Conceptual artist Jim Denevan turns the classic dictum ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short) on its head. His elegant, large-scale sand drawings on vacant beaches last only as long the incoming tide. Then they are swept away forever. Denevan, is a chef, surfer, and sand artist from Santa Cruz, CA. I […]
I guess I must have missed Alan Gussow. Though he painted on Monhegan Island from 1949 until his death in 1997 and I have written about art in Maine since 1978, I’ve never seen a major Gussow show. Apparently, there was a ten-year retrospective at the Portland Museum of Art back in 1970, the year […]
And now for something completely different. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is one of the most fascinating cultural attractions in all of New England, a sprawling modern museum with a collection of more than one million objects of Asian, Asian Export, Native American, African, Oceanic, Maritime art and photography that grew out of […]
As I sit here at the keyboard, my backyard view is of gardens punctuated by deep red bee balm and bright yellow black-eyed susans, pink lilies and lobelia, buttery primroses and lilac hostas. High summer is not a time for strenuous intellectual or artistic activity. It’s a time for rest and relaxation, for enjoying the […]
Before it’s too late, allow me to call your attention to a nifty little exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Entitled Nature/Artifice, the exhibition features 13 works from the museum’s collection that artfully speak to the relationship between nature and culture. I say before it’s too late, because the RISD Museum is […]
Art galleries tend to come and go with the economy. When I first started looking at contemporary art in the 1960s, there was only one serious art gallery in Portland, Maine -Frost Gully Gallery, which eventually returned to Freeport from whence it came. By 1987, at the height of the 1980s boom, there were more […]
Photographers have long been captivated by itinerant peoples. Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans photographed migrant laborers and sharecroppers during the Depression. Josef Koudelka became famous when Aperture published The Gypsies in 1975. Sebastiao Salgado is regarded as perhaps today’s most distinguished documentary photographer based on the epic sweep of his photographs of the world’s dispossessed. […]
Real Art Ways, an alternative arts space founded in Hartford, Connecticut in 1975, is one of New England’s liveliest contemporary arts venues, like Space in Portland, Maine, and AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island, presenting a heady mix of fine and performing arts. This summer, Real Art Ways has commissioned four works of public art for […]
In this pluralistic 21st century art society, the distinction between fine art and folk art is hardly worth making. An artist is an artist is an artist and art is anything an artist says it is. Art can be an object, an act, an installation, or just idea. It can be made of anything from […]
A cool mist and a milky, overcast sky mercifully keep the sun off the backs of the blueberry rakers on the desolate barrens north of Columbia Falls, in Maine’s coastal Washington County. Close to 100 rakers, stooped and sweaty, work their way across the vast open landscape, littered with pickup trucks and brightly colored plastic […]
Robert Indiana will be upstaging the late, great Andrew Wyeth as the featured attraction at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, this summer as Robert Indiana and the Star of Hope (through October 25) brings the artist’s collection of his own work ashore from the island of Vinalhaven. The Star of Hope is the […]
As fitting summer fare, the Portland, Maine, Museum of Art and the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, have teamed up to produce Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England, an exhibition of 74 paintings and prints by 48 of the artists who flocked to the coastal art colonies of Old Lyme, […]
