Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 was a blast. Miami was buzzing, but whenever someone asked me, “How was Miami?” I could only answer, “How was the Convention Center?” Because when you work as a guided tour educator at Art Basel, your entire world contracts into those walls, those crowds, those artworks and the choreography of a fair that never stops. Uber prices were sky-high, traffic was impossible and despite more than 20 satellite fairs spread across the city, it was challenging to get to all of them. My week began with training on Monday and continued straight through until the crates were rolled out on Sunday evening. One of my favorite rituals happens only after the fair closes: watching the art leave. After six days of nonstop motion, an entirely different performance begins: packing, wrapping, lifting, wheeling and sealing. This year, I watched a team of handlers dismantle Maurizio … [Read more...] about ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2025

There are artists whose work you admire, and then there are artists whose work you feel. Donald Langosy belongs firmly in both categories. Encountering his work is not a passive experience; it is something that happens slowly, internally and with lasting effect. His art asks us to pause, to stay present and to allow meaning to emerge rather than be delivered. In a world conditioned for speed and instant clarity, this invitation alone feels radical. Langosy’s practice carries a quiet strength. His work does not shout or insist; it invites. It draws the viewer into a space where looking becomes thinking, and thinking becomes feeling. When we spend time with his work, the brain shifts out of rapid consumption and into sustained attention. Visual perception, memory and emotion begin to operate together. We are no longer simply seeing; we are processing, reflecting and connecting. This … [Read more...] about A CONTINUING JOURNEY

Behind imposing glass doors, just beyond the Currier Museum of Art’s antechamber, one is confronted with the culmination of a career. Eight large paintings of oil on canvas by the audacious painter Wendy Edwards hang as the first works museumgoers will see this winter and spring, less a primer of what lies ahead in the near-century old museum’s other galleries, than a reminder that challenging work is still being made, and that the work continues to evolve as the artist ages. Produced over the past decade, the paintings in “Flourishing,” which runs through April 5, will be the inaugural show in the Currier’s new Concourse Gallery space. Each deal in Edwards’ recurring subjects, the human body and florals, in their own unique ways. Her ability to translate aspects of the natural world into the abstract is a skill honed over a 40-year career; and if the works presented offer less context … [Read more...] about AN ARTIST WHO FLOURISHES

“Carrie Crane: The Lise Hoffman Archive (a fiction)”, on view at the Boston Sculptors Gallery through January 25, animates Lise Walker Hoffman (1934-2019), a fictional young woman of Crane’s imagination. Acting as her alias, a conduit of sorts, Crane experiments with sculpture, construction, prose, mixed-media and technology. What is presented is a robust background of Lise Hoffman’s “life” from her early adolescence into her 70s through a collection of found objects, journals and letters, contributions and accolades, and scientific and creative endeavors. In her artist statement, Crane reflects on the moment of inception of the project and character. As she played with a strange machine of sorts that her husband brought home one day, she said, “After much fooling around, I proclaimed — as an artist I am allowed such a privilege — it to be an incubator for nascent planets. This led to … [Read more...] about TELL ME A STORY

“While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his (Ahab's) head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of the lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead … For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul” — Herman Melville, “Chapter 44, The Chart” Moby-Dick; or The Whale. In March 2020, as the pandemic descended on the United States, Heidi Whitman began rereading “Moby-Dick, or The Whale.” Reading a chapter a day, she made her way through the book’s 135 chapters, discovering layers of … [Read more...] about INSIDE AMERICAN VENGEANCE

A welcome response to the winter blues, Blue Door Gallery owner and curator Janice Santini is presenting “Euphony,” an exhibition of collage art by Connecticut artist R. Douglass Rice that opens with a reception on January 24. “It’s a musical term where different notes combine to make something pleasing to the ear, the opposite of cacophony,” said Rice, explaining the show’s title. “Collage is an art form which combines shapes to make something pleasing to the eye and provoke thought.” Santini said that she chose Rice’s sculptures and collage works, “because they have sophisticated play, invite a viewer with bold colors and provoke intuitive and imaginative narrative.” With titles that include “Our Tribeca Loft 1989,” “Continuing the Chaos” and “Do you Wanna Dance,” Rice’s works imply extended storylines and include imaginary soundtracks. Each one could be a page torn from a lengthy … [Read more...] about SEEING MUSIC