Williams College Museum of Art

After three years with eleven museums on three continents the treasures of the Clark Art Institute are back home safe and sound. They will be seen this summer when the museum reopens after extensive renovation and expansion on July 4. This grand tour of major museums will reap benefits as the Clark requests loans for major exhibitions. Other major museums, however, including the Museum of Fine Arts and the Guggenheim, have loaned works to their satellites and commercial exhibition promoters for cold cash.

This week representatives of the Clark Art Institute, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown Theatre Festival and Mass MoCA met with the media to promote plans for a spectacular Northern Berkshires season. The Clark reopens following extensive expansion and renovation. Mass MoCA offers the first full season of its Anselm Kiefer building. Jenny Gersten has planned a blockbuster program for WTF. WCMA plans special events like a Think and Drink series. In high season it may be hard to book a hotel or dine at the best restaurants.

Massachusetts funded Mass MoCA initially, and now again, as an economic development to drive the creative economy of cultural tourism in the depressed Northern Berkshire County. In addition to the Clark Art Institute expanded and coming back on line this summer, in a few years, Mass MoCA plans to double its exhibition space. A key result of that expansion will be a shift of visitors from day trips to weekends. In this next phase more involvement with the local community, particularly its artists, will be crucial.

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.

With a $25.4 Million grant from the Commonwealth Mass MoCA is embarking on the third and final phase of renovation and development of its 26-building, 600,000 square foot, 16-acre factory campus. Phase III research and concept design work is complete. The project is ready to move construction projected for 2014-2016. This entails 130,000 square feet of gallery space requiring $25 million in state infrastructure grants, plus $30 million in privately raised construction investments, building maintenance reserves, and endowment funding.

Dishing the dirt on celebrities has become a billion dollar industry for muckraking supermarket tabloids, talk radio, and TV entertainment and gossip shows. But we were shocked and distressed when Berkshire Eagle columnist John Seven unloaded a mud slinging screed against Woody Allen and other "artistic creeps." Seven seems surprised and offended to realize that great artists are not always great people. Duh.

In 2011-2012 The Getty Foundation sponsored Pacific Standard Time which involved 60 cultural institutions in Southern California. The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles presented "Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980." The exhibition, which was awarded Best Thematic Exhibit Nationally for 2012 by the International Asssociation of Art Critics (AICA), is on view at the Williams College Museum of Art through December 1.

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.

The 2005 DeCordova Annual Exhibition included: Jean Blackburn, Lalla A. Essaydi, Milan Klic, Michael Lewy, Sally Moore, Laurie Sloan, Barbara Takenaga, Nao Tomii, Nadya Volicer, Mark Wethli. Reposted from Maverick Arts Magazine.

In 2002 Deborah Rothschild curated "Prelude to a Nightmare: Art Politics, and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna 1906- 1913" for the Williams College Museum of Art. We repost a dialogue with her from Maverick Arts Magazine.

The September/ October edition of Art New England includes a section devoted to the Berkshires. To celebrate there was a reception hosted by the Eclipse Mill Gallery in North Adams. We got a chance to catch up with publisher Tim Montgomery whom we knew back in the day when he was in sales for the legendary Rock of Boston the pioneering WBCN. Several years ago he acquired the publication and continues its mandate as the foremost publication covering New England.

Initially Mass MoCA director Joe Thompson denied that there would be a new Kiefer Building. We reported it anyway ages ago. Thompson confirmed it during a recent interview and now its official as reported today in the Berkshire Eagle. The fun begins on September 27.

This time next year the Clark Art Institute will open its Tadao Ando designed campus expansion. Mass MoCA unveils its new Anselm Kiefer building this fall. That adds to its existing Sol LeWitt building. The resultant boost in visitation, as well as more events like the recent Solid Sound Festival, are a part of plans for the expansion and growth of business, tourism and jobs for a region with twice the rate of state unemployment. That's down from seven times the unemployment rate in the early 1990s.

On view through September 8, 2013, Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making History showcases some sixty oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings, as well as approximately 120 rarely seen wood engravings. Drawing upon the resources of the Clark’s own holdings of nearly 250 works by Homer (dating from 1857 to 1904), the exhibition provides a variety of distinctive perspectives on this important American artist.

The vast vaulted space of Building Five is roughly the length and width of two, end to end, football fields. Globally, there are only a handful of similar spaces. The basic approach of artists over the last 13 years has been to jam it full or leave it relatively empty. The current installation "Phoenix" by Xu Bing realizes its full potential. In this second and final installment of an extensive dialogue Mass MoCA director Joe Thopson discusses the museum's programming and challenges.

There were many daunting impediments in presenting Phoenix a vast sculptural installation by the leading Chinese artist, Xu Bing, at Mass MoCA. This third major project with contemporary Chinese artists remains on view in North Adams for the coming year.

The premiere run of Dr. Ruth All the Way by Mark St. Germain sold out at Barrington Stage Company. A return, through October 7, allows for fine tuning the one woman play which stars Debra Jo Rupp. During this first of two installment of a recent dialogue St. Germain also discussed a work, Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah, commissioned for next summer's Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) presents Cosmologies. The exhibition will be on view from September 29 through December 16, 2012. Cosmology is the arena in which science, metaphysics, philosophy, and religion converge. The multitude of cosmological approaches seek to uncover the universe’s origins, fate, meaning and physical laws

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute presents rare Chinese burial objects in an exclusive exhibition that considers both the discovery and the impact of modern Chinese archaeology, Unearthed: Recent Archaeological Discoveries from Northern China through October 21, 2012. The exhibition features objects recently excavated from sites in the Shanxi and Gansu provinces and never before seen outside of China, including a full-size stone sarcophagus discovered intact in 2004.

It was steamy in the Shed last night for the sweltering launch of the gala, 2012, 75th season of Tanglewood. With Christoph von Dohnányi, a Conducting Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center in 1952, the orchestra replicated the very first BSO concert that took place on August 5, 1937. A capacity audience enjoyed the all-Beethoven program, opening with the Leonore Overture No. 3, followed by Symphony No. 6, Pastoral, and Symphony No. 5.

A version of the traveling exhibition The Italians by the late photographer, Leonard Freed, will be presented in August at the Eclipse Mill Gallery by the gallerist/ entrepreneur Ralph Brill. We met with Brill to discuss Freed and other wide ranging thoughts and projects. There was a focus on North Adams as the former home of Arnold Printworks and Sprague Electric prior to becoming home to Mass MoCA.

On Thursday, June 28, 2012, Kidspace at MASS MoCA will open the Bus Stand, a public artwork by Queensbury, New York-based artist Victoria Palermo, who was inspired by her 2010 Kidspace artist-in-residency in the North Adams middle schools to create a colorful work of art on Main Street that would combine the functional with the aesthetic.

East meets West. Last night the legendary Chicano band from East LA, Los Lobos, blew the roof off the Hunter Center of Mass MoCA. It was the ultimate bicoastal culture clash between the sizzling band with an eclectic mix of rock and interpretations of ratcheted up traditional Mexican music and a nearly full house of mostly blue collar locals, aging hippies, and bluebloods from neighboring, posh Williamstown.

The Boston University Art Gallery (BUAG) presents 100 Years (version #4, Boston, 2012), curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1 and RoseLee Goldberg, Director and Curator of Performa. The exhibition traces the development of performance art over the past century with a wealth of assembled archival documents, film, photography, and audio previously unseen.

After high school in East LA four Chicano friends- Harry Gamboa, Jr,, Gronk, Willie F. Herron III, and Patssi Valdez- hung out and made conceptual, graphic and performance art together. The initial reactions of their community were expressed by the Spanish work Asco- disgust, vomit, revulsion. They liked the word which stuck with them. It was used for the movement which was active, under the art world radar from 1972-1987. Now the ephemera and documents of that transient expression are the subject of a bi coastal project between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Williams College Museum of Art.