When museum directors and curators move to new institutions it is not uncommon for them to draw on art and artists they have worked with previously for some of their first exhibitions at the new venue. Dan Mills, who came to the Bates College Museum of Art a year ago from Bucknell University’s Samek Art […]
Edgar Allen Beem
Plymouth Rock: Facts, History & Trivia
Learn the truth behind the myths and legends that surround Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
A Timeline of New England Environmental Battles New England has seen major environmental conflicts for decades. Yankee polled a dozen regional groups to come up with the following timeline of some of the most contentious debates of the past 50 years. Whether environmentalists find themselves pitted against private industry, state and federal governments, or even […]
In a region where seasonal work off the land is a staple of life, evergreens yield hundreds of thousands of holiday decorations.
A Visit to Boston’s MFA
Even back in the 1970s when I was a graduate student in Boston, I wasn’t a big fan of the Museum of Fine Arts. I dropped in at the elegant and eccentric little Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum regularly just to smell the gardens in winter and breathe the ancient air, but the MFA struck […]
“Last year I had the best year ever,” my old friend Eric Hopkins told me back in May when I stopped by to visit him at his new studio on the edge of downtown Rockland, Maine. Sometimes it seems as though Eric, one of the most popular and prolific painters in Maine, rules […]
Made in the UK at RISD
Sometime before the end of the year, when we head to Providence to visit our oldest daughter and her family, we will definitely stop by the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art to check out Made in the UK: Contemporary Art from the Richard Brown Baker Collection. The exhibition (September 23 to […]
Edward Hopper in Maine
The Bowdoin College Museum of Art has been setting attendance records this summer with Edward Hopper’s Maine, an exhibition (through October 16) of some 90 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints of Maine landscapes and cityscapes created during nine trips to Vacationland between the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the stock market […]
The Rhode Island Red breed began in Adamsville (a village of Little Compton), Rhode Island, in 1854, when William Tripp crossed his Cochin hens with a Red Malay or Chittagong rooster purchased from a sailor in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Isaac Wilbour, above, Tripp’s neighbor, bred his hens with the “Tripp fowl,” creating what he called […]
My sense of fair play tells me it is way too soon to return to the Center for Maine Contemporary Art for a review even though the July 20 post about Steve Mumford’s drawings and paintings of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been the most popular and controversial Just Looking post ever. But, […]
100 Artists of New England
Art is all about making personal choices, not just for the artist, but also for the audience, the dealer, the collector, the curator, and the critic. What exhibitions am I going to see? What artists am I going to write about? What art do I think is important? What art am I going to buy? […]
Where to Draw the Line
My good friend Rob Shetterly and I had a major difference of opinion recently over the ethical if not the aesthetic merits of drawings by Steve Mumford. Rob, president of the Union of Maine Visual Artists, an art activist, creator of the American Who Tell the Truth portrait series, and a plaintiff in the lawsuit […]