On June 13 in 1870, a train arrived in North Adams with 75 young men from China hired to replace striking shoe workers. Over 2,000 people watched as the men walked to the factory under police escort. The crowd was hostile, but there was no violence. The Chinese proved to be both cheaper and more efficient than the union shoe workers they replaced.

Did you miss Global Pillow this weekend? There's still time to watch this global celebration of dance!

David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History represents a landmark moment in American art: the first major exhibition of David Driskell’s remarkable career as a painter. The exhibition is featured at Maine's Portland Museum of Art through September 12.

Developed in partnership with Fuller Craft Museum, Plymouth College of Art, and The Box (both in Plymouth, England), Another Crossing brings together artists from the United States and Europe for a global, cross-cultural effort that examines a pivotal event in world history.

This summer, New Light: Encounters and Connections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), brings more than 60 works of art from across the collection—including 23 newly acquired contemporary pieces—into thought-provoking dialogue. Organized into 21 “conversations,” the exhibition juxtaposes each contemporary work with one or two rarely seen objects acquired earlier in the Museum’s history.

Area Stage mounts 'Annie' with eight actors, all of them adults. The production takes place inside a speakeasy. This immersive 'Annie' is yet another triumph for visionary theater artist Giancarlo Rodaz. The production runs through July 4.

How theater is presented this summer continues to expand. TheaterWorks in Hartford, West Hartford’s Playhouse on Park and Ridgefield’s Thrown Stone Theater are exploring what are called “site-specific” productions – where the production’s content has a relationship to the site where it is performed.

Tania Leon has been awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for music for Stride, commissionedb by Project 19 of the New York Philharmonic. The project commissioned work by women composers.

This 2021 Boston Pops July 4th Spectacular will be a televised, live-streamed concert to take place under the direction of Keith Lockhart from the stage of Tanglewood’s Koussevitzky Music Shed, Sunday, July 4, 8-11 p.m., broadcast live on Bloomberg TV and Radio, as well as locally on WHDH-TV Channel 7.

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) has appointed Timothy R. Rodgers, PhD, to serve as the Museum’s Nanette L. Laitman Director. Rodgers is currently the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum and previously served as director of The Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami. Prior to the Wolfsonian, Rodgers concurrently served as director of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and Vice President of the Scottsdale Cultural Council. He will assume his new position on September 15, 2021.

Horace D. Ballard is the new Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. Associate Curator of American Art at the Harvard Art Museums, effective September 1, 2021. Ballard is currently curator of American art at the Williams College Museum of Art, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he was previously assistant curator from 2017 to 2019.

Playwright Jeanne Takata’s one-man, biographical drama “Hold These Truths” beautifully captures Gordon Hirabayashi’s courage and sacrifice in challenging President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1942 Executive Order 9066, which consigned Japanese-Americans, including those who were American citizens, to internment camps during World War II.

Wilco's Jeff Tweedy takes the stage, joined by special guest and bandmate, Nels Cline, for a concert benefiting MASS MoCA’s Joe Thompson “Yes” Fund. All proceeds directly support the museum’s mission – instilled by our founding director Joe Thompson — to champion artists and art-making in all forms. 

Nikolai Astrup is considered one of Norway’s most important artists, yet he is largely unknown outside of his homeland. Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway, on view June 19 through September 19, 2021, features more than eighty-five works and celebrates this brilliant painter, printmaker, and horticulturalist. 

Juneteenth dates back to June 19, 1865, when news of the Civil War’s end reached Galveston, Texas—nearly two and a half years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The MFA has hosted a community celebration marking the holiday since 2013.

Mezze in Williamstown changes with the seasons. Now in a heat spell they are creating chilled beet soup garnished with cucumbers, green olive, gammelgarden yogurt and salmon roe.

The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award was created in 2007 by an anonymous donor whose commitment to an ongoing annual gift to Jacob’s Pillow of $50,000 is generous and far-reaching. The Award, presented each year to an artist of exceptional vision and achievement, carries a cash prize of $25,000 which the artist can use in any way they wish. Dormeshia is this year's winner.

Savvy heavyweight Hollywood movers and shakers like Steven Spielberg, Marc Platt, Kristie Macosko Krieger, producer Mark Taylor, and director Bartlett Sher lend their considerable talents and heft into a timely remake of the 2017 Tony-winning stage production “Oslo”.  The Oslo movie version of 2021 is also written by J.T. Rogers from his eponymous stage play, along with new inputs as a way of sharpening and updating the dialogue by Rogers and others.  

Featuring four Williams plays, the newest from Penny Arcade, Mae West’s shuttered 1926 Broadway smash, a witchy satire from 1616, and more. The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival was founded in 2006 in Provincetown—the birthplace of modern American theater—where Williams worked on many of his major plays during the 1940s.

As a title, Sections riffs off the organizational structure of a newspaper—a structure which is palpably felt in print editions where each section is folded separately and sandwiched into the others. This concept plays out spatially across the gallery, as the walls, floor and ceiling each become uniquely activated by the work installed on them.

Southeast Florida's Island City Stage presents a delightfully comic 'Bright Colors and Bold Patterns." The Drew Droege one-man comedy is onstage through June 29. The production will also include a period during which people can virtually watch the show. 'Bright Colors and Bold Patterns' completes Island City Stage's 9th season.

 “It has been a long time since we were all together in a theater, and we need this now more than ever—artists and audiences alike,” says Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director Diane Paulus. “We have spent the last year in deep learning and reflection at the A.R.T., and we are excited to share our 2021/22 programming, which welcomes audiences back in person and reflects our core values, from centering anti-racism to embracing regenerative practice that promotes the health of our planet, our organization, and each other.”

Almost a year after I wrote my essay in 2013 on Zombie Abstraction I got an email from Mark Stone at https://henrimag.com/ that I had received confirmation of my role in coining the term Zombie Formalism from “Art in America” critic Raphael Rubinstein in an article he wrote in that magazine on French postmodernist thinking and French abstraction:"Theory and Matter."

The list of artists included in the exhibition are:  Joseph Barbieri, Gerry Bergstein, Peter Brooke, Lana Z Caplan, Nicole Chesney, Alice Denison, Robert Ferrandini, Rick Fox, Lorie Hamermesh, Dinorá Justice, Jaclyn Kain, Masako Kamiya, Martin Kline, Mary Kocol, Keira Kotler, Bryan McFarlane, Todd McKie, Joseph McNamara, George Nick, Richard Raiselis, Louis Risoli, Terry Rose, Henry Schwartz, Peri Schwartz, Peter Scott, Robert Siegelman, Cheryl Ann Thomas, Peter Vanderwarker  

IN SUPPORT OF REGULATIONS SET BY THE TRI-TOWN HEALTH DEPARTMENT AND THE LENOX AND STOCKBRIDGE HEALTH BOARDS, TANGLEWOOD WILL LIMIT ATTENDANCE CAPACITY TO 9,000—50% OF ITS USUAL CAPACITY OF 18,000; THIS REPRESENTS A SIGNIFICANT INCREASE OVER THE PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED ATTENDANCE CAP OF 25%.