Museum of Fine Arts

How one man lovingly – and obsessively - constructed his very own movie palace in the basement of his suburban home.

During the pandemic Northeastern University has restricted access to artists in its historic African American Master Artists in Residency Program. It was founded in 1978 by Dana C. Chandler, Jr. Speaking out against the university for its actions against AAMRP is Dana Chandler III the son of the founder,

When the British born Malcolm Rogers took over the Museum of Fine Arts in 1994 it had a $4.5 million annual deficit and was generally moribund. It was better than he found it when he departed in 2015. He left a bricks and mortar legacy of The American Wing designed by Lord Norman Foster. Under a mantra of One Museum, however, he dismantled the traditional departments, fired renowned curators, or forced them to leave. He created a structure of mega departments staffed by cooperative curators. The current director, Matthew Teitelbaum, inherited a debt of $140 million and is tasked with mending curatorial fences.

MFA director Jan Fontein first apppointed John Walsh as curator of European Paintings then Theodore E. Stebbins as curator of American Paintings. In this first of our two part coverage Stebbins discusses the M&M Karolik and William H. and Saundra Lane collections. On his watch Stebbins acquired major American, modern and contemporary works. His legacy for the museum and in the field is formidable.

When I interviewed Alan Shestack in 1992 he had been MFA director for five years. It was a time of economic downturn and the museum faced an annual deficit of $3 million. We discussed ways in which the museum might meet this challenge including a relationship with a museum in Nagoya, Japan which it helped to launch and program. He spoke adamantly that selling works to cover costs violated the mission and covenant of museums and their donors.

MFA director Jan Fontein appointed Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. as John Moors Cabot Curator of American Art. For three years he was also head of the departments of American and European painting as well as the department of 20th century art. He acquired 600 works for the museum including 100 from the Lane Collection of American modernism. In terms of acquisitions and exhibitions few curators compare to his impact on the museum. \

On April 14, 2020 Alan Shestack passed away at 81. From 1987 to 1993 he was director of the Museum of Fine Arts. He was notable as a mediator and problem solver. As director he presided over 26 departments with an uneven distribution of resources and power. This interview took place not long after he arrived at the museum.

At 83 the reowned portrait photographer, Elsa Dorfman, passed away at home in the People's Republic of Cambridge. As a young women she worked for Grove Press in New York. There she met many writers including Allen Ginsberg who became a lifelong subject and friend. I included her in exhibitions and wrote about her for Art News.

In 1983 the Museum of FIne Art organized a traveling exhibition A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting: 1760-1910. It toured the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Grand Palais in Paris, as well as being shown at the MFA. Artists and members of Boston's African American community protested that the exhibition did not include artists of color. In this 1984 interview former MFA director, Jan Fontein, discussed negotiatons to include the 19th century artist Henry Osawa Tanner. We also covered gaps in 20th century European and American art.

Because of the Raphael Incident, Perry T. Rathbone. was forced out as director of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1970. The board president, George Seybolt, who ousted Rathbone, then passed over acting director, Classical curator, Cornelius Vermeule, to unilaterally appoint a dark horse candidate, Merrill Rueppel. That ended with a curatorial coup from which Asiatic curator, Jan Fontein, emerged as acting director in 1975. He calmed troubled waters and acccomplished much through 1987. From April 1983, this is the first of two transcribed interviews.

There were incidents of racism when a school group visited the Museum of Fine Arts on May 16, 2019. Attorney General Maura Healey has negotiated an agreement between the Museum of Fine Arts and Boston’s Helen Y. David Leadership Academy. The settlment comes with an apology as well as a commitment of $500,000 to address issues of racism

To mark the beginning of another month in this surreal and uncertain time, Gallery NAGA will present the third solo exhibition of glowing, ephemeral paintings by Nicole Chesney and luscious, Irish landscapes on paper by Rick Fox.

The status of the Italian poet, essayist and gallerist, Mario Diacono, is legendary. To be with his wife Claudette, a native of Lynn, Mass, he moved to Boston and opened a gallery in 1985. He was renowned for showing a single work for which he wrote scholarly essays. Then relatively affordable he made few Boston sales of the now renowned artists he exhibited. The Museum of Fine Arts bought a Ross Bleckner painting and appropriation by Sherrie Levine. Most of the work was acquired by the Italian collector Achille Maramotti. Today Diacono is a curator for Collezione Maramotti.

From 1987 to 1993 Alan Shestack was director of the Museum of Fine Arts. He followed Jan Fontein who was director from 1975 to 1987.

Shortly after the exhibition Words & Images Allan Rohan Crite 1910 – 2007 opened the private St. Botolph Club was closed because of the pandemic. There is however a link to a video that provides a virtual tour of the exhibition. Crite is regarded as a leading Boston artist of his generation. He was a graduate of the Museum School. The Museum of Fine Arts is remiss in not planning a major exhibition of this remarkable and widely influential artist.

A native of Toronto, Matthew Teitelbaum, departed Boston in 1993 to take a curatorial position at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In this interview he was acting director of the Institute of Contemporary Art. Then 37, it provides insights of his curatorial vision and process. He went on to be director of the AGO. In 2015 he returned to Boston as director of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Gallery NAGA, with a lease from Church of the Covenant, was organized as a cooperative in 1977. In 1982 Arthur Dion was hired as director and soon became sole owner. With a commitment to painting and studio furniture it prevails on what was formerly Boston's gallery row. Now director emeritus Dion stepped away from daily management. As part of compiling an oral history of contemporary art in Boston, Dion shared insights of his remarkable career.

In 1968 the Institute of Contemporary Art was evicted from Newbury Street. Bag and baggage it was mothballed in its failed former home on Soldier's Field Road. Connected to new Mayor Kevin White and Deputy Mayor, Katky Kane, they gave Andrew C. Hyde a long shot at turning things around. The relaunch largely entailed embracing an emerging generation of artists which formed the Studio Coalition in 1969 and Boston Visual Artists Union in 1970.

When we spoke in 2000 the arts leader Ted Landsmark was director of the Boston Architectural College. He was on leave as chair of the board of the Institute of Contemporary Art but still serving on the board of the MFA. It was a time of transition and change. The ICA was constructing a new building on the waterfront. Its director, Jill Medvedow, was competing for funding with MFA director, Malcolm Rogers. Landsmark argued that they should be working together

The documentary filmmaker, David Sutherland, describes his approach as making portraits. The issues derive from the persona of his subjects which range from farmers, to teenagers coming of age in Appalachia, a battered Native American mother, to the artists Jack Levine and Paul Camus. In the past 20 years he has created 21 hours of film for long form documentaries featured on Frontline for PBS. His three-part series “The Farmer’s Wife” was a PBS hit with 18 million viewers.

Separately at Jewish Settlement houses Jack Levine and Hyman Bloom studied drawing with Harold Zimmerman. In 1929, when Levine was 14, they were instructed at the Fogg Art Museum by Harvard professor, Denman Ross. By the late 1930s, with Karl Zerbe, they gained national attention as Boston Expressionists. After a lapse of decades, through February, Bloom is featured in "Hyman Bloom Matters of Life and Death." The MFA has never given Levine the time of day. In 1986, while making a film with David and Nancy Sutherland, I interviewed Levine.

The Museum of Fine Arts last featured Boston Expressionist Hyman Bloom in a 1959 group show. The current exhibition Hyman Bloom Matters of Life and Death, curated by Erica E. Hirshler, attempts to make up for that lapse. The focus on cadaver paintings and drawings is bold and spectacular. The work is ghastly with haunting beauty. On a national level it is among the year's best museum exhibitions.

An exhibition of Vietnam protest paintings by Arnold Trachtman was censored and closed by the admninistration of Harvard University. We remounted it at the Institute of Contemporary Art then on Soldier's Field Road. That formed a professional and personal relationship. He was a part of a niche of major Boston artists that existed out of the mainstream, Yesterday he passed away in Cambridge at 89.

During a recent visit to the Museum of Fine Arts a school group was inappropriately treated in a blatantly racist manner. That has caught the museum, and its director Matthew Teitelbaum, in the cross hairs of media whiplash. There is a shameful legacy of racism and anti Semitism at the MFA. It will take decades to make appropriate changes.

During graduate study at Boston University photographer Carl Chiarenza was a professor, mentor and friend. We spoke at length about how JFK and the Vietnam War nudged him into studying art history. At Harvard he was the first American to write a dissertation on photography. It was a biography and critical study of then living American icon Aaron Siskind. Now retired from the University of Rochester he continues to create new work.