Michael Mansfield Eric Taubert As the Ogunquit Museum of American Art (OMAA) prepares to open the doors for its 64th Season on May 1, a new executive director stands at the helm. After a nine-month nationwide search, the museum board selected Michael Mansfield, former curator of film and media arts at the Smithsonian American Art […]

YOUNG RUSSIANS AT SHATTUCK Don Wilkinson During a recent press conference in Moscow alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that he told Vladimir Putin that relations between the United States and Russia had reached “a low point.” It’s hard to argue with that observation. Between rumored Russian […]

GOING WITH THE GRAIN Beth Neville Coming full circle in his long life as a sculptor, Nick Edmonds creates sculptural worlds filled with people, boats, clouds and rocks. Each carefully carved wood sculpture takes the viewer to a extraordinary place. “Crystal Creek Pond” depicts his childhood memories of swimming in his grandfather’s trout pond. Small, […]

MICHELMAN MAKES SPACE Marguerite Serkin It is not often that the creative output of an artist matches her intellectual capacities. For Elizabeth Michelman, there is context and conceptual reasoning behind her creative choices as an artist and in exhibition design. She is able to convey the impetus behind her multi-faceted implementation through words and visual […]

BOSTON ATHENAEUM’S WORKS ON PAPER Franklin W. Liu Nestled with quiet dignity on Boston’s bustling Beacon Hill since 1849, and just a stone’s throw from the Massachusetts State House, is the Boston Athenæum, one of the oldest, manifestly resourceful, independent libraries in the United States. Walking within its hallowed halls, with no need for reminder, […]

BEARING WITNESS TO TRAGEDY Elayne Clift I was born a Jew on March 20, 1943. One week after 3,000 people just like me Perished in Cracow, I began to live. I began to live one month before How many Jewish lives ended in Warsaw? In Budapest? In Bergen Belsen? But for an ocean, and other […]

THE ARTIST’S EYE DRAWS US IN Suzanne Volmer “Matisse in the Studio,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston through July 9, is the MFA’s spring/summer blockbuster. The show, jointly organized by the MFA and the Royal Academy of Arts, London in partnership with the Musée Matisse, Nice, includes “rare pairings of Matisse’s masterpieces with […]

A RETROSPECTIVE ODE TO FEARLESSNESS Flavia Cigliano The current retrospective of prints by Frank Stella at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy is stunning, spectacularly revealing the evolution of the artist’s printmaking over three decades, from the minimalistic geometric “Black Series 1” (1967) to the visually cacophonous “Near East Monoprints” (1999-2001). Organized […]

Welcome Brian Goslow Welcome to our May/June 2017 issue — one that we hope will serve as the blueprint to the start of your New England summer art wanderlust. We had already planned to cover the opening of the Frank Stella “Prints” retrospective at the Addison Gallery of American Art, but when the offer came […]

Balanchine’s “Donizetti Variations” opened a three-part program by teaching our wings to soar to Gaetano Donizetti’s dreamy, sprightly, symmetrical melodies from his 1843 opera, “Don Sebastien.”

The vigor of the music belied our modern stereotypes of the classical as bland, of the romantic as naïve. And the dancers inhabiting Donizetti’s lively, questing inspirations with quick-silver turns seemed to grasp myriad opportunities to soar or slow, improbably, just before the musicians in the orchestra pit announced them!