In the latest news in the battle for arts funding in the US, The Art Newspaper reported yesterday that the Boston Mayor has greatly increased payments under his Payment in Lieu of Taxes scheme that asks nonprofits, including museums to make “voluntary” contributions to city services such as the fire and police department.
Boston’s Museum of Fine Art is asking visitors to donate so they can add the 42-foot-high, 10,000 pound, 2,400 piece “Lime Green Icicle Tower” sculpture that is a highlight of the current Dale Chihuly show.
The artistic avant garde is often a pretty insular group — when you’re doing something new, odds are that few people besides your immediate friends and collaborators know what’s up. A jewel box of an exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts proves just how small the art world is with Modernist Photography 1910-1950, a show that’s just as much about the aesthetic (and physical) interrelationships between artists as it is about the advent of modernist photography in the United States.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts is going totally psychedelic, man. It’s like, all these colors swirling everywhere, all these curly pieces of glass like crazy mutant sea creatures. You feel me? Crowd-pleasing sculptor and glass artist Dale Chihuly has a big show up at the MFA, and it’s like, totally sweet.
The Metropolitan Museum is raising its suggested admission prices for adults from $20 to $25, reports the New York Times. Good thing we’ll still be paying the ticket price with whatever change we have in our back pockets.
The re-installation of the Denver Art Museum’s American Indian art galleries has an important new feature: individual artist names are now included on its wall labels. The comprehensive re-installation heralds a new move towards recognition of the history of Native American art, as well as Native American artists’ contribution to a larger American art history.
The purpose of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ new Art of the Americas wing to provide a space to tell the entire story of American art. Yet visitors may be surprised to find the ground floor of the new wing occupied by Aztec, Mayan and Native American art, sharing space with early colonial work. The new galleries question the idea that “American” art is solely defined by work created in the United States, tied to the too-strong connection between “America” and the colonial US. The MFA instead presents art from this era of both Americas, South and North, as a continuum, part of a dynamic intercultural milieu. But how far does the museum go in redefining what we mean by “American” art?
At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ new Wing of the Americas, the story of American art is told over the course of four floors, ranging from colonial and indigenous art through modernism. Stopping before contemporary, the third floor above ground level is the home of American modernism. The opening gallery of the floor tells a story that’s neither comprehensive nor diverse, instead presenting a kind of multifaceted, unfocused face to greet the public. How does this hanging impact the works on view in the gallery, and museum-goers’ experience of the art?
Greg Cook is proud to be a yokel. As an art critic for The Boston Phoenix weekly, an independent blogger and artist, Greg is a staunch fan and supporter of the Boston contemporary art community. What bugs him about this city’s art scene is that he might have a better opinion of the scene than it does of itself. In a series of blog posts on his New England Journal for Aesthetic Research, Greg has outlined a Yokelist manifesto for a Boston art community with enough confidence to drive itself to greater heights, art world capital or not.
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