Newest Features
By BIG RED NEWS EDITOR While reported elsewhere, many of you may have not read about the ongoing debacle between Swiss artist Christoph Büchel and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA. Büchel, who was comissioned by Mass MoCA to produce an installation project for Building 5 (one of the many warehouse size galleries on the North Adams campus), had last December abandoned the over-budget project, Training Ground for Democracy, after project and budget disagreements. Büchel has not yet returned to the project and the status of the exhibition…
By BIG RED NEWS EDITOR The Museum of Fine Arts has announced that the Herb Ritts Foundation will provide the museum with a gift of $2.5 million and a large collection of photographs by the late fashion photographer Herb Ritts, who died in 2002. In return, the museum create a new permanent gallery for photography and name it in honor of Ritts. In 1996, the MFA put on a controversial retrospective of Ritts’ work, which was one of the ten most viewed shows in the museum’s history. The new Herb Ritts Gallery…
By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail. Once every Spring, on Easter Sunday, Christians commemorate the reanimation of Jesus of Nazareth (aka Jesus Christ), a Galilean Jew whom they believe came to Earth to save humans from being eternally punished after they died for all the things they ever felt guilty for doing. The story of Jesus Christ is an analog for the changing seasons as life springs from the dead of winter in the form of nascent flora and fauna. Not surprisingly, Easter is celebrated with…
By CHARLES GIULIANO After a dead of winter hiatus the Eclipse Mill Gallery has opened the season with a two person exhibition of works on paper by Frank Jackson and black and white mounted photographs by Linda Schwalen. The exhibition has been curated by Eclipse resident and photographer, Barry Goldstein. The artists live in Williamstown where he is an Assistant Professor of Art at Williams College. She showed her work in a 2003 solo at the Williams College Museum of art but has no formal relationship with the college. During the opening…
By THOMAS MARQUET #16: Thomas Marquet’s comic strip about life in a gallery. “The White Cube” comics can be read in series in the Big RED & Shiny Collections section. Thomas Marquet is a cartoonist, sculptor, and critic, based in Brooklyn, New York, which is an admittedly unoriginal place to be pursuing any of these things. Get The White Cube every day at Tom’s blog.
By HEIDI MARSTON AISHMAN Have you ever seen something you thought was cool and then wondered why everyone else didn’t think the same thing? Going to art openings is often like that for me. It’s always subjective and always personal: people see, experience and enjoy different things and that is part of what makes it exciting. The exhibition of “Shaun El C. Leonardo + Mark Schoening” at Rhys Gallery is one of those moments where I am thinking, “this is awesome and what’s more awesome is that other people see the value…
By MATTHEW NASH “Are you here for the art, or for the property?” This question was overheard several times during my visit to the latest incarnation of Arthouse, this time at 73 Spring Park Ave. in Jamaica Plain. Like its predecessors, this exhibition is built around the dual purposes of showcasing art and real estate, and once again Brendan Killian has put together a great collection of artwork. The fact that there were real estate agents hovering with business cards at the ready did not, surprisingly, detract from the experience of the…
By LINDA K. PILGRIM Beatrice Dauge Kaufmann sees the most optimistic interpretations of American landscapes of New England and New York landscapes that I’ve ever seen. Yet, her glasses are not naively rose-colored. She simply has a way of perceiving the best—and most colorful—pieces of the atmosphere of the Northeast possible. Her optimism is conveyed through daring colors: lemony yellows, cotton candy pinks, watermelon reds, blueberry and bright baby blues plus more—colors that are exceptionally difficult to describe. These artificial nametags don’t do them justice, because hers are paintings that must be…