The Harvard Art Museums announced that its much awaited renovation and expansion of the 32 Quincy Street building will finally open to the public in the fall of 2014. Since breaking ground in 2010, the project has presented numerous challenges…
So you’ve seen Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street at the Museum of Fine Arts and just can’t help wanting more? That is quite possibly the third of life’s proverbial certainties, and the only one worth indulging. Fortunately, all you have…
I’ve been making progress on one of the RISD photography graduate thesis requirements: our thesis book. This book will contain our work, in images, as well as a text document that is to be part research paper, part personal…
Remedy the aches and ills of a long, cold winter with a visit to The Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation where the astonishing ability of the human body to heal itself is triumphantly on display.…
Philip Guston’s pictography forms an intimate coded narrative. This style (for which he is known) only emerged late is his career and life, and feel sincere and autobiographical. Guston’s appropriation of the style of underground comics is a crude…
I’ve been listening to The Smiths’ The World Won’t Listen on and off for over a month solely because of Phil Collins and Wellesley College. It’s a bit too emo for my tastes today, but I don’t remember thinking that…
“Poïesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιέω, which means “to make”. This word, the root of our modern “poetry”, was first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world. Neither technical production nor creation…
I’m loving these promotional videos by Pacific Standard Time and the Getty Trust celebrating the people, art and architecture of Los Angeles. If you find yourself in the city this spring and summer, don’t miss Pacific Standard Time presents: Modern…
[please set the video to full screen] De Lejos (From Afar) implies distance: spatial, geographic, emotional, linguistic. A state of being both somewhere and nowhere; distance as the essential obverse of intimacy. De Lejos works with the notion of the…
Here is a work of art you can recreate at home. This is Caminhando (Going/Trailing), a 1964 work by Brazilian artist Lygia Clark: Begin by taking a strip of paper, twisting it, and taping the ends together; this forms a…
Thanks to all your initial write-in nominations, Big Red & Shiny is now an official nominee for the Boston Phoenix’s Best of Boston 2013. Although we have only been covering the art scene for about five months since our two…
It has been over two months since I wrote this piece about art school in Ireland. I’m back in the States now, and returning to a teaching semester, but I am still thinking about the community over at Burren College…
Since my last post I’ve been busy … (procrastinating!) updating my website, and making an animation showing my process. But imagine the video clip as an endless loop. (You can view it as a gif here.) The animation was…
I want to believe in ghosts. I want a trace to dwell in the intimate places of someone’s life after she has died. I want these spaces to in some small way to always belong to her; for emotions…
“Poïesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιέω, which means “to make”. This word, the root of our modern “poetry”, was first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world. Neither technical production nor creation…
Felix Gonzalez-Torres American (Guaimaru, Cuba 1957 – 1996) “Untitled” (Last Light), 1993 Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John Cowles, by exchange, 2010.472 If you’ve traveled to or lived in Boston during the past two years, you’ve…
The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham has been on the rebound since 2009, when former president Jehuda Reinharz recommended that director Michael Rush’s contract not be renewed and the museum’s important collection of modern and contemporary art…
The other day I was browsing though the archives of The Evolving Critic and came across a post from 2011 titled “How to Build an Igloo.” The week I published the post, Boston had been blasted with a winter mega-storm…
Vulnerable, confronted with the camera. The girl knows this is her moment. This is her time to show the world what she is. But the moment comes and she doesn’t know what to tell us. There is a void where…
I almost posted an image I took of a mountain range of laundry in my house today, all from just this past week. It’s really impressive. Our toddler has been waging a war against night time bed wetting, and losing,…