Google “famous glass artist” and the first entry that comes up is “Dale Chihuly.” The second lists seven “famous glass masters,” Chihuly and six artists you may never have heard of. Personally, the only other glass artist I can name is Harvey Littleton, the father of the modern glass movement and Chihuly’s mentor. Dale Chihuly […]
Edgar Allen Beem
Yankee
iImages and eMirrors
In a nice coincidences of exhibitions, the Portsmouth Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art in Portland are currently featuring shows in which contemporary artists use 21st century technologies to wonderful aesthetic effect. In iImage: The Uncommon Portrait (through April 24), the Portsmouth Museum of Art presents yet […]
Three years ago, on March 6, 2008, I called your attention to Boston Phoenix art critic Greg Cook’s art blog, New England Journal of Aesthetic Research. Two years ago, February 4, 2009, I reported on the Boston Art Awards Cook had created in order to recognize local art and artists. On December 22, 2009, I […]
Yankee
The Feathered Hand
Alison Hildreth has one of the finest literary imaginations of any artist I know. Her deeply personal, intuitive paintings, prints, drawings, and installations are often informed by her readings of visionary writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and W.G. Sebald. So it does not surprise me that The Feathered Hand, Hildreth’s wondrous exhibition […]
Massachusetts
Women of Pop Art
The Pop Artists of the 1960s used the materials and imagery of popular culture (advertising, comic books, consumer products, etc) in the service of a fine art that at once reflected and commented upon 20th century materialism. Most of the famous Pop Artists were men – Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana, James […]
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Craft Becomes Art
The Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, Maine, is one of the arts education institutions that draw people to Maine to study the skills that lead to creativity. Like the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Maine Media Workshops, Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, and Watershed Center for the Ceramic […]
Yankee
Art City By The Sea
Greenhut Galleries in Portland began mounting a biennial Portland Show in 2002 to mark its 25th anniversary. The fifth edition of the Portland Show (through December 31) features close to 50 artists who were invited to depict, evoke, respond to, remember, imagine, and abstract the essence of Portland, the biggest little city in the world. […]
Yankee
Boston Star Rising
As one who wishes the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston would do more with contemporary art in general and New England artists in particular, I’m pleased to call a little attention to the four new Kristin Baker paintings currently (through March 27, 2011) being shown in the MFA’s new Linde Family Wing for Contemporary […]
Yankee
The Liberation of Color
In his classic A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas remembers “a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any color I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds.” There is an exhilaration that […]
Yankee
Realism After Abstraction
Ordinarily, exhibitions of art from a museum’s permanent collection are about as newsworthy as re-arranging the furniture. Staff and a few art historians and critics might take notice, but that’s about it.Contemporary Art from the Farnsworth at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine (through May 22, 2011) strikes me as an exception. The show […]
Posing for an artist is an intimate and privileged experience. To submit to the sustained, analytic gaze of another is a strange thing, at once uncomfortable and pleasurable. I have only done it twice and I’m not sure I’d do it again. Back in the 1970s, I sat several times for painter Diane Fitch, then […]
Yankee
Art at Play in Brattleboro
Making art is both a serious form of human inquiry and a form of imaginative play. The five exhibitions that open November 6 (and run through February 6, 2011) at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in Vermont share a sense to playful fun that should delight visitors through the holiday season and into the […]