for the Arts is under threat of being abolished, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Under the conservative agenda of the Trump adminsitration this is an attack on the arts in America. Guarding the Trumps in NY, DC and Palm Beach for a week is on a par with endowment support.

In three concurrent New York gallery exhibitions- Lisson, Mary Boone and Jeffrey Deitch- the dissident Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, has created poignant and roiling new works. This is a massive project by arguably our greatest living artist.

Here is a cheat sheet of ranked museum exhibitions if you plan to be in NY for the holidays

Pekka Kuusisto took on the challenging Ligeti violin concerto with gusto, humor, and a quiet modesty. This was an unusual, and unusually effective combination of qualities, especially in view of the pick he took to the violin to make it into a guitar, and his beautiful whistling. David Fulmer conducted like a poet of music. John Zorn in the audience appreciated the performance of his work by the Mivos Quartet. It was another brilliant program put on by Alan Gilbert, who credits cellist Jay Chambers with suggesting Ligeti and his influence.

The annual New York Philharmonic concert at St. John the Divine in New York was started a quarter century ago just as Kurt Mazur took the helm of the orchestra. The conductor was honored today in a wonderful New Orleans Funeral March led down the long aisle of the Cathedral by Wynton Marsalis and also a performance of Brahms' Second Symphony led by Alan Gilbert.

Although just fourteen August de Forest is being given a one woman show at the Butler Institute of American Art’s Mesaros Gallery in Youngstown, Ohio. She is from a family famous for its artists and museum professionals.

The Mount in Lenox announces its schedule of events for the 2016 season.

An exhibition by Susan Schwalb features abstract, linear compositions of mixed metalpoint on colored surfaces, many of which investigate absence or the void as a constructive element The exhibition at Garvey/ Simon Gallery in New York will run from April 28 – June 4, 2016

Using a satellite image Tom Krens commented on a six mile line connecting North Adams and Williamstown. It was a part of an engaging power point presentation to develop a cultural corridor connecting world class resources including a new for profit museum and one in North Adams featuring model railroads and maquettes by renowned architects. Former governors Dukakis and Weld attended the presentation.

The Lumbee Indian, Lloyd Oxendine, who died on August 5, held a BA in art history from Columbia where he also earned an MFA. From 1970-78 he ran a New York gallery dedicated to Native American Art. In 1972 he wrote what proved to be most of an issue of Art in American surveying 23 artists. For many years he was a brilliant and outspoken activist.

I have known and much appreciated the witty and whimsical artist Raeford Liles since the 1960s. He was represented by the East Hampton Gallery when I worked there. Some years ago the artist returned to Birmingham, Alabama where he grew up. Now in assisted living his family has been working to catalog, archive and preserve decades of his work. From this extensive project has emerged the publication of a series of digital prints from his inspired Greek Pots series.

In this installment of an extensive interview the pratfalls of modern and contemporary art in Boston are explored. It was a peripheral topic in Belinda Rathbone's biography of her father, former MFA director, Perry T. Rathbone.

The Boston Raphael is the first major book on the Museum of Fine Arts since Walter Muir Whitehill's centennial history in 1970. This is part one of an in dept interview with biographer Belinda Rathbone about the New York Times best selling profile of her father, former MFA director, Perry T. Rathbone.

In its new, enlarged, and enhanced space, The Cooper-Hewitt Museum has increased its ability to present provocative and compelling perspectives on design. At its best, this museum pays homage to design as if it was great art: visitors are infused with delight and a sense of wonder by what design was, is, and what it means in our lives.

The School of Paris, particularly Picasso and Matisse, with sidebars on Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Leger are the heart and soul of museum and gallery exhibitions during the busy holiday season. These show provide invlauable insights to the issues of cubism and abstract art in the 20th century.

Recently we were among the 1.3 million annual visitors to the Getty Center in California. The Richard Meier designed complex opened in 1997 at a cost of some $1.3 billion. While spectacular in scale and cliff top site the museum is oddly generic displaying a thin permanent collection with a handful of very expensive acquisitions through some curatorial hanky panky.

Once 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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Since it opened in 1955 with a superb permanent collection the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute has long been regarded among America's finest regional museums. With a $145 expansion and renovation designed by Tadao Ando the Clark is now a whole lot more fabulous. Combined with nearby Mass MoCA, Williams College, and the Wlliamstown Theatre Festival the Northern Berkshires are an even better first class arts desitinaton.

After 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.

Nashville is rightly known as The Music City. Since 2001, with the opening of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in a former art deco post office the city is also a regional destination for world class art exhibitions. Meeting with museum staff we discussed how a non collecting institution, a kunsthalle, manages to leverage major loans and traveling exhibitions. Primarily this is done by original scholarly work and publications as well as building relationships with partnering museums.

Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 6 is the most compelling and insightful contemporary exhibition currently on view in New York museums. Unquestionably some of the most important work of the past few years has been created by Chinese artists. There are 70 works on view by 35 artists in this fascinating exhibition.

Dream surrealism has always been accessible to the general public. During the Holiday season in New York, through January 12, there is an intriguing double header. The relatively small but concise "Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations" is on view at the Metropolitan while "Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938" is featured at the Museum of Modern Art.