Visual Arts
This MFA exhibition displays some of the most intricate manifestations of tattoos in woodblock prints, leaving the viewer curious about its footprints in contemporary art and popular culture. By Yumi Araki Under the Skin: Tattoos in Japanese Prints is showing at the Museum of Fine Arts through January 2, 2011. As a cultural prelude to…
Read MoreOn August 1st a group of dedicated Melvilleans gathered at the author’s Arrowhead home in the morning to commemorate his 191st birthday by hiking to Monument Mountain. This trip is meant to reenact the hike Melville took on August 5, 1850, which led to his meeting Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose short story collection Mosses from an…
Read MoreWhat is a Judicial Review? It is a fresh approach to creating a conversational, critical space about the arts. The aim is to combine editorial integrity with the community—making power of interactivity. This is our second session. Hear Ye! Hear Ye! For dance critic Debra Cash, Serenade/The Proposition, the first of Bill T. Jones’s investigations…
Read MorePapercut’s mission is to collect, catalog, and make available to the public the widest possible collection of contemporary ‘zines. By Dylan Rose I’m new at this reporting bit and, in an early conversation with my editor about the particular goals and restrictions of the genre, I blundered: I happened to refer to Arts Fuse as…
Read MoreAlthough I was quadruply nervous—about my historical and art-historical knowledge, my Dutch, my speaking voice, and my presence of mind—I enjoyed the tapings for the radio and have no reason to think that I committed any terrible gaffes. By Gary Schwartz My late Sunday mornings over the past decades have been torn between quiet work…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh Charles LeDray, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, MA, July 16 through October 17 New York sculptor Charles LeDray is known for making very, very tiny things—especially men’s clothing—with fanatical precision and craftsmanship. Something about them fascinates. A British critic has compared his elaborate, Liliputian arrangements to “the model tankers and cruise…
Read MoreOh connoisseurship, what hath thou wrought? By Gary Schwartz Until June 27, a small exhibition of irresistible charm and interest is being held in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, after a run at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp: Willem van Haecht: room for art in 17th-century Antwerp. Van Haecht was one of the great masters of…
Read MoreThe narrative turns out to have the blandly cheerful tone and slightly stilted prose of an official biography: the sort of thing with the CEO’s picture on the cover, given out at stockholders meetings. Chuck Close: Life, by Christopher Finch. Prestel, 352 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by Peter Walsh In these media-saturated, image-obsessed times, every public…
Read MoreBy J. R. Carroll Photo by Nicole LeCorgne Jazz festivals come in all shapes and sizes these days, even within the modest geographical confines of New England. Up in Vermont, the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival is still in progress; among others, you can still catch Jim Hall on Friday, June 11, and Sonny Rollins the…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh It’s a hot weather tradition. Generations of American artists have followed the seasonal migration out of hot, sticky, eastern cities to Cape Cod (Edward Hopper, Hans Hoffman), the North Shore (Winslow Homer, Childe Hassan, Stuart Davis, Mark Rothko), and the Berkshires (Daniel Chester French, Norman Rockwell ). Besides their work, they left…
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Visual Arts Commentary: John Singer Sargent — A Particular Sort of Loner