Visual Arts

Visual Arts Review: A Fruitful Exchange — “Believers: Artists and the Shakers”

March 18, 2025
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The exchange proved to be as fruitful for the artists as it was for the Shakers.

Book Review: “After Spaceship Earth” — Seriously Spaced-Out

March 18, 2025
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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.”

Film Review: “Botticelli’s Primavera” — One of the Great Picture-Puzzles of the Italian Renaissance

March 10, 2025
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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.

Book Review: Catching Up with Minor White’s Off-Beat Journal

March 3, 2025
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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.

Book Reviews: Three Very Different Architecture Books

February 21, 2025
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A trio of reviews of volumes on structures on paper and in the world.

Visual Arts Review: “The Art of Looking” — The Evolution of Harvard’s Art History Department

February 15, 2025
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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.

Visual Arts Review: “Cat Mazza: Network” — Weaving Technology and Tradition in Political Art

February 10, 2025
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This show uses an impressively clever use of technology to create sign posts on a path through labor history, psychiatry, and textile design.

Book Review: “Leonardo da Vinci — An Untraceable Life”

February 3, 2025
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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 Arts Review: Joana Choumali — No End of Stuff

January 30, 2025
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This show is proof of the Harvard Art Museums’ commitment to display relevant work by living artists who are grappling with critical issues posed by our contemporary world.

Arts Commentary: Candy Rappers of 2024 — Remembering Candy Darling

January 9, 2025
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It is clear to Candy Darling’s biographer that the present moment contains alarming reminders of the political scapegoating generated by the culture wars of the ’90s. She leaves no doubt that her subject’s difficult, complicated life embodies a cautionary tale.

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