Museum of Fine Arts

Patricia Hills is a leftist/ feminist scholar, professor and curator. Since retirement from teaching art history at Boston University she has continued with research and writing. This essay is a chapter from her soon to be published memoir Feisty Feminist Challenges the Art World. Here she vividly relates the Boston Massacre when MFA director Malcolm Rogers fired renowned curators pursuant to his vision of One Museum. In a corporate, manner unique to the well mannered art world, they were escorted from the museum. Hills organized protest against this initiative. She endured a counterattack from the museum but was supported by Boston University.

The poet and multimedia artist Gerd Stern has died at 96. His friend Mark Favermann wrote about him on two occasions for Berkshires Fine Arts. His companies USCO and Intermedia were a presence in Cambridge and Boston. Most notable was a recording studio on Newbury Street where the Cars and other bands recorded.

Mckinney’s work is a deeply personal exploration of portraiture, color, and composition. Her work draws from a wide range of sources, rooted in an expansive dialogue with art history while remaining true to her unique vision.

In 1986 I organized an exhibition of four African American artists who lived and worked in Provincetown. That fall Kind of Blue traveled to the gallery of Northeastern University. In Boston there was a panel discussion chaired by Edmund Barry Gaither, then the director of the National Center for African American Artists and an adjunct curator for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In addition to myself, there were two other panelists. Patricia Hills was then a professor of art history at Boston University. She has long championed issues of social justice and wrote a monograph and curated an exhibition of the work of Jacob Lawrence. Dana Chandler is an artist and activist.

Co-organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson is the largest-ever exhibition of the artist’s work. Featuring approximately 110 works in a wide range of media—drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and illustrated books—the retrospective explores how Wilson’s work speaks to shared experiences, while also displaying his personal search for identity as an artist, Black man, parent, and American.

Curated by independent art historian Glenn Adamson, Ground/work 2025 features a dynamic range of outdoor presentations by international artists, Akiyama, Laura Ellen Bacon, Aboubakar Fofana, Hugh Hayden, Milena Naef, and Javier Senosiain that respond to the Clark’s unique setting while expressing ideas core to each artist’s individual practice.

In her candid memoir, Pow! Right in the Eye!—recently translated into English—Weill described herself as having a "difficult personality." She wasn’t wrong. Her sharp tongue and uncompromising attitude were well known. Picasso biographer John Richardson even described her as a "peppery, homely Jewish spinster with spectacles thick as goldfish bowls." Yet it was her fiery personality and unrivaled intuition for spotting talent that made her a key figure.

Organized against the backdrop of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Power of the People: Art and Democracy at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), presents diverse perspectives on democracy through 175 works of art that include ceramics, coins, inscriptions, paintings, sculpture, prints, photographs, posters, and fashion

Jeffrey Gibson’s POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT is a newly commissioned immersive installation that will occupy MASS MoCA’s signature Building 5 gallery and follows Gibson’s highly celebrated United States representation at the 60th edition of La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition opens on November 3.

Bert Stern’s children, Trista and Bret, comment on the exhibition, “We are thrilled to bring our father’s iconic 1962 shoot with Marilyn Monroe back to vivid life at the beautiful Sohn Fine Art Gallery. Marilyn was our dad’s dream girl, a unique mix of actress, model and ‘American goddess’ (as he called her) that he never encountered before or after. He told us, ‘Stars die, but light goes on forever.’ Through the magic of photography, Marilyn Monroe is still reaching us with her light today.”

In the late 1960s a new generation of artists revitalized the Boston art world. They created Studio Coalition the nation's first open studios event. Katherine Porter emerged with immediate recognition and success. She was shown twice in Whitney Biennials and exhibited in major galleries. Social concerns informed her work. She moved a number of times seeking a like minded community. We reconnected when for several years she lived in Vermont. In her final recent move she settled in Santa Fe.

Mark Morrisroe, who died at 30, was the most innovative of the artists shown as the Boston School at the ICA in an exhibition curated by Lea Gangitano. Since his premature death his reputation has continued to grow. This is his fifth solo with Clamp Gallery. His work has been acquired by numerous museums.

I first met Clement Greenberg after Ken (Moffett) invited me to go to Toronto in the summer of 1981 where he and Greenberg were on a panel discussion at the Toronto Art Fair. I accompanied Greenberg and Moffett on their visit to at least 20 artists’ studios in Toronto. It was the best art education of my life!

For under a million dollars, MFA curator Kenworth Moffett, presented Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist to the acquisitions committee. In an epic pratfall the trustees under orders from the new director, Merrill Rueppel, turned it down. In a matter of weeks it was acquired by the National Gallery. The MFA later acquired two works by the abstract expressionist artist. Several years ago a Pollock, now owned by the Norton Museum, sold for $200 million.

Whimsical figurative artist Andrew Stevovich is exhibiting at Clark Gallery in Lincoln, Mass.

In conjunction with the exhibition Hallyu! The Korean Wave, which explores the worldwide impact of South Korean pop culture, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), presents films by some of the country's greatest auteurs.

The collection of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), is one of the most comprehensive in the world. Five newly transformed galleries showcasing nearly 200 highlights—including painting, sculpture, decorative arts and selections from the Museum’s vast collection of ukiyo-e prints—open on May 11, 2024.Japanese

With minimal marketing and fanfare the Cape Ann Museum launches its 2024 season with the special exhibition In the Round: 20th Century Cape Ann Sculpture which opens April 6 from 3 to 5 pm. It focuses on major sculptors who lived and worked on Cape Ann. In July there will be a survey of women artists. The museum has pulled back to business as usual following last summer's blockbuster Edward Hopper and Jo Nivison exhibition in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In my new paintings I am imagining “evolutants” stuck in the mud, from remains of the flora and fauna of the smallest cell-like creatures to the evolution of our present human form, painted as staggered layers of history. They are colorful, animated patterns of biological and imaginary forms painted in acrylic and oil.

First Friday, March 1, 5 - 8:30pm, will feature the reception & artist talks at Boston Sculptors in the South End. Works by Ed Andrews and Leslie Wilcox will be on view through March 31. There will be artist talks on Saturday March 16 from 2-5 PM.

Pandering to the public continues at the ever more accessible Museum of Fine Arts. It follows a blockbuster show of Sargent portraits of white supremacists with an in depth view of the ultimate charlatan Salvador Dali. He has been described as the greatest modernist from the wrist down. Dalí: Disruption and Devotion, opens in July with 30 works by Dali compared to European masterpieces from the museum's collection. The Dalis are on loan from the St Petersburg, Florida museum. The project is both cost effective and crowd pleasing.

Presenting over 150 photographs of, by, and for Indigenous people, “In Our Hands” welcomes all to see through the lens held by Native photographers.

A majority of the works in Mondrian: Foundations are drawn from a gift to the MFA from Maria and Conrad Janis by and through the Janis Living Trust. In addition to 34 paintings, drawings and watercolors by Mondrian—24 of which are on view in the exhibition

In collaboration with curator/designer Martina Salisbury, The Friends of Beattie-Powers Place presents Moments in Time :: Pictures 1965-2023. The intimate salon installation offers a rare opportunity to view a selection of over 60 of Gerard Malanga’s photographs, including portraits of some of the most illustrious artists, musicians, literary figures, and cultural icons of the last six decades.  ?

Hall Space presents Ellen Shattuck PIerce "Taking Place." It's a lively exhibition of relief and hand colored laser prints.