Joyce Tenneson is famous for her ethereal, romantic photographs of women, flowers, seashells, and now trees. She is one of the few serious photographers who dares to tackle obvious beauty in an age of ironic ugliness. I have long regarded her as the Andrew Wyeth of photography. Just as Wyeth painted as though […]
Edgar Allen Beem
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The Many Faces of F. Holland Day
Fred Holland Day (1864-1933) was a colorful and controversial character in his time, a wealthy Bostonian who championed photography as an art form. A noted Pictorialist himself, he created romantic photographs that aped paintings. In this he was eclipsed in his own time by his rival Alfred Stieglitz and in history by the rise […]
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Wally Warren’s Roadside Attractions
Wally Warren has been described variously as a folk artist, a faux folk artist, an outsider artist, an earth artist, an environmental artist, an assemblage artist, a found object artist, and a recycle artist. He just thinks of himself as a sculptor. In 2011, Warren had a rare institutional exhibition of his colorful, […]
In 2002, the University of Maine Museum of Art, which had resided on the campus of the state’s flagship state university in Orono, moved off campus and into Norumbega Hall, a former dance hall, bowling alley, and Sears store on the Kenduskeag Stream canal in the heart of downtown Bangor. “If we were […]
Back on February 2, artist Kim Bernard of North Berwick, Maine, noted on her blog that seeing Alexander Calder’s Circus at the Whitney Museum of Art was a highlight of her recent trip to New York City. “I could see this every day and never grow tired of it, especially the video and Calder […]
Currently and coincidently, both the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine are opening major photography exhibitions this weekend. The Currier is filling two large galleries with a show of 125 modernist photographs from its own collection. The Portland Museum of Art is showing a selection […]
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DeCordova’s Boston Biennial
Back in 1987, the then-DeCordova and Dana Museum and Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, mounted New England Now: Contemporary Art from Six States, a truly authoritative regional survey of the sort that New England needs. The DeCordova became the New England regional hub for new art under curator Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, but, now renamed DeCordova […]
When John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury moves from the Portland Museum of Art to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for its January 28 to March 18 run, the landmark Marin show will be complemented by Land, Sea, and Sky: Contemporary Art in Maine, an exhibition of recent […]
Earlier this year, I had my eyes opened to the current vogue for mechanical and digital interactive media in a show at Maine College of Art’s Institute of Contemporary Art called Fracturing the Burning Glass. Last week while visiting family in Providence I stopped by the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University where I […]
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My Favorite Art Books
Tyler Green, the eminently informed and informative writer behind the art blog Modern Art Notes, posted his list of the top art books of 2011 on his November 28 blog I was pleased to see that one of Green’s selections is John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury by Debra Bricker Balken, the catalogue for the […]
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The Privilege of Studio Visits
Amidst the busyness of the holidays, I confess that I neglected to visit a museum or gallery to feature this Thanksgiving week. But then that reminded me that museums and galleries aren’t necessarily the best places to see contemporary art. Like curators, collectors, critics and artists all over the world, I much […]
If you live within a two hour drive of Portland Museum of Art and have not yet seen Gather Up the Fragments: The Andrews Shaker Collection (through February 5, 2012), I strongly urge you to do so. But before you do, it might help to get in the proper frame of mind. Take a […]