Museum of Fine Arts

The blockbuster summer exhibition, through September 13, is testing the limits of the recently renovated and expanded Clark Art Institute to handle maximum visitation even mid week. Only a few of the 50 works in the exhibition Van Gogh and Nature will be readily familiar to visitors. Many of the works on view, gathered from major collections, rarely travel to special exhibitions such as this. The curators have provided an intimate view of his daily practice and meticulous study of nature.

Because of the activity of the 19th century collector William Sturgis Bigelow the Museum of Fine Arts has some 30,000 Japanese prints. He donated 80% of these treasures. Through August 8 the MFA is showing 230 works by the Japanese master Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). The centerpiece is his iconic color woodblock print “Under the Wave off Kanagawa,” “a.k.a. “The Great Wave.” It is from "Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji" which the artist produced while in his 70s. He later added ten more because of the success of the series.

After less than a decade the land locked ICA on the waterfront has run out of space. There is a desperate plan to expand into two floors of a 17 floor adjacent building which is under construction. It has become ever more obvious that the award winning design by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. is proving to be an utter dysfunctional disaster.

In 2009 Michael Rush, then the director of the Rose Art Museum, took the fall when Brandeis University schemed to close the museum and sell its $350 million collection. In 2010 he became the founding director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. He died recently at 65.

The Venice Biennale is about to open. The renowned curator and museum director, Jane Farver, was working with the artist Joan Jonas on an installation in the American Pavilion. It was announced that she died suddenly apparently of a heart attack. Jane was a friend and beloved mentor during her tenure as director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center from 1999 to 2011.

The legendary Provincetown Players was founded in 1915 and after a couple of seasons transferred to New York. We asked Bragan Thomas, the Co Chair of Programming, what is being planned for the centennial celebrations at Provincetown Theater. We also discussed a world premiere reading of his play "Caligula and the Three Daggers."

Belinda Rathbone, daughter of Perry Rathbone, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from 1955 to 1972, discusses her book The Boston Raphael: A Mysterious Painting, an Embattled Museum in an Era of Change, and a Daughter’s Search for the Truth at the Clark Art Institute on Sunday, April 26 at 3 pm.

From 1989 to 1993 Matthew Teitelbaum was an ICA curator under director Milena Kalinovska. On August 2, after some 22 years at the Art Gallery of Ontario, he will take over as the 11th director of the Museum of Fine Arts. It is anticipated that he will bring a more welcoming management style than the autocratic Malcolm Rogers who cleaned house and instilled fear in the staff under the mantra of One Museum.

Recently the Clark Art Institute completed a $145 million expansion and renovation following the master plan of Tadao Ando. Now 69 the director Michael Conforti will retire this summer following 20 years in Williamstown. Widely regarded as one of America's finest mid size regional museums on his watch the endowment grew from $128 million to $357 million.

Recently Kenworth Moffett posted a succinct account of his theoretical views and tenure as founding curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine arts. This is part one of a followup interview with Moffett. Here we explore his education at Columbia and Harvard as well as a unique relationship with Clement Greenberg the leading critic of his generation.

Conceptual artist and merry prankster, Jay Critcholey, will have his first museum retrospective at the Provincetown Art Associatrion and Museum from May 1 through June 21. it will present an ove view of three decades of work and residence as a humorous activist in the renowned artists colony. Through his inventive annual events such as Provincetown Harbor Swim for Life Critchley has been instrumental in raising some $4 million for a variety of charities that benefit the community.

For the past decade Edmund Barry Gaither has been primarily focused on developing a mixed use parcel in Roxbury which will include a new home for the National Center for African American Artists. That has entailed suspending his projects as an adjunct curator to the Museum of Fine ares and maintaining NCAAA as a skeletal operation in a 19th century former mansion in Roxbury. Despite many setbacks he hopes to get the museum up and running in the next couple of years. This is the second and final part of a dialogue with Gaither..

While a graduate student at Brown University, in 1970, the art historian Edmund Barry Gaither was recruited for a shared appointment as adjunct curator of the Museum of Fine Arts and working with Elma Lewis as director of the National Center for African American Artists. He still holds those positions. In this first part of an extensive interview Gaither describes jumping in to curate the major MFA exhibition African American Artists from New York and Boston. He was soon multi- tasking while being pressured by a diverse range of individuals and groups.

In 1973 the studio of Dana C. Chandler, Jr. was looted with most of his work destroyed. The studio was then torched. He was assisted by a dean of Northeastern to find adequate space. That led to establishing the African American Master Artist-in-Residence Program (AAMARP). It continues to exist although Chandler relocated to New Mexico where he has lived for the past decade.

The protest artist Dana C. Chandler, Jr. was an activist who charged the Museum of Fine Arts with institutional racism. That initiated the special exhibition African American Artists from New York and Boston and the appointment of its curator, Edmund Gaither, as an adjunct curator of the MFA. Chandler was later instrumental in forming African American Master Artist-In-Residence Program for Northeastern University. This is the first of a two part interview with the artist.

When Thomas Messer served as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston there was a plan to merge it as a department of the Museum of Fine Arts. This was confirmed when I asked him about it during an unrelated press conference. Belinda Rathbone also found related documents in the MFA archives when researching her book The Boston Raphael. Related to his time at the ICA these are excerpts from an extensive interview with Messer in the public domain at the Archives of American Art.

In 1970, on the occasion of its centennial, the MFA commissioned Walter Muir Whitehill, a trustee, to write its two volume history. Some 44 years later The Boston Raphael by Belinda Rathbone is the only published update examining that venerable Boston institution. In an extensive interview we have examined the legacy of her father as well as probed into issues and conundrums that were thoroughly researched but beyond the scope and agenda of her book. This is the third and final installment of that dialogue.

In this installment of an extensive interview the pratfalls of modern and contemporary art in Boston are explored. It was a peripheral topic in Belinda Rathbone's biography of her father, former MFA director, Perry T. Rathbone.

The Boston Raphael is the first major book on the Museum of Fine Arts since Walter Muir Whitehill's centennial history in 1970. This is part one of an in dept interview with biographer Belinda Rathbone about the New York Times best selling profile of her father, former MFA director, Perry T. Rathbone.

In August of 2010 Sidewalk Sam was on hand, at the invitation of Gail and Phil Sellers of Art About Town, to create one of his renowned public art projects on Holden Street.During a Boston blizzard yesterday he died in his sleep. We first met the artist as an activist and prankster in the 1970s.

The Open Call NNE (North Northeast) at Brattleboro Museum & Arts Center will be on view to February 7, 2015. During the breakfast opening we were pleased to encounter artists we haven't seen for decades. The Vermont kuhsthalle featured several simultaneous exhibitions including celebrity photographs by senator Patrick Leahy.

After giving away more than 50,000 artworks by Andy Warhol and making approximately a quarter of a billion dollars in cash grants, the Warhol Foundation is now approaching its 30th anniversary with a renewed focus on grant-making programs, as seen in the grassroots activity it is seeding through Common Field and the exhibitions resulting from its last round of gifts.

During the 1960s I was an intern in the Egyptian Department and Jim Jacobs worked in the Classical Department. In the decades since the MFA we have remained friends back in the day celebrating holidays in the Berkshires. Recently we met to discuss his career from classicist to artist and then private art dealer. He started working for Charles Alan and Leo Castelli. In particular he was close to the sculptors John Chamberlain and Donald Judd We discussed minimal and pop art as well as the museums Dia Beacon, Mass MoCA, Chinati and Judd Foundations.

At the age of 28 Kara Walker won a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Now middle aged she has enjoyed success with work focusing on ante bellum slavery and more recently the triangle trade in slaves, molasses and rum. Our critique about her show at Sikkema Jenkins Gallery has more to do with marginal execution than its polemical subject matter.

Jane Eaglen and Greer Grimsley with a student orchestra led by Robert Spano put on an incendiary performance of Act III of Wagner's "Die Walkure." The big question remains: when will Boston get a proper opera house?