During his performance Don’t Make Me Over at the Tufts University Art Galleries on March 15, artist Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw-Cherokee) deconstructed Dionne Warwick’s 1962 hit song into a strange, cyclical chant, part incantation and part love ballad. The words he…
Included in the exhibition Playtime at the Peabody Essex Museum is a piece by Cory Arcangel where he manipulates the classic old-school Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. A TV monitor shows Mario stranded on a block surrounded by blue sky.…
Conceptual art is often too subtle to reach the edges of our preconceptions, or it is so blatant it prevents our own imaginative leaps. Anila Quayyum Agha’s “Intersections” (2012, laser-cut steel, light bulb), recently on view at the Peabody Essex…
Born in 1959 in Cuba, María Magdalena Campos-Pons first came to Boston through a MassArt exchange program in 1988. After arriving in Boston, Campos-Pons began bringing a variety of media, including photography, video, and performance, into her painting practice. Campos-Pons’s…
American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood, recently on view at the Peabody Essex Museum (now travelling across the country through fall 2016), was a stunning, densely-mounted and sharply focused show that brought to light the cosmopolitan side of a…
Michael Lin’s FreePort project, on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, brings a contemporary perspective to the museum’s renowned Asian export art collection. The FreePort Series, launched in 2010 by Curator of Contemporary Art Trevor Smith, invites well-known contemporary artists…
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…
Earlie Hudnall, Jr., Lady in Black Hat with Feathers, 1990, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist. © 1990 Earlie Hudnall Interspersed throughout three galleries of vivid paintings and sculptures, the silver gelatin prints on…
The opening reception of Toshio Shibata, Constructed Landscapes at PEM on Wednesday April 17 drew well over 200 visitors, from affiliated artists to friends of the museum (which includes, as it turns out, the consulate of Japan in Boston),…
The Peabody Essex Museum has continued its dynamic contemporary art series, FreePort, now in its sixth iteration, with an installation of Nick Cave’s famed soundsuits. This exhibition goes beyond merely placing the suits themselves in the galleries as sculpture, and…
On Thursday, December 6th, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, MA, announced the appointment of their first curator of American Art, Austen Barron Bailly. Bailly is coming to us from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) where…
For centuries, hats have been used to define one’s social and cultural identity—and like other fashion accessories (ahem, shoes anyone?), they can make or break one’s outfit. Just look at images of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee or the Kentucky Derby…
By HANNAH BARRETT Until September 7th, The Golden Age of Dutch Seascapes at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem offers a rare opportunity to see a spectacular collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich,…