Metropolitan Museum of Art

Regular visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts were readily familiar with many of the works in the 2006 traveling exhibition Americans in Paris 1860-1900. Its renowned permanent collection was augmented with loans of masterpieces including Whistler's Mother and Madame X by Sargent. This review is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

The Combines of Robert Rauschenberg, as presented in this traveling exhibition., were among the most powerful and influential works of his generation. This articles is reported from Maverick Arts Magazine.

As research for the exhibition Native New Yorkers we interviewed artists, a curator and collector. We found that questions led every deeper into a richly diverse and little understood field of contemporary art. The article is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

Lowery Siums was the first African American curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Later she was the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. We met for lunch in Chelsea followed by a visit to the exhibition of our mutual friend Jaune Quick To See Smith at Flomenhaft Gallery. This article was posted to Maverick Arts Magazine in 2005.

Not long after Camilo Alvarez founded Samson Projects in Boston's South End in 2005 we met for a beer and burger. It launched a series of meetings and articles with a range of artists, curators and gallerists. For their historical interest they are being reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

The artist Martin Mugar recently visited the modern and contemporary galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He discusses the challenge of emergring from the shadow of the renowned artists on view. As well as releasing the muse of his own limitations.

Kapoor in Berlin (closing November 24) is a show I had looked forward to seeing, and it did not disappoint. Anish Kapoor (born 1954 in Mumbai; British citizen, recently knighted) creates massive sculptures from different materials that vary from forms that look like prehistoric rock formations, to highly reflective steel, to sticky red wax. Two years ago I was delightfully overwhelmed with his Cloud Gate, 2004-06, installed at the AT&T Plaza in Millennium Park in Chicago.

We met with Native American artist Lloyd Oxendine in his New York apartment in 2006. He related early efforts to promote the artists of his heritage in the 1960s and 1970s. Recently we learned that not long after the interview the artist became homeless and nothing has been heard from him since then. In 1985 he became Director/Curator of New York's American Indian Community House (AICH) Gallery/Museum. During his tenure he organized some 40 exhibitions and worked to promote reviews and sales.

Michelle Dorrance, Artistic Director of Dorrance Dance, is lauded as "one of the most imaginative tap choreographers working today” (The New Yorker). A 2012 Princess Grace Award Winner, 2012 Field Dance Fund Recipient, and 2011 Bessie Award Winner, Dorrance is among the world’s most sought after tap performers, teachers, and choreographers today.

The American Chapter of the International Society of Art Critics (AICA) announces its annual awards. There are a number of categories from site specific works to gallery and museum exhibitions.

Jaune Quick to See Smith is one of the foremost Native American artists of her generation. She will exhibit work on the theme of Water and War at the Accola Griefen Gallery in New York City from February 28 through April 6.

Occasions to see sculpture by the Italian Renaissance master, Michelangelo Buonarotti, are few and far between. From now through March 3 his unfnished Apollo-David is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Matisse: In Search of True Painting is a modest exhibition of just 49 works selected by Rebecca Rabinow, a curator of modern and contemporary art for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It offers multiple views of specific themes and subjects. This provides valuable insights to the process and techniques of the artist. The Met show of Matisse is as satisfying as Picasso Black and White at the Guggenheim is a bloody awful mess. In this clash of Titans, and faceoff of Holiday blockbusters, Matisse and the Met win hands down. No contest.

The stunning exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art "Bernini Sculpting in Clay" includes 29 of the artist’s bozetti, or sketch models in terracotta, standing between 12 and 20 inches tall — along with one or two larger and more finished models, which are as much as three feet tall. The project, which as been co organized with the Kimbell Museum, provides compelling insights to the artist's working process.

For the holidays two blockbuster exhibition provide the chance to compare and contrast the greatest masters of the School of Paris. The Metropolitam Museum is showing Henri Matisse while the Guggenheim features Picasso Black and White. A spin through the Guggenheim proved to be disappointing with a glut of mediocre mid period and late works and just a couple of bona fide masterpieces.

The October 2012 WFF went off without a hitch, well almost. BerkshireFineArts has already given overviews of this year's film festival. This report is primarily about short films, or Shorts, and their highly succesful screenings during a five day long movie feast!

Now in its 14th year the Williamstown Film Festival has been compressed from two weekends to one Wednesday through Sunday stretch. That saw an increase of guest artists and visitors who hung in for the duration of the unique cinematic event. Yet again, artistic director, Steve Lawson, concocted a heady mix of many short films and several stunning features. There was a sell out for the thursday opening night of Dreamscape, followed by a party at Mezze. On Friday Mass MoCA was packed for Knuckleball. This is the first of two reports and several interviews.

In the third and final installment of an in depth interview Stephen Hannock discusses how it takes a village to create his work. And that all of the individuals deserve to be respected and paid. He also articulate the process by which his remarkable lifestyle and the narrative of his images get woven into their creation.

The documentary film Dreamscapes by Wolfram Hissen will be screened on Thursday October 18 at the annual Williamstown Film Festival. Following the film, its subject the artist Stephen Hannock, and Top Chef producer and chief judge, Tom Colicchio, will engage in a dialogue with tasting at the restaurant Mezze. Hannock has been involved by creating paintings for a dozen new restaurant projects with Colicchio and his partner Danny Meyer. We met with Hannock in his Berkshire studio to discuss the film and his latest art projects.

Last night Compagnie Kafig blew the roof off of the Ted Shawn Theatre in their second visit to Jacob’s Pillow Dance since 2001. The French choreographer based in Lyon, Mourad Merzouki, has worked with eleven Brazilian dancers to create a compelling blend of indigenous dance and high cultures. The audience was thrilled and astonished.

From now through March, 2013 Mass MoCA will display the first major museum level survey of contemporary Canadian art in the United States. The work of sixty plus artists was selected through a process of some 400 studio visits over the past few years by curator Denise Markonish. It's a lively, upbeat, sprawling exhibition but don't expect any quick answers to the question of what is Canadian about Canadian art. Mostly it's like contemporary American art just less familiar and farther north,.

Between 1893 and 1895, Edvard Munch, 30 when he started the cycle, made four versions of "The Scream." It has proved to be one of the most iconic images of modern art. Three of the paintings are owned by museums in Norway. Two have been stolen and since recovered. The fourth, a pastel version from 1895, the last in private hands, set a new auction record this week at $120 million. That's a lot of cash for high anxiety.

None of the collections of Gertrude, Leo, Michael Stein and his wife Sarah remained intact. They sold and traded many masterpieces during their lifetimes. The collections were further dispersed by their heirs. In a definitive exhibition The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde 200 of these works have been brought together and are now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Beyond King Tut and Cleopatra most folks know little or nothing about the thirty dynasties and 3000 years of Ancient Egyptian Art. The Met's special exhibition The Dawn of Egyptian Art provides a tantalizing encounter with the esoteric era prior to and during the founding dynasties.

In 1952 a remarkable painting "Mountains and Sea" placed a recent Bennington College graduate, Helen Frankenthaler, in a position of innovator of what critic/ boyfriend, Clement Greenberg, dubbed Post-Painterly Abstraction. The movement is more widely known as Color Field Painting. We discussed her work in 1981 during an exhibition at the Rose Art Museum. At 83 she died on December 27.