Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, has organized a multimedia celebration of contemporary West Indian culture that includes videos, films, live music, readings, and a wide ranging art exhibition. Entitled Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art, the exhibition (through March 14) was curated by Real Art Ways director of visual arts Kristina Newman-Scott and […]
Edgar Allen Beem
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25 Cent Children’s Classics
What is the best-selling children’s book of all-time? My first guess would have been The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. My second guess would have been The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. But in fact, the best-selling children’s book of all time is The Poky Little Puppy written by Janette Sebring […]
Yankee
Everything Old Is New Again
Art and technology tend to have a love-hate relationship. Some artists embrace the latest technologies as new tools with which to create. Other artists react against new technologies, embracing instead traditional even antique mediums. Examples of both impulses can currently be seen in a pair of remote and unrelated exhibitions that nonetheless beg to be […]
Yankee
Art at Colby
The Colby College Museum of Art is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an exhibition and a book, both entitled Art at Colby. The exhibition runs through February 21, 2010, but it is the book that I would like to call your attention to here. A book is the second life of art, so while not […]
The Williams College Museum of Art has mounted a series of late fall exhibitions that celebrate and provide context for its 1878 William Morris Hunt masterpiece “Niagara Falls,” a symphonic oil of one of America’s iconic landscapes. Hunt (1824-1879) was a Vermont native who became a celebrated Boston portrait and landscape painter. A Strong Impression: […]
Robert Solotaire passed away a year ago this month at a very youthful 78 years of age. Bob was a downtown kind of guy, a ubiquitous presence on the streets of Portland, particularly up in the West End where he ran a boarding house, wrote for the neighborhood newspaper, and painted the lively urban scenes […]
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Modulating a Maine Modernist
Back in the 1950s, three artists lived in a building on 28th St. in New York City. Bernard “Blackie” Langlais lived and worked on the top floor. Alex Katz had a studio on the second floor. And Charles DuBack lived on the first floor above the street level lumberyard below. All three men attended the […]
Though I have only been there twice, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, is one of my favorite New England art institutions, focused as it is on bring new art and recent trends to a wider audience. You can be pretty sure of finding art that will expand your awareness and appreciation of […]
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Black on White, Ink on Paper
The debut of Evolution of a Shared Vision: The David and Barbara Stahl Collection at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire (September 26 to January 3, 2010) reminds me of the Temple Beth-El art shows in Portland, Maine, in the 1960s. Before there was a contemporary art scene in Portland there were […]
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Joel Babb’s Real World
Joel Babb possesses that preternatural ability to paint complex visual realities both with high fidelity and poetic expression. Hyperrealism is an aesthetic not always valued on the contemporary art scene these days but one he shares with a handful of other fine painters of Maine, among them Richard Estes, Linden Frederick, and Alan Magee. In […]
Jump In! at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts (through October 31) in downtown Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is a multimedia exhibition featuring more than 20 regional artists, all of whom in one way or another celebrate water in the landscape. The show is just the latest in a lively series of exhibitions, concerts, performances, festivals and […]
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Artist in Residences
Since 1990, artist Connie Hayes has been painting landscapes, still-lifes and interiors in and around houses where she has stayed as a houseguest, methodically borrowing the homes of friends and friends of friends in order search out new subject matter. In 2004, Hayes documented her peripatetic paintings in Painting Maine: The Borrowed Views of Connie […]