Earlier this fall, after our national correspondent, Nancy Nesvet posted pictures and video from a rally in Washington, D.C. on our Facebook page, someone asked us, “Are you a political group?” My response was, “Staying alive is a political act.” And art is the way many of us filter life. Rarely is that a more truthful statement than when you have to deal with a loved one facing a health crisis — and you’re the person in charge of arranging ...

I first became acquainted with David Lang through his art, specifically with the large metal sculpture on the grounds of the Danforth Museum of Art where I once worked. Curvilinear in form and monumental in size, the piece stood delicately balanced on its pedestal, a twisted, disintegrating question mark that the artist entitled “The Question Is the Answer.” Solid, yet seemingly weightless, this formally abstract sculpture was most dramatically visible to students looking down from the second-floor classrooms in the ...

Surprise! There’s human hair on display in “Parsing Sign and Image,” a diverse group exhibition of mixed-media art juried by Artscope Magazine’s founder and publisher, Kaveh Mojtabai, that engages with the complex theme of image-communication. The exhibition asks: Can a text itself stand as an image, or will our minds always connect to a literal meaning? Must a word always carry meaning, or can words and letters act as graphic elements of pattern and design? The show’s exhibition statement responds, ...

The Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi displayed an impressive range throughout his decades-long career, producing not only traditional sculpture, but also stage sets, memorials and furniture. His forays into industrial, landscape and interior design evince his belief that sculpture belongs in all realms of life, not merely to be placed on a pedestal and stared at. Hence, “Beyond the Pedestal,” the title of the Portland Museum of Art’s exhibition, a rare Maine retrospective of Noguchi’s work. Noguchi believed that sculpture should ...

“The Shape of Birds” takes the theme of displacement, remembrance and adaption from Nizar Qabbani’s poem “A Lesson in Drawing” which begins with “My son placed a paint box in front of me / and asked me to draw a bird for him. / Into the color gray I dip the brush / and draw a square with locks and bars. / Astonishment fills his eyes: / ‘...But this is a prison, Father. Don’t you know, how to draw a ...

“From Starfield to MARS: Paul Manship and his Artistic Legacy” is an exhibit conceived in two parts: “Art Deco at the Addison” explores sculptor Paul Manship’s artistic legacy and historical connection to Phillips Academy, and “Starfield through Contemporary Lenses” presents the works of four acclaimed Massachusetts artists and educators, all having recently completed year-long artist residencies at Manship’s beloved home, Starfield, in the village of Lanesville, an enclave in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Starfield was recently purchased from Manship’s descendants by a ...

It is a damning statistic how often women are harassed, attacked or raped in today’s world. The current exhibition at Lesley University, “1 in 3: Comparative Perspectives on Gender Violence,” delves into that statistic. It examines prejudices that condition cultures to overlook the subjugation of women. In 1969, in a NOVA Magazine interview, Yoko Ono said, “Women are the Niggers of the World.” Today, 40 years later, like gunpowder shot over the bow of misogyny, the shocking salvo still meets ...

The process of printmaking is a metaphor for the making of a human being: from many layers, one is achieved. “It’s a dialogue,” explained Paul DeRuvo, Associate Staff Printer, while speaking about three print-portraits arranged together in “E Pluribus Unum: From Many, One,” at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking (CCP), another solid and expertly curated exhibition of superb and diverse examples of contemporary print methods curated by Kimberly Henrikson, Executive Director of CCP. DeRuvo was talking specifically about artists Meg ...

The “trace” is a notion that straddles two worlds. It can be a thing in this world, a tiny amount or residue of something; or drawing around an object’s physical boundaries as a template. In the imagination, it can also be a symbolic representation of the ways in which things and people may be both present and absent to our experience. The paintings, sculptures and performance works of the six artists curated by Montserrat College of Art Gallery director Nathan ...

Existential tensions of contemporary life are addressed head-on by many of the watercolor painters in the New England Watercolor Society’s Biennial exhibition. Following in the watercolor traditions of the great masters, Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, many of the paintings deal with the stresses of life. No one has painted a despairing fisherman’s wife looking out to sea for her lost husband or Italian marble quarry workers cutting stone. But the artists do address addiction, loneliness, homelessness and anxiety. ...

That Sunday afternoon in 1970, students and regular patrons in Fort Worth Art Center Museum had turned out for a show that seemed to encapsulate the age: Bellbottomed jeans and maxi-dresses mingled with the suits, minks and diamonds, when the photographer and now-director Dennis Hopper emerged, dressed in a gray pin-striped suit, Indian shirt and black western boots, his long hair flowing. Hopper had chosen more than 400 photographs out of some 10,000 he had captured and printed between 1960 ...

On first view, “Waste Not,” an exhibition featuring works by Lorraine Sullivan, Anne Plaisance, Stephen Martin and Kim Triedman (the show’s curator), holds many elements of life — or past life — that I’m quite fond of, especially pieces from old storefronts and corner stores and weathered buildings that I attach to feelings of warmth. Old windows are turned into picture frames, store fixtures become statues and a partially disembodied mannequin sits in a pre-prefabrication wooden wheelchair seems to have ...

You might think you know what you think about furniture: that it’s utilitarian, it’s background, that any influence it wields is only on other furniture and that only at a glacial pace. The power of 10 original and very crafty contemporary furniture designers, now at the Fitchburg Art Museum, very quickly disabuse one of these easy notions as contemporary furniture furnishes metaphors for our most intimate human concerns, fears and hopes. Liz Shepherd’s “Untitled: Blue” is one of the most ...

It was 1971. I was 18. My dad had recently been installed as the new pastor of Wisconsin Avenue Baptist Church in Washington D.C. I’d moved from my home state of South Dakota to be with my family and attend college at the University of Maryland. I’d transferred my job as a telephone operator to a nearby Maryland suburb while establishing residency prior to starting school. I quickly accumulated new friends, many of them black as the D.C. area has, ...

Donald Saaf knew at an early age, while drawing comic books with his siblings, that he wanted to be an artist. He began painting as a teen and later moved from Hartford to Boston, where he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. A year in Mexico on a travel scholarship, living with indigenous people in a small village with his wife — painter Julia Zanes — led to a show at the Clark Gallery in Lincoln, ...

While the post-Cold War 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union brought the promise of closer relations and great cultural exchange between the United States and “Mother Russia,” recent political tensions between the two countries suggest the divide still exists, possible deeper than before. Two shows running this holiday season at the Museum of Russian Icons have the goal of serving to show visitors that even when the Space Age and threat of Nuclear War cast us as arch enemies, our ...

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is known for many things: the beautiful Venetian palazzo-inspired architecture, the unconventional way it displays its pieces of art, the largest and still-unsolved art heist in history, and Isabella Stewart Gardner’s wide taste in art — from Italian renaissance and medieval European to Asian and Islamic art; from paintings and sculptures to rare books and textiles — to name a few. Keeping in tradition with her love of textiles, “Common Threads: Weaving Stories Across Time,” ...

Alzheimer’s. A word that conjures up images of fear, isolation, confusion, and loss. In the United States today, 5.7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s. By 2050, this number is projected to rise to nearly 14 million. Terminal illness is a painful topic — but this one strikes home for me. My father was recently, finally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, after years of ambiguous labels assigned to his memory loss and declining capacity to care for himself. I sat down with ...

Reflecting North and South America’s political and economic turbulence and artists’ domestic and environmental concerns, Art Basel Miami Beach 2018 — its 17th edition — will open to the public December 6 through 9 at the newly renovated Miami Beach Convention Center. Two hundred and sixty eight exhibitors will display work in tried and true sectors: Galleries, where gallerists present their choice of artists and where 12 galleries have moved to from their previous sectors; Nova, where three artists will ...

In August, 2007, the International Council of Museums (ICOM), representing museum professionals, globally defined a museum as “a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits … for the purpose of education and enjoyment.” Private museums, differing from public museums, are based on a single collector’s vision, having no one to answer to but the owners. However, if they are non-profit, in the United States, their ...

“Stories to Tell,” a one-person show of “assemblage paintings that combine portraits and other figurative compositions with various salvage and found objects” by Barbara Johansen-Newman will be on view from November 1 through 26 at the Gallery at Gorse Mill, 31 Thorpe Road, Needham, Massachusetts. The folkish-feel of Johansen Newman’s current work brings her career full cycle; she started out “enamored with the art form of puppetry,” creating both puppets and the scenery they’d perform in front of, took up the fiber ...

I first came across Stephen Hamilton’s work at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury, Massachusetts in the 2017 show, “Black Gods Live: Work of Stephen Hamilton.” I was struck by the vibrant representations of African men and women, the handcrafted tapestries and the narratives in his work. I took to following him on social media to keep up with his practice and recently did a studio visit with him to find out more about his ...