This fascinating exhibition surveys the entire history of the National Academy membership and, almost incidentally, provides a potent cross-section of the history of American art and its discontents.
Visual Arts
Visual Arts Review: The Legacy Museum — An American Inheritance
The Legacy Museum draws on a passionate and visceral mix of architecture, graphics, text, art, music, video and spoken word to prove that — ever since the time of slavery — white views on race have distorted the presumed fairness of our legal system.
Visual Arts Favorites 2019
Our critics sound off on some of their most striking visual art experiences this year.
Visual Arts Commentary: Pat Falco’s MOCK — A Resonant Statement about Boston’s Affordable Housing Crisis
With MOCK, the artist has made made an exceptionally powerful statement, conceptually and physically, about Boston’s increasingly dire affordable housing predicament.
Visual Arts Review: Andy Goldsworthy’s “Watershed” — Mysterious Simplicity
Watershed is an unadorned but stunning addition to the offerings at the deCordoba Sculpture Park and Museum.
Visual Arts Review: Contemporary and Antediluvian — Judy McKie At Gallery NAGA
Judy McKie draws on a personal mythology in which animal and plant forms become abstracted yet recognizable, anthropomorphic while remaining strangely primeval.
Arts Commentary: MFA Boston — at 150
There have been times in the MFA’s past when it hasn’t lived up to its educational mission, when it has pandered to the whims of the wealthy — particularly its fat cat benefactors.
Music Interview: “Going to the Place That’s the Best” — Norman Greenbaum Returns Home to Malden
The hit 1969 song “The Spirit in the Sky” by Malden’s own Norman Greenbaum is the inspiration for one of several new works of public art.
Visual Arts Review: “Women Take the Floor” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts
Had the curatorial parameters been tighter in concept, and more generous regarding the source of the work, the MFA might have produced a great, rather than just a good, exhibit. .
Visual Arts Review: Gordon Matta-Clark, Anarchitect — Anarchy + Architecture
Brandeis’ Rose Art Museum presents a creative, insightful look at urban blight.