It’s an egregious inelegance that after having proffered an evocative, intimate, inspiring exhibition of artistry, even the most well-intentioned of museums often dump its patrons out onto the doormat of a gift shop. The Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, Massachusetts, a gleaming tower of clean, gorgeous minimalism, isn’t immune to this, yet its galleries and presentations repudiate… continue
As they’ve been doing for twelve years now, passionate booklovers from all five of New York’s boroughs and locations around the globe as far away as Australia will come together this month for the Brooklyn Book Festival. This year’s crowds are expected to swell to more than 50,000 participants. It’s an event that sprawls across the whole week of September 11-17. Beginning with… continue
How to process the persistent horror that earth is being consumed by an unstoppable, self-inflicted inferno? Coping mechanisms… irreverence, nihilism, denial? If none of these sit right with you—if you prefer to fill your lungs with smoke and rot, squint through pollution and shadow, and submit to tragedy rubbernecking—we have good news! New York based artist Donald Sultan spent the better part of the 1980s creating his 59-work series The Disaster Paintings, twelve of which are currently on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum… continue
What can a rock band possibly achieve by reuniting after two decades? Most, if they had any hits, will embark on a nostalgia trip for their fans, who will almost certainly be of a specific generation and care little for the modern music scene. New recorded material rarely comes out of these reformed bands, and if it does, tends to retread instead of reinvigorate. Well, what if the band was never successful to begin with and… continue
The word “memory” comes from the Indo-European root meaning “to mourn”, and in Greek myth, Memory was the mother of the Muses. The Materiality of Mourning, an exhibition by Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo at the Harvard Art Museums through April 9, 2017 unites these sources of inspiration. Her sculptures, assemblages of furniture and… continue
The small yet deceivingly spacious studio of painter Andrew Fish is housed in an old red-brick building above a foam-cutting company, part of the Vernon Street Studios in Somerville, which houses several artist studios. A blue-velvet upholstered couch that looks like it was jettisoned from a tasteful high society home years ago fills the left wall beside a vintage flatbed printing press decorated with scraps of paper and… continue
Approaching the Robert Lehman Wing from the main entrance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, most visitors pass through the gallery where an eighteenth-century choir screen from the cathedral of Valladolid is installed, catching a first glimpse of the jaw-dropping entrance to Manus x Machina: Art in an Age of Technology from a distance. Passing through the opening in the screen, they see a glittering gold garment, framed in… continue