For reasons I’ve never quite understood, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston rarely has exhibitions that interest me enough to drive to Boston. Maybe it’s my own largely contemporary tastes or the MFA’s art historical focus. In any event, Nicholas Nixon: Family Album is enough to get me to Boston to see what I’ve […]
Edgar Allen Beem
Yankee
Bright , Shiny and Kinetic
George Sherwood brings a somewhat unusual background to the creation of art. The Ipswich, Massachusetts, resident earned a BFA at the Hartford Art School back in 1976 and spent time as a street performer in Burlington, Vermont, before enrolling at the University of Vermont to a study for a degree in engineering (B.S. 1984). He […]
Connecticut
The Return of Rackstraw Downes
The Maine art community, myself included, never really appreciated painter Rackstraw Downes when he was a seasonal resident of the state. Though he had a summer home in rural Morrill from the 1960s until fairly recently, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Rackstraw Downes show in Maine. Now that Downes, a New York City […]
Back in 2006, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, received a $140,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the exhibition and publication of its extensive collection of works on paper. The following year, the Henry Luce Foundation gave the Wadsworth $50,000 to do conservation work on the works on paper in […]
Yankee
Surf’s Up in Newport
Photographers love subcultures. Show me an identifiable subculture – gypsies, migrant workers, drug addicts, strippers, veterans, artists, musicians, skateboarders, fishermen, homeless people – and I’m pretty sure I can find a photographer who has documented their way of life. Surfers have been photographed so long and so often that surfing photographers themselves have become something […]
Dahlov Ipcar, 92, is a Maine state treasure. The daughter of painter Marguerite and sculptor William Zorach, Ipcar is perhaps the best-known and best-loved artist in the state, celebrated for her lifetime of creativity and her sustained vision of the transformative power of the imagination. “I have come to feel that the reality created by […]
Yankee
Raw and Cooked Landscapes
Ansel Adams and Ed Burtynsky are a natural pairing not because their photography is so similar but because it is so different. Adams’s magnificent black and white photographs of wild, majestic American landscapes are icons both the fine art photography and of the environmental conservation movement. Burtynsky’s symphonic color photographs of industrialized landscapes around the […]
Yankee
The DeCordova Gets Tired
Forgive the tired pun of the title. When it comes to sculptor Chakaia Booker’s art, it’s hard to avoid. Rubber Soul. Retread Retro. Rubber Made. Rubber Maid. Where the Rubber Meets the Museum, etc. Suffice it to say they’ve all been used. That’s because Chakaia Booker makes fantastic sculptures out of old tires. I first […]
Yankee
Joe Nicoletti Has the Blues
Though I have known Joe Nicoletti for more than 30 years now and have admired his paintings even longer, I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that he was born in Italy. The occasion of his upcoming retrospective exhibition at the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine, where he has taught since 1981, […]
Yankee
Provincetown Comes to Boston
Provincetown is terra incognita to me. I have visited this outpost of art and beach culture but twice in my life. Like Key West, it struck me as an almost foreign place, a gritty and sensual end of the road illuminated by the bright sun, the sparkle of the sea, and the glow of free […]
Yankee
Setting Sail on a Sea of Oil
Hundreds of New York artists spend time each year in Maine, but Katherine Bradford is one of the few who swan against the flow. Though she is a New York native, she was a Maine artist before she was a New York artist. Kathy Bradford first came to Maine in 1968 at the age of […]
Yankee
Art At The Edge
Just three months ago I reported on the ambitious beginnings of the Portsmouth Museum of Fine Art and an excellent exhibition there entitled Sacred and Profane (Just Looking 2/4). Now the Portsmouth MFA has mounted a new exhibition entitled At the Edge that continues the museum’s mission of bringing the best in contemporary art to […]