Visual Arts
“Visionary Projects” at the Boston Athenaeum is a captivating exhibition of Frank M. Costantino’s work, a display of over 80 drawings and watercolors.
While offering a window into artist Fabiola Jean-Louis’s examination of her cultural and personal identity, the exhibit also provides a deeper understanding of the Haitian struggle for freedom.
The exchange proved to be as fruitful for the artists as it was for the Shakers.
In her stimulating book, Eva Díaz presents more than 30 conceptually minded artists who “reconsider how the applications of technologies used in near and outer space, once billed as progressive and exploratory, are today rife with negative effects such as resource depletion and privatization, economic inequality, and racial and gender domination.”
The stunning painting is beautifully presented in this documentary, but the flood of references to other works of art and quotations from classical and Renaissance writers might make the film a bit slow going for someone with no background at all in Renaissance cultural history.
Minor White’s autobiographical undertaking lacks diaristic narrative. There’s too much neurotic navel-gazing too much of the time. Yet it is very appealing as a twisted personal miscellany whose contents range from summaries of sex dreams to snarky letters that were never sent.
A trio of reviews of volumes on structures on paper and in the world.
The show may be a case of inside baseball, appealing to a small group of art history majors and museum lovers. But it offers a fascinating look at innovation at one of the country’s most revered, and most traditional, colleges.
This show uses an impressively clever use of technology to create sign posts on a path through labor history, psychiatry, and textile design.
This book is an anti-biography that argues Leonardo had little interest in autobiographical self-promotion and claims that the many gaps in the historical record prevent him from cohering as a biographical subject
Visual Art Commentary: Silence Is Complicity — Why Museums Must Use Their Voice to Defend Democracy