Newest Features
The MIT List Visual Arts Center recently launched an audio guide for its public art collection that focuses on 51 notable works and offers varied insights into the collection. When visiting the mostly outdoor collection in person, each of these 51 works has a sign indicating a phone number to call to access the guide as well as QR codes that can be scanned. Art and MIT is not such a strange combination. In fact, MIT has developed innovative art programs and is continually expanding their collection. Their Percent-for-Art Program allots up…
Every week, BR&S picks out a series of gallery events, screenings, exhibitions, performances. Here are our choices for you to go & see this week: • Events Friday July 26* Lauren O’Neal, The Earnest Contingent Nave Gallery, 155 Powder House Blvd, Somerville, MA Panel Discussion: Fail Better: A Salon on Works-in Progress Join Joanne Desmond, Kirsten Reynolds and Leika Akiyama for a discussion about artistic experimentation and the role of process and failure in artmaking. How do artists conduct research and development? Can the idea of the temporary, the half-baked, or the…
In my last post, I wrote about the Peabody Essex Museum’s newly launched blog, Connected. In this post, I highlight some institutions across New England that are embracing the world of blogging. In Boston, the Institute of Contemporary Art was one of the few museums with a blog (no longer active). For over a year, the blog was “under construction” until it was ultimately given the boot (though the blog is currently listed at the bottom of their website). This is very unfortunate considering the many opportunities the ICA had to show…
I am working on a new series of drawings. This is what they look like. This how I’m making them. This was made from 1,059 photographs. I took one photo for each mark I made. My last post was about unfinished projects. For this one, I wanted to write about an ongoing idea. These drawings are a few weeks old. I am not sure where they’re going but I keep making them. For this to happen, I think there has to be an element of trust- trust in the imagery, trust in…
Harold Feinstein,Two Men & a Boy Contemplate, Coney Island, 1950 “It’s a nickel a question,” he joked. At that point, I suppose I already owed Harold Feinstein five cents, since I had just asked if I could ask him a question. Feinstein, of course, is a street photographer whose meteoric rise to fame began when he was just 15 years of age, and Edward Steichen took a liking to his work, acquiring it for MoMA’s collections. A member of Berenice Abbott’s The Photo League throughout the 1940s, Feinstein rubbed elbows with…
North Adams came alive on the weekend of June 20th – 23rd. The town’s 15,000 population increased by 60 percent as 8,000 people poured in for Wilco’s music and arts Solid Sound Festival. As far as the concept of Creative Placemaking is concerned, this is a perfect demonstration of the idea. We usually associate music festivals such as Lollapalooza, Electric Zoo, and so on, with big cities, more obvious locations of culture and heritage, and at a glance the choice of North Adams is therefore surprising. Without question, Solid Sound, held at…
Photo by Walter Silver/PEM Museums across New England are slowly catching up to other museums already dominating the blogosphere. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem is the latest cultural institution in New England to add blogging to their already impressive social media repertoire. Their recently launched blog Connected, is destined to become one of the best museum blogs in the New England area and has already featured a wide range of voices, including Karen Kramer, Curator of Native American Art and Culture in a post about her upcoming exhibition on Contemporary…
The deCordova Museum recently announced painter Ann Pibal as the fourteenth winner of the institution’s Rappaport Prize. Previous winners of the $25,000 award include Suara Welitoff (2012), Ursula von Rydingsvard (2008) and John Bisbee (2003). The Prize is awarded annually, and is funded through the Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Foundation. “I am honored and excited to have been chosen as the 2013 Rappaport Prize recipient,” says Pibal. “The award will be of absolutely enormous assistance, both practically and as an accolade, as I continue with my studio projects.” Pibal’s paintings,…