Visual Arts
In Arlene Shechet’s mischievous hands, the medium’s power as a shape shifter runs wild.
This astutely curated exhibit explores the presence of architecture in contemporary sculpture.
With invention that suggests the work of Malevich and Mondrian, the composition is a play of rectangles.
It is a conundrum for the critic: is the crudeness of the rendering the result of an expressionist style or a lack of finesse or skill in rendering?
The show is unabashedly American in subject matter and form: Realism is as much an influence as Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and the other European –isms.
Walking, the deCordova’s fascinating and wonderfully worked out exhibition suggests, is deeply subversive of the status quo.
In recent years several serious artists, Amanda Parer among them, have created giant inflatable pieces with the aim of making cultural/political statements.
An artist who readily quoted Kierkegaard? Actually, Robert Motherwell always resisted his media image, the ex-Ivy League graduate student who is a philosopher-intellectual before he is an artist.
The Theodore Baird House is a special place; the only Frank Lloyd Wright structure in Massachusetts.

Visual Arts Commentary: Boston City Hall — A ‘Triumph’ of Brutalism
Urban pollution and acid rain have not dealt kindly with Boston City Hall’s mostly concrete facade.
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