New Museum

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.

As globalization brings us closer together, frequent reminders of the horrors we perpetrate on each other are invaluable. A young man who was 14 when he was arrested, tortured and locked up in Guantanamo Bay reminds us that no one is exempt. Laurie Anderson offers an ineffably moving picture in collaboration with Saudi-born Mohammed El Gharani. The installation was recently on view at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

For years midcentury magic realist Paul Cadmus and other artists of his generation were neglected by the Whitney Museum. Now, in the inaugural exhibition of its new meatpacking facility, titled "America Is Hard to See," Cadmus and his peers return in force.

This fall, under director Jill Medvedow, for the first time during her administration, the ICA will present a much anticipated historical exhibition surveying the impact of Black Mountain College on the post war American avant-garde. Under her predecessors, Milena Kalinovska and David Ross, there were many such projects. We spoke with Kalinovska about her Boston years as she prepared to depart with a three year contract as director of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery in her native Prague.

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.

While director of the Williams College Museum of Art Tom Krens initiated plans for Mass MoCA. When he left for a 20 year career at the Guggenheim Museum in New York that project moved forward under Joe Thompson. Now Krens, a Williams graduate and Williamstown home owner, is proposing to create a for profit museum on leased land fronting the high traffic corridor between MoCA, Williams College and the newly expanded and renovated Clark Art Institute.

The winner of the European Museum of the Year Award in 2008, the KUMU soars as the youthful face of independent Estonia. The museum's state-of-the-art galleries display selections from its 58,000-piece collection of Estonian art from the 18th century to the 1990s, including works from the Soviet era. The KUMU is a compelling destination in Tallinn, Estonia's charming capital.

After one season the Rudd Museum of Art in North Adams has been renamed with a new mandate as Berkshire Artist Museum. It recently reopened with a Rudd installation Iceberg in the nave and That '70s show as phase one of Then and Now which will be complete later in the season.

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.

In its new, enlarged, and enhanced space, The Cooper-Hewitt Museum has increased its ability to present provocative and compelling perspectives on design. At its best, this museum pays homage to design as if it was great art: visitors are infused with delight and a sense of wonder by what design was, is, and what it means in our lives.

Arguably housing the finest university art collection in the world (over 250,000 objects in all mediums), Harvard University’s Harvard Art Museums comprise three museums. The Fogg Museum was established in 1895, the Busch-Reisinger Museum in 1903, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum in 1985. Through innovation in research, teaching, professional training, and public education, Harvard’s museums have played a leading role in the development of art history, the science of conservation, and the evolution of the art museum as an institution.

Peter Dean was a major force in the New York City art scene during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. He co-founded two distinct socially conscious art groups, showed in major galleries, and exhibited at the US Pavilion at the 41st Venice Biennale. A current exhibition in Chelsea gives us a rare and thrilling look into Dean's world.

Enduring fits of road rage during a week in LA we made daily visits to great museums. This is an initial report which will continue.

Yinka Shonibare: Double Dutch was shown at the Kunsthalle Wien in 2004. He was one of the most interesting artists included in the controversial 2000 exhibition of the Charles Saatchi collection Sensation at the Brooklyn Museum. This article is reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

As a young artist in New York James Rosenquist supported himself by painting billboards. That informed his approach as a Pop artist. For a time in the 1960s I worked for him as a studio assistant. This review of the Guggenheim retrospective is reposted from a 2004 article in Maverick Arts Magazine.

When we started planning a trip south, Savannah, Georgia, was the first location that came to mind. Actually, John Berendt’s novel, 'In the Garden of Good and Evil,' triggered our thoughts and imagination. We wanted to explore Old Savannah, as he had portrayed it. Other stops along the way fell into place after that.

We met with Native American artist Lloyd Oxendine in his New York apartment in 2006. He related early efforts to promote the artists of his heritage in the 1960s and 1970s. Recently we learned that not long after the interview the artist became homeless and nothing has been heard from him since then. In 1985 he became Director/Curator of New York's American Indian Community House (AICH) Gallery/Museum. During his tenure he organized some 40 exhibitions and worked to promote reviews and sales.

After seven years at the Institute of Contemporary Art, two of them as interim director, Christine McCarthy took a fifty percent pay cut to join the Provincetown Art Association and Museum as its director. Since 2001 she raised $8 to expand and renovate the Century plus institution. On her watch space has doubled with triple the budget, membership, and collection. This is the first of several installments of an extensive dialogue.

The performance artist Marina Abramovic is known for extreme, punishing rituals. They entail endurance over long intervals that recall the actions of the post war German artist Joseph Beuys or those of Chris Burden. Her work, with recreations of a number of her classic pieces with living performers were presented in a retrospective at MoMA with additional performances staged at the Guggenheim Museum.

Conceptualized in 1945 and completed in 1949, architect Philip Johnson's Glass House almost immediately became a 20th Century architecture icon. Used by Johnson as a weekend retreat for 58 years, it is now shared with the public as part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is a pilgrimage mecca for architecture buffs to see the eccentric outer structures and contemporary art collection of Johnson and his longtime partner art curator/critic David Whitney. This is a visually-compelling experience of an architectural masterpiece.

I explain to my clients that they are not auditioning for a record company; the record company is auditioning for us. We know you’re great and we are looking for the A&R man who gets it.

PBS announced today that the Tanglewood 75th anniversary gala concert, featuring many of the iconic artists identified with the fete, has been added to the line-up of the PBS Arts Summer Festival and will air nationally on Friday, August 10 at 9 p.m. ET as part of GREAT PERFORMANCES.

Purchase College President Thomas J. Schwarz announced today that Paola Morsiani, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, will become the seventh director of the Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College, effective July 1, 2012. As director, she will oversee an institution that has achieved international stature for its outstanding collection of modern, contemporary and African art, as well as its innovative exhibitions presenting established modern masters and cutting-edge contemporary artists. She replaces Thom Collins, who became director of the Miami Art Museum.

A volcanic bowl, Ngorongoro is a wildlife refuge, where over 20,000 animals live year-round. The Crater's floor of open grassland, dotted with animals big and small against a backdrop of mountains, is a sight to behold. Karatu is the major village in the Highlands, which provides fantastic views of the crater, along with an array of lodges for visitors.