Visual Arts

Visual Arts Review: “Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth” — Overwhelming the Clichés

September 3, 2023
Posted in , ,

Edvard Munch was very far from a one-hit wonder. His career was a long narrative of restless creativity.

Read More

Visual Arts Review: In Gloucester, Edward Hopper Became Hopper

August 6, 2023
Posted in , ,

A leitmotif of this exhibition underlines Josephine Nivison Hopper’s role in her husband’s emergence as one of the most successful and beloved artists of his generation.

Read More

Visual Arts Review: The Unbearable Lightness of Watercolor at the Harvard Art Museums

August 1, 2023
Posted in , ,

Among the usual suspects and idiosyncratic specimens, a handful of landscape paintings, prosaic portraits, and transcendent abstract works defy watercolor’s association with lightheartedness.

Read More

Book Review: “Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting” — Demanding the Miraculous

July 25, 2023
Posted in , , ,

It is the volume’s autobiographical component, the accounts of Pasolini’s wide wanderings in art and aesthetic revelations, with their dramatic, cinematic flashbacks, that give this collection much of its literary value.

Read More

Visual Arts Review: At the Met in New York — A Fashion Factory and an Enslaved Assistant to Velásquez

July 10, 2023
Posted in , ,

Two exhibitions merit a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — but soon. Each closes July 16.

Read More

Visual Arts Feature: Elizabeth Waterman’s MONEYGAME — Reconsidering the Lives of Strippers through a Female Gaze

July 1, 2023
Posted in ,

As a fellow female artist who is working to develop her own career, photographer Elizabeth Waterman acknowledges and honors the humanity and dedication of her subjects.

Read More

Book Review: “Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” — Sort of a Shaman

June 22, 2023
Posted in , , ,

Betye Saar’s assemblages and travel sketchbooks are rich in references and symbols; they are mysterious and introspective, more spiritual than political.

Read More

Visual Arts Feature: Fluxus Artist Nye Ffarrabas Turns 91 — Celebrating “The Friday Book of White Noise”

June 16, 2023
Posted in , , ,

Nye Ffarrabas and others in Fluxus created intermedia events that pushed the boundaries of prevailing norms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, architecture, and theater.

Read More

Visual Arts Review: “Van Gogh’s Cypresses” – Seeing the Forest for the Trees

June 6, 2023
Posted in , ,

Ah, the trees! They are the focal point, the organizing principle, of this tight exhibition, which in three parts tracks Van Gogh’s productive yet challenging sojourn in southern France, from Arles to Saint-Rémy.

Read More

Design Commentary: Department of Play — Creating a New Urban Planning Paradigm

May 27, 2023
Posted in , , ,

Participatory, small-scale planning is a powerful step forward because it doesn’t pay lip service to cliches about “listening to the community.”

Read More

Recent Posts