Museum of Fine Arts

When an opportunity to celebrate USCO’s pioneering work came along, I just had to curate it. This acknowledgement of our cultural past, still clearly resonates in our 21st Century present.

The walled city of Carcassonne, the heritage site Albi with its Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, the Basque cities of Auch and Bayonne, and the Atlantic coastal cities of Biarritz and Saint-Jean-de-Luz are treasures that make this region of France unique for the visitor.

A decision on an appeal by Attorney General of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to halt the sale of 40 key works of art at Sothebys on behalf of the Berkshire Museum will be decided by the end of January. Van Shields, now on medical leave as director of the museum, and board president, Elizabeth "Buzz" McGraw, announced their $60 million plans for a New Vision in July. What started as a local story has morphed into national and global coverage. The outcome of this unethical attempt at deaccessioning by a pariah museum may have a game changing impact on the mandate of all American museums' commitment to preserve and conserve collections for future generations.

Since the 1980s, the artist Rafael Mahdavi has been a colleague and friend. For many years, in addition to painting, photography and sculpture, he has been writing. Recently, he published a second book Villa Dolores a memoir of childhood and adolescence with another volume, already written to follow. He is also revisiting, editing and preparing for publication several novels. This memoir is relatively brief, just 173 pages, but compact , polished, explosively evocative and poetic. I took my time reading brief chapters of two or three pages. Each was a distilled and detailed anecdote, some horrific in nature, that flowed like an intimate conversation.

During our visit to the Cape Cod Museum of Art we viewed several special exhibitions: Salvatore Del Deo: A Storied History, extended through October 28, Discovering Cape Cod’s Museum Treasures, through November 26, and Judith Shahn Selections: A Tribute to Thomas Linxweiler through November 12. We met with Dr. Edith Tonelli who has been director for the past four years. She provided an overview of the museum and plans moving forward. We also learned why the museum and adjacent Cape Playhouse prove to have been uniquely moving experiences.

From 9 AM to noon there was an ordely and peaceful demonstration in front of the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. Pickets came and went with between 40 and 80 individuals linuing the sidewalk at any given time. Most passing cars honked their support. There was a media presence. While museum director, Van Shields, remained hunkered down in the bunker, board president Elizabeth "Buzz" Hayes McGraw delivered her boilplate message to a TV crew from Albany.

When Laurie Norton Moffett, director of the Norman Rockwell Museum, in a Berkshire Eagle op-ed piece asked the Berkshire Museum to "pause" in its plan to sell 40 works the story broke as national news. In daily coverage since then the pro and con has rocked back and forth. I seemed like game over when Joe Thompson, director of MASS MoCA, endorsed the sale and radical plans urging readers to "get real." Then lawyers waded in questioning that the works may or may not be "unrestricted." The controversy went into extra innings when the Rockwell family, in an Eagle letter, stated that the artist never intended for his works to be sold as a last ditch bailout for the poorly managed and curatorially aenemic museum.

Works by Stephen Hannock are in global museum collections. His Oxbow painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be included in a survey of Hudson River artist Thomas Cole. Hannock's mate Sting will also be involved in the project. When he created paintings for his friend's hometown of Newscastle the studies were shown at the Berkshire Museum. He gave one of the studies to the museum to honor philanthropist Nancy Fitzgerald. The fact of that work and the entire fine arts collection of the museum is unknown. We talked at length with the Berkshire based global artist about the impact of the museum's strategy to sell its fine arts collection with a radical makeover as an interactive educational museum for history and science.

Matisse’s collectibles had a profound influence on his creative choices. Allowing us a priceless opportunity to see how the artist’s mind worked and the ways his creative process unfolded, this magnetic exhibition at the MFA Boston allows us to examine them in relationship to his art. As its only North American venue, Matisse in the Studio will only visit Boston.

Boston Baroque's "Giulio Cesare" marked the role debut of soprano Susanna Phillips as Cleopatra in this tale of love and war with Cleopatra and Julius Caesar its central protagonists. Full of ravishing arias and ensembles, the opera is almost an embarrassment of riches. Boston Baroque did it justice if not in the elusive definitive production it deserves.

Alan Fink met his artist wife, Barbara Swan, in Paris where he lived for three years on just $700. They married in 1952 and relocated to Boston. There he went to work for the next 16 years at Boris Mirski Gallery. In 1967 he founded Alpha Gallery now run by their daughter Joanna. Their son Aaron is an expressionist painter.

For a period of time in the late 1960s I worked in the studio of Pop artist James Rosenquist. He passed away recently at 83. When Jim first arrived in New York he painted billboards high above Times Square. He later used those techniques as a key but undervalued Pop artist.

Since June, 2014 Berkshire poet, Charles Giuliano, has published three books of gonzo verse. A fourth is in production for a summer release. On Tuesday April 18, at 7:30 P.M. he will give a reading at the Williams Faculty Club (WFC), 968 Main Street, Williamstown, MA 01267. The event is free and open to the public.

When the Institute of Contemporary Art opened its waterfront home there were awards for the dramatic design by Diller Scofido and Renfro. Immediately, however, it was obvious that with 65,000 square feet, and just its top floor for exhibitions, there was no plan for expansion and growth. For the next five to ten years the ICA is leasing a 15,000 square foot industrial place in East Boston. Visitors will commute by ferry to the seasonal Watershed which opens in the summer of 2018.

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.

London's newly opened Design Museum is the world's leading museum devoted to contemporary design in every form from architecture and fashion to graphics, product and industrial design. The Design Museum is now open in its spectacular new location on High Street Kensington. It is now a major venue to visit in London.

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.

The vast Khovsgol Lake region in northern Mongolia is home to numerous nomadic herders. As their grazing horses, yaks, and reindeer grace the shores, picturesque gers for locals and visitors add to the pastoral charm. Gobi Desert in the south fascinates with its valleys, sand dunes, ochre-colored cliffs, and the unique two-humped Bactrian camels.

Dyno rockers Jeff and Jane Hudson will present an (ahem) New Wave Party at the Williams Inn on November 19. The vintage punk rockers are promoting their latest release The Middle which combines new and old material. Until recently they operated an antiques store at Mass MoCA. Jane is a legendary genius while Jeff is generally viewed as a piece of work. Together they make strange and rhapsodic music. Never miss one of their iconic events.

My friend Jim Jacobs can do just about anything, physical or mental, when he sets his mind to it.

During the 1970s Kenworth Moffett, while a full professor at Wellesley College, was hired part time as the founding curator for contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts. After a long illness he passed away at the age of 81. Long after our days as aesthetic adversaries we remained friends. During annual visits to Palm Beach we would meet for lunch in Ft Lauderdale where he was director of its museum. In 2015 we collaborated on an extensive interview which is linked to this obituary.

Rodin was the first truly "modern" sculptor. His work was an evolving process in creating figurative pieces that expressed and integrated emotional, psychological and even spiritual notions of humanity. Rodin sometimes mixed, recycled,, and re-combined used “spare parts”: plaster-cast heads, torsos, arms, and legs. His mix-and-match sensibility was the inevitable result of his deep belief that art is always in transition, never complete. And these hybrid assemblages were put together in ways that are intended to evoke passion and reaction. This PEM show is a visual treat.

April is National Poetry Month. Berkshire Fine Arts, LLC announces the publication of two books Shards of a Life and Total Gonzo Poems by Berkshire poet and arts critic Charles Giuliano. In July, 1970 he coined the word gonzo while telling an outrageous story. He was the first to publish gonzo in a rock review that summer for the former daily Boston Herald Traveler. With these two books and a third nearing completion Giuliano has morphed gonzo journalism into a vibrant, hip, compelling form of cutting edge poetry.

In a period of radicalism and terrorism, Intersections serves as a beacon for remembering and cherishing the sensitive beauty of the best of Islamic creative culture. This is a must-see visual and environmental experience.

Recently we visited Dartmouth College where we learned that the Hood Museum of Art will close in March for renovations to begin this summer. We discussed these plans with an old friend, John Stomberg, who has just arrived in Hanover as the new director of the museum.