For its second Spotlight New England exhibition focused on contemporary artists working in the region, the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, is featuring sculpture, paintings, and drawings by Gary Haven Smith of Northwood, New Hampshire, and Gerald Auten of Norwich, Vermont and the Dartmouth College faculty. The exhibition (through September 13) pairs […]
There is an old farmhouse on the edge of the town where I live that has stood forlorn and empty for as long as I can remember. It’s shabby, but it has, as architects are wont to say, “good bones.” Sometimes I think I’d like to buy it and fix it up. Other times I […]
For many years I had a postcard propped up on a bookshelf in my office, a portrait of actor Gary Cooper looking suave in a suit and tie. Though I’m a fairly disheveled sort myself, this picture of a casually elegant Gary Cooper was the apotheosis of style to me. I see now that the […]
First, let me confess that in 30 years of writing about art in Maine and New England, I had never visited the Saco Museum in downtown Saco, Maine. My guess is that you haven’t either. If not, you should. In recent years the Saco Museum (known as the York Institute until 2000) has been mounting […]
When painter Carlo Pittore died in 2005 at the age of 62, he left behind a lifetime of art in his Bowdoinham, Maine, studio. Artists naturally want their art to live on after them, but the fate of most posthumous art is to be packed away, scattered to the four winds, or even disposed of. […]
Back in 1998, entrepreneurial museum director Thomas Krens created something of an art world sensation when he filled the Guggenheim Museum in New York with 114 motorcycles. The controversial The Art of the Motorcycle prompted some wags to suggest that the bike show had finally fulfilled the circular Frank Lloyd Wright museum’s destiny as a […]
In the 20th century, skillful, exacting imitation of appearances tended to fall from artistic grace as photography displaced painting as the medium of likeness. Henri Matisse, in helping to liberate painting from a mere description of reality, is famous for having said, “L’exactitude n’est pas la v
Reid State Park is a natural wonder unto itself, containing not only rocky tidepools, beaches, dunes, and salt marshes, but also a tidal lagoon. The first great thing about the lagoon in Reid State Park is that the waters there tend to be at least 10 to 15 degrees warmer than the numbing flow of […]
The art of appropriation, the practice of using someone else’s work as an element of your own, has a long, distinguished history in modern art. It’s a game artists sometimes play to tweak the art establishment and get noticed. Back in 1917, for example, Marcel Duchamp, the father of conceptual art, submitted a porcelain urinal […]
If you’ve never had your portrait painted, you should. It is one of life’s enduring pleasures. I sat for a student at the old Portland School of Art back in the 1970s and, looking at the portrait today, I can still recall – and feel – how relaxing and soothing it was to have the […]
As it celebrates its 40th anniversary, the Westport Arts Center in Connecticut invited artist Eric Aho to organize an exhibition focused on a sense of place. Aho, who lives in Vermont, decided to tighten the focus to visual ideas about a place both universal and particular – home. In HOME (through June 1) Aho has […]
The nature and character of a juried exhibition is in part a function of the artists who submit and in part a reflection of the tastes and judgments of the jurors. The 2009 Portland Museum of Art Biennial (April 8 to June 7)looks to be mostly a matter of the latter. From the 970 artists […]
