Museum of Modern Art

The Lumbee Indian, Lloyd Oxendine, who died on August 5, held a BA in art history from Columbia where he also earned an MFA. From 1970-78 he ran a New York gallery dedicated to Native American Art. In 1972 he wrote what proved to be most of an issue of Art in American surveying 23 artists. For many years he was a brilliant and outspoken activist.

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.

Michael Graves shook up the architectural world by taking the unadorned boxes of modern architecture and often theatrically enhancing them with color, pattern, and ornamentation. His work for Humana, Disney and others was considered kitsch by some but revolutionary by others. Though his building style faded, his often whimsical and sometimes iconic home products for first Alessi and then Target and other retailers may be his greatest continuing legacy.

As winter slowly makes way to spring it is time again to make travel plans. Consider a visit to Northern California as a viable option.Here are some recent and upcoming developments in San Francisco’s arts and culture scene.

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..

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.

George McNeil emerged as one of the First Generation Abstract Expressionist and New York School painters during the late thirties. He was shown in the New York Worlds Fair in 1939, and in 1935 he was a member of the W.P.A. and served on the Federal Art project with artists such as Willem de Kooning and James Brooks.

The merry Dada prankster Marcel Duchamp changed the definitions of art with his Found Objects, Ready Mades and Assisted Readymades. The Robert Gober show at MoMA requires a new category, Made Readymades.

During the busy holiday season The Museum of Modern Art is featuring the blockbuster exhibition of the artist’s triumphant and inventive last works Henri Matisse: The Cutouts. The exhibition drew some 500,000 visitors last summer to London’s Tate Modern.

Jay Milder came of age during the Second Generation of the New York School as one of the seminal Figurative Expressionist painters and one of the SoHo loft pioneers. Today Milder's influence on painting is widespread and he has been cited as influence of both Neo-Expressionism in the United States and the graffiti art movement in Brazil.

Judith Bookbinder's 2005 publication Boston Modern: Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism is the definitive study of this important but neglected movement. Her study is meticulously researched and documented. This is the catalogue for the exhibition that the Museum of Fine Arts has failed to deliver. Significantly most of the Boston Expressionists were Jews struggling with Biblical constraints against the graven image.

From 1974 to 1994 the German/ American artist Otto Piene was the director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. With a farm in Groton he continued to commute to his studio in Dusseldorf. He died this week, at 85, while working on a major museum exhibition and sky art event in Berlin. While celebrated internationally, there will be an exhibition of Group ZERO this seaon at the Guggenheim, he was snubbed by the Boston art world and media.

The Austrian artist Franz West (16 February 1947- 25 July 2012). is being featured this summer in the Northern Berkshires. There is a display of several large scale, puffy, pink phallic sculptures at Mass MoCA and a tandem exhibition of works on paper and smaller scale sculptures at Williams College Museum of Art. The artist was widely included in global biennials and museum exhibitions including a retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art. We consider West in the milieu of post war artists in Vienna including its outrageous Actionists.

Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) was one of the most important Post War German artists. He is the subject of a dense, sprawling and and messy retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art through August 3. It would be a folly and conceit to attempt to review such diverse and eclectic, mind boggling work. For that we refer you to mainstream critics all of whom fail, to varying degrees, to nail down the work of one of the most fascinating and daunting artists of our time.

The Italian artists circa World War I advocated destroying the past while embracing the future. Hence Futurism the subject of an enormous and fascinating survey Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe on view at the Guggenheim Museum through September 1. In their enthusiasm and nationalism they embraced the Fascism of Mussolini.

From the late 1890s through the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Moscow based business man Sergei Ivanovich Schukin (1854-1936) assembled one of the great collections of early modern art. When the Soviets confiscated the collection he emigrated to Paris. The National Arts Club in New York is currently showing 35 Russian avant-garde works from the collection of family member Marina and Nikolay Shchukin. Through June 14 the exhibition is sponsored by Russian American Foundation as a part of the Annual Russian Heritage Month.

The title of the exhibit, "The Production Line of Happiness" is taken from a Jean Luc Godard documentary in which an amateur filmmaker compares his day job as a factory worker with his hobby of editing his films of the Swiss countryside. Williams says that today's consumer culture pictures and produces endless images to be consumed.

Several months ago we spoke in depth with Joe Thompson about a bill pending on Beacon Hill to grant $25 million toward the final phase of developing the North Adams campus of Mass MoCA. This week, early August, 2014 the bill has been signed by outgoing Governor Deval Patrick a Berkshire neighbor of the museum. Thompson, as he discusses here, must raise an additional $30 million for the project which will take several years.

Visiting new York City means seeing great theatre. Mark Favermann and his companion Lisa saw Pinter's No Man's Land with Sirs Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart and the musical A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder with the versatile Jefferson Mays. These shows are two of the 2013-14 Broadway season highlights in the Big Apple. And NYC also means visiting great museums. Two that were visited were MoMA and the Morgan Library.

Carl Chiarenza is distinguished both as a photographer and a scholar. Rochester Contemporary Arts Center is featuring him in Makers & Mentors new and recent collages, paintings and photographs by: Carl Chiarenza (Rochester), Lisa Bradley (New York), Bruno Chalifour (Rochester), David W. Haas (Rochester) February 6 – March 16, 2014.

Dream surrealism has always been accessible to the general public. During the Holiday season in New York, through January 12, there is an intriguing double header. The relatively small but concise "Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations" is on view at the Metropolitan while "Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938" is featured at the Museum of Modern Art.

Relaunching after renovations the Irish Museum of Modern Art presented two special exhiitions- Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray (9 August 1878 – 31 October 1976) the Irish born furniture designer, and architect and Leonora Carrington (6 April 1917 – 25 May 2011) a British-born–Mexican artist, surrealist painter and novelist. Her mother was Irish.

Building Five of Mass MoCA is one of the largest and most magnificent spaces for contemporary art in North America. It is always fascinating to see how artists respond to the daunting challenge. Izhar Patkin: The Wandering Veil is now on view for the coming year.

For a variety of social and political motivations the majority of modern and contemporary museum level exhibitions we viewed recently in Dulin and London featured feminist reclamation projects for women artists of varying degrees of obscurity. Of these the large restrospective of work by the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta at Hayward Gallery required no PC underpinnings. Her work clobbered us with its primal power and originality.

In collaboration with the Hall Art Foundation a building dedicated to works by the German artist, Anselm Kiefer, will be on view at Mass MoCA for the next 15 years. Combined with the 25 year agreement for the Sol LeWitt building this greatly enhances the museum as America's foremost destination for contemporary art.