Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted its first sound-based installation. British artist Oliver Beer selected 32 vessels from the Museum's vast collection. They form a 32 note chromatic scale which can performed on an electronic keyboard. The exhibit was a feast for eyes and ears.

During a recent road trip we visited museums in Montreal, Ottowa and Toronto. We noted different strategies to intergate First Nations artists into special exhibitions and permanent collection galleries. A third of the exhibition space of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto features First Nations artists. With an unfavorable comparison only a handful of American museums have a commitment to feature Native American art and culture.

The Orchestra Now (TON) is brave. In taking on two of the seminal composers of modern music, they tackled the presentation of developing ideas about sound as music, to which the 20th century composers have added new dimensions. Some composers took the sounds out of time. Anton Webern often composed suggesting different tempi measure to measure. While Morton Feldman did not go as far as John Cage, inviting musical artists to perform whatever, whenever, he often suspended his work out of time.

In a complex reconfiguration of permanent collections of Canadian museums there is a mandate for integration of First Nations work with galleries of post war abstraction. While change is welcome and necessary, for now, the juxtapositions are complex and disorienting. There is more contrast than confluence.

Julia Bullock is a young soprano who is designing a career to her personal specifications. Peter Sellars was attracted to her voice and performance after a Julliard college appearance as the young Vixen in Leoš Janá?ek’s Cunning Little Vixen. He lured her to Teatro Real in Madrid to perform in Henry Purcell’s “The Indian Queen.” She has performed in his work in San Francisco, and this summer took on the role of Kitty in “Dr. Atomic” at the Santa Fe Opera. She is now Artist in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Organized with the Louvre Museum in Paris, where it appeared with more works, the Met show presents some 150 paintings, prints and drawings in a dozen large galleries. Major works did not travel to New York resulting in an inadequate view of a major 19th century artist. It remains on view through January 6.

Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900, is an ambitious, scholarly but problematic exhibition at the Clark Art Institute. It has been drawing large crowds and ends on 3 September.

Former MIT/CAVS Fellow, Ellen Kozak, and composer Scott D. Miller are presenting a 4-Channel Video Installation at the Hudson River Museum until September 9. The summer exhibition also includes monumental abstract drawings by Christine Hiebert as well as museum owned etchings that are titled: Donald Judd: Variations on a Theme.

The MIT Museum's current exhibitions include: 'Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies,' until January 31st, 2019 and 'Gyorgy Kepes Photographs II, MIT Years 1946-1985,' until July 15, 2018. This article also highlights the Museum's party in late April, where more than 150 people celebrated with the CAVS community. As always, photographs of artwork and people make words visible and more memorable.

Gyorgy Kepes opened in 1967 the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and it was officially inaugurated in 1968. An ardent proponent of collaborations between the arts, sciences and technology MIT was the right place to start such a Center. Since then, a number of museums, organizations and academic centers with similar mandates are flourishing in North America and Europe. Here's just an overview of work that was created at CAVS during 40 years of its existence. The program Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) has taken on the mantle at MIT of interdisciplinary work in the 21st Century.

While described as a retrospective in eight galleries with just 60 paintings, 21 portrait drawings and five of his ground-breaking “Joiner” photo collages the David Hockney exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a bit of a tease. Now 80 when Hockney depicted homosexuality during the 1960s it was still illegal in Great Britain. He left for the laid back lifesyle of LA in 1964 and now commutes between continents. The exhibition is on view through February 25.

With just 43 works Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed at Met Breuer through February 4 provides a small but succinct view of his work. He was a prolific artist, creating approximately 1,750 paintings, 18,000 prints, and 4,500 watercolors, in addition to sculpture, graphic art, theater design, and photography. More than half of the works on view were part of Munch's personal collection and remained with him throughout his life.

The motive was not to miss a once- in-a-lifetime exhibition Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman & Designer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It remains on view through February 12. In addition to visiting museums by day we enjoyed four nights on Broadway. During the Big Chill we avoided threeh our holiday lines at the Met. There was easy access and a good selection for half price TKTS in Times Square.

Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960) founded the Shelburne Museum which has 150,000 objects and 39 buildings on 45 acres. Her father Henry Osborne Havemeyer was known as The Sugar King. With his wife Louisne they created a vast collection donating 2,000 objects, including French Impressionist masterpieces, to the Met. Electra married polo champion James Watson Webb II of the Vanderbilt family. Well before the controversies of the Berkshire Museum, in 1996, the Shelburne Museum sold $30 million of its art to pay expenses. During the winter just five buildings are open. We viewed two special exhibitions in the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education which opened in 2013. It was a lively and intriguing experience.

The Metropolitan Museum uses it galleries and collections to present events. The Shanghai Opera's production of Farewell My Concubine, based on a 3rd century BC story, fit perfectly in the Chinese Courtyard modelled on the Ming Dynasty Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets.

This summer the Clark Art Institute features four special exhibitions Picasso Encounters, an exhibition of prints with a few key paintings, as well as Orchestrating Elegance; Alma Tadema and the Marquand Music Room and two focused on prints and paintings by Helen Frankenthaler. The museum launched its expansion with a spate of blockbusters but is now moving into a new era with less hoopla under its reserved and scholarly French-born director Olivier Meslay.

Five Boston museum directors have signed a letter of concern over reports that the National Endowment for the Arts is under threat of being abolished, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Under the conservative agenda of the Trump adminsitration this is an attack on the arts in America. Guarding the Trumps in NY, DC and Palm Beach for a week is on a par with endowment support.

In three concurrent New York gallery exhibitions- Lisson, Mary Boone and Jeffrey Deitch- the dissident Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, has created poignant and roiling new works. This is a massive project by arguably our greatest living artist.

Here is a cheat sheet of ranked museum exhibitions if you plan to be in NY for the holidays

Pekka Kuusisto took on the challenging Ligeti violin concerto with gusto, humor, and a quiet modesty. This was an unusual, and unusually effective combination of qualities, especially in view of the pick he took to the violin to make it into a guitar, and his beautiful whistling. David Fulmer conducted like a poet of music. John Zorn in the audience appreciated the performance of his work by the Mivos Quartet. It was another brilliant program put on by Alan Gilbert, who credits cellist Jay Chambers with suggesting Ligeti and his influence.

The annual New York Philharmonic concert at St. John the Divine in New York was started a quarter century ago just as Kurt Mazur took the helm of the orchestra. The conductor was honored today in a wonderful New Orleans Funeral March led down the long aisle of the Cathedral by Wynton Marsalis and also a performance of Brahms' Second Symphony led by Alan Gilbert.

Although just fourteen August de Forest is being given a one woman show at the Butler Institute of American Art’s Mesaros Gallery in Youngstown, Ohio. She is from a family famous for its artists and museum professionals.

The Mount in Lenox announces its schedule of events for the 2016 season.

An exhibition by Susan Schwalb features abstract, linear compositions of mixed metalpoint on colored surfaces, many of which investigate absence or the void as a constructive element The exhibition at Garvey/ Simon Gallery in New York will run from April 28 – June 4, 2016

Using a satellite image Tom Krens commented on a six mile line connecting North Adams and Williamstown. It was a part of an engaging power point presentation to develop a cultural corridor connecting world class resources including a new for profit museum and one in North Adams featuring model railroads and maquettes by renowned architects. Former governors Dukakis and Weld attended the presentation.