New Museum

A breath of fresh air for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is a generational show that focuses on a close group of avant-garde artists who combined ideas and imagery.

The first installment of the New Museum's signature triennial brings together fifty artists from twenty five countries all under the age of thirty-three. Talking about my generation.

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program has earned an international reputation as a foremost center for advancing the study of visual arts and for educating the next generation of art historians, professors, and museum directors and curators. The program engages the world's most creative and innovative visual arts scholars, from Clark Fellows who travel to Williamstown from throughout the world to pursue their research while in residence at the Clark, to prominent participants in pioneering international research collaborations. Lectures by Clark Fellows are free.

As capital of the European Union, Brussels attracts a large international workforce and visitors. The city is filled with interesting museums, gourmet restaurants and chic cafes, along with unique cultural quarters and ethnic markets. Its historic center is one of Europe's finest medieval squares; its Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings are delightful architectural treasures.

The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. is one the best endowed small museums in the U.S. Through its association with Williams College the Clark offers a wide range of lectures and symposia that are available to the general public.

After a Global economic meltdown it will hardly be business as usual for the recently booming art market. Like the greed and excess on Wall Street there will be a lot of blame and finger pointing. Hopefully the bottoming out may enduce new realiities and even result in more relevant art.

Of the several prominent museum projects underway throughout Massachusetts, none is more unique than the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. This mansion museum is being changed for the first time in over 100 years. Mrs. Gardner stipulated in her will that nothing be changed from the day she died. Now, changes are occurring. Like its namesake owner, the changes have not come without a bit of controversy. An architectural star is designing the project. Part III.

In the last decade, universities and museums have had star architects create and renovate. Several prominent projects are now underway with high expectations. They stretch from Boston to the Berkshires. Like the Field of Dreams film axiom, "if you build it, they will come," apparently, museums feel the same way. Part I of three parts.

The upcoming Olympics prompted me to share my impressions of China, which I visited three years ago. My three week itinerary with Overseas Adventure Travel included Shianghai, Beijing, Xian, Chengdu, Lhasa, Chongqing, Hong Kong and a cruise on the Yangtze River. In this first of a six-part series are insights to China's modernity and traditions.

In keeping with its mandate for risk taking the New Museum, which was founded by Marcia Tucker in 1977, has recently opened a permanent home on the Bowery of New York.

During a week in New York we averaged eight to ten hours a day of touring the many art fairs and museums. It was both exhilerating and exhausting.

New York is suffering from municipal malaise. Failing with plans for Ground Zero, the 2012 Olympic Bid and now Atlantic Yards in Downtown Brooklyn, NYC lacks vision and civic follow through. A few individual architecturally interesting buildings are getting built but not larger visionary urban design schemes. Politics, provincialism and perhaps fear of the new have caused America's greatest city to civically belittle itself. Why?

In July it will be 20 years since Tom Krens left the Williams College Museum of Art to become director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His resignation was announced today. He has changed forever the mandate for major museums and how they are managed.

All Shook Up is an exhibition of photographs deconstructing the Boston Athenaeum by German artist in residence Thomas Kellner known for photographing the world's monuments.

If all goes according to plan in April gallerist Ralph Brill will light up a section of the Hoosic River between the Eclipse Mill and Mass MoCA in North Adams. He is involved in the development of a World War II Museum that would become the Northern Berkshires' "Fourth Museum."

Another view of the new Institute of Contemporary Art written by the designer Mark Favermann. This is the first article for Berkshire Fine Arts by a former columnist for Art New England.