Ron Wallace of Greene, Rhode Island, reportedly broke the world record for heaviest pumpkin during the 28th annual Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off at the Topsfield Fair in Massachusetts on Friday. The monster he grew this summer came in at 2,009 pounds and is believed to be the first pumpkin weighing more than a ton. Which won him $10,000 in addition to $5,500 he won for taking first place in the contest.
The 1-ton pumpkin is one of those arbitrary but monumental barriers–like Roger Bannister in 1954 becoming the first person recorded to run a mile in less than four minutes.
Chris Stevens of New Richmond, Wis., has held the Guinness World Record for heaviest pumpkin for a 1,810.5-pound behemoth he brought to the Stillwater Harvest Fest in Minnesota in 2010. At the Deerfield Fair in New Hampshire on Thursday, Steve Geddes of Boscawen, New Hampshire, seemed to best that record with a 1,843.5-pounder. Impressive, but it only stood until Wallace’s pumpkin tipped the scales the following day. Photos courtesy of the Topsfield Fair.
The Danforth Museum and School of Art has announced that it has received a “$500,000 unrestricted gift from an anonymous donor … the largest single donation in the 37 year history” of the Framingham, Massachusetts, institution. The museum reports:
“’This represents a vote of confidence in what we are doing,’ says Museum Director Katherine French, ‘and is particularly welcome as we consider relocation to a new facility.’ Troubled by long standing facilities issues, the Danforth has been considering a move to a Town owned facility on the historic green in Framingham Center. Last May Danforth Trustees responded to an RFP issued for a municipally owned building, which was conditionally approved in June by Framingham’s Board of Selectmen, subject to negotiation of acceptable terms and final approval at Town Meeting. In July the Danforth received a $30,000 Cultural Facilities grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to create a strategic site plan for the new location and has been working with Ann Beha Architects to realize this plan.”
Most playgrounds across the country are limited variations on a theme because they’re built with elements from a handful of manufacturing companies. Albion Park in Somerville, Massachusetts, features a nice, but standard issue variation on slides, swings, and so on from Kopan of Tacoma, Washington. What distinguishes the playground is its sprinklers. The water turns on when you press down on plungers atop three different poles around the edge of the “splash plaza.” Each plunger triggers different sprays, and the sprays vary when activated in combination.
The less than one acre site has been a public playground since 1950. A 2009 renovation, which also offers a playground, basketball court, seating area and community garden, received a 2010 Boston Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award.
Notably the park only offers two slides. A mounded lawn in the center could support some sledding in winter. But the stress is on climbing–with a climbing net on the playground section for 2- to 5-year-olds, and lots of climbing wall handholds built onto the outsides of the section for older kids.
Albion Park on Albion Street at Albion Place and Lowell Street, Somerville, Massachusetts.
Photos by The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research.
In 2002, the Springfield Museums dedicated the Dr. Seuss National Memorial, set in the quadrangle between the buildings in the Massachusetts town where Seuss was born in 1904 as Theodor Seuss Geisel.
The project was first floated when Seuss paid a visit to Springfield in 1986, but didn’t get approval until after his death in 1991. Sculpted by Seuss’s step-daughter, Lark Grey Dimond-Cates, it includes a life-sized Seuss sitting at a drafting table with the Cat in the Hat. The Grinch peeks around a 10-foot-tall “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” book. A giant book serves as a pedestal for 14-foot-tall Horton plus Sam-I-Am, Thing 1 and Thing 2, and Thidwick the Moose. A tower of Yertle turtles and the Lorax, standing on a stump, stand on their own, away from the main group.
Ten years on, it remains undeniably fun. Dimond-Cates does a good job of rendering the famous characters and giving (most of them) a sense of animation and wit. But the two giant books and the decision to render everything in unpainted bronze are awkward solutions. Dr. Seuss, himself, made lively painted plaster sculptures of his critters while he was alive. The bronze here may be primarily about durability, but it seems to also be about asserting the importance of Dr. Seuss and his work, insising it’s art. But leaving it unpainted feels unplayful and miserly. And suggests that the organizers weren’t confident enough in Seuss’s work to hold its own.
Dr. Seuss National Memorial at the Springfield Museums, 21 Edwards St., Springfield, Massachusetts.
Photos by The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research.
Randy Regier, who studied at Maine College of Art and then lived in Portland for a while before decamping for Kansas last year, is one of the best sculptors working in the U.S. He mates awesome craftsmanship of vintage-looking toys and machines to intriguing invented narratives. Which is why his “Dime Star” installations across Maine won the critics’ pick for best sculpture at the 2011 New England Art Awards. Though he’s no longer here in New England, we love receiving news of his most recent work. “I was commissioned to find a lost shipping crate of early 1950’s era space toys from a Wichita, Kansas,-based company called ‘Wichitoy,’” he e-mails. “The search – most of which occurred in my studio – was ultimately a success.”
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has opened a new gallery of gems and jewelry from the ancient Mediterranean. The MFA says half of the works will be gems from the MFA’s collection of some 700 Greek and Roman gems, “considered the finest in the United States,” and the other half of the works will be examples of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman jewelry, including the MFA’s gold “Earring with Nike driving a two-horse chariot” from about about 350 to 325 B.C. (pictured at top).
“Cameo with portrait busts of an Imperial Julio-Claudian couple,” mid-1st century A.D., Sardonyx.
When Disneyland was developing the 1967 “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride, Marc Davis—a Disney animator-turned-Imagineer—realized that there wasn’t much historical imagery of pirates: “The artist who really invented pirates as we see them now was an illustrator by the name of H[oward] C. Pyle. He was the guy who really decided how pirates should look.”
“Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered” at the Norman Rockwell Museum, organized by the Delaware Museum of Art, is a retrospective of the brilliant American painter of manly adventure—much like Winslow Homer, who began in illustration and developed a career as a “fine” artist.
Pyle (1853-1911) spent most of his life in Philadelphia or his native Wilmington, Delaware. Through his teaching (students included N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Jessie Wilcox Smith) and popular magazine and book illustrations of Robin Hood, the Arthurian legends, the American Revolution, and pirates, Pyle deeply influenced American culture—particularly Hollywood.
Wyeth’s paintings are filled with he-men and Parrish’s have a dreamy stillness, but Pyle’s people are more natural and nearly always in dramatic action. In “The Flying Dutchman” (1900, pictured at top), rendered in seasick greens, seawater rushes down the wildly pitched deck. But our perspective matches the masked captain, hauntingly standing sturdily upright in the gale. In the Revolutionary War scene “The Attack upon the Chew House” (1898, pictured below), Pyle stresses the difficulty of the soldiers’ charge through the gun smoke to the building by directing the action from right to left—against the way we read. The gray men crash against the stone house like an exhausted wave.
“Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered,” Norman Rockwell Museum, 9 Route 183, Stockbridge, June 9 to Oct. 28, 2012.
Pictured above: “Howard Pyle at his studio easel,” taken by C.P.M. Runeford, 1898 Howard Pyle Manuscript Collection.
This review originally appeared, in slightly different form, here.
“The Attack upon the Chew House,” 1898.
“Away they rode with clashing hoofs and ringing armor,” 1888.
“Retreat through the Jerseys,” 1898.
“We Started to Run back to the Raft for Our Lives,” 1902.
At the heart of Ori Gersht’s art is a question: how to capture the ghosts of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Israel’s wars? Gersht’s work is about the persistence of trauma, the elusiveness of memory — “an attempt,” he tells me, “to hold onto something that’s already lost.”
In “History Repeating,” a striking survey of 25 works since 1998 curated by Al Miner at the Museum of Fine Arts, the London-based artist’s answer is a violent poetry. Hyper-detailed lush videos and photos show trees crashing down in a forest, a man falling apart as he crosses mountains, and — in the work for which he is best known — Old Master-style still-lifes blasted to bits.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Gersht’s first war was the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War when he was a baby. Childhood memories include his father, who ran an art-house cinema, called up for Army service; the sirens and bomb shelters of 1973’s Yom Kippur War; his mother sheltering him with her body; officials visiting the neighborhood to announce soldiers’ deaths. His grandmother spoke of leaving Poland for Israel in 1933 to avoid an arranged marriage, and about the family she left behind disappearing into the Nazi death machine. Gersht served in the Israeli Army as a medic in the ’80s, where he was lucky enough to avoid crisis action, but constantly rehearsed treatment of traumatic wounds and chemical burns.
In 1988, he moved to London seeking anonymity, and attended art school. He found his subject by driving to Sarajevo in 1998, a few years after the seige there during the Bosnian War, and photographing the city’s scars. Then a plane to Poland in 1999. Riding a train from Krakow to Auschwitz, he photographed passing buildings that seemingly remained as mute witnesses to Nazi murders.
Thursday, Sept. 27, 7 p.m.
The Rhode Island Film Collaborative offers a panel on tax credits for local film productions at the Blackstone Valley Visitor’s Center, 175 Main St., Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Speakers are Anthony Ambrosino, film producer and creative Director at The 989 Project; Bert Crenca, artistic director of AS220; Steven Feinberg – executive director of the RI Film & TV Office; Gary Glassman, founder of Providence Pictures; Andrew Lund, director of the Integrated Media Arts MFA Program at Hunter College, City University of New York; Edward Mazze, professor of business administration at the University of RI; and Kimberly Wyman, an accountant who is head of film tax audits at Carl Weinberg & Co. Free.
Thursday, Sept. 27, 8:30 p.m.
Andy Adams, creator of FlakPhoto.com, and Jorg M. Colberg, publisher of the website Conscientiousnes, discuss photography in the digital era at the RISD Museum’s Metcalf Auditorium, 224 Benefit St., Providence.
Friday, Sept. 28, 6 p.m.
Letterpress printmaker Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. speaks at AS220, 115 Empire St., Providence. (At top, check out the preview of the documentary about him, “Proceed and Be Bold.”)
Friday, Sept. 28, 7:30 p.m.
Jason Rosenfeld, Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College, explores the recent art of Williamstown-based painter Stephen Hannock at Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, 10 Vernon St., Brattleboro, Vermont.
Saturday, Sept. 29, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo at University Hall, Lesley University, 1815 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge. Free.
Saturday, Sept. 29, 3 to 7 p.m.
The seventh annual “What the Fluff?! Fest” presented by the Somerville Arts Council in Union Square, Somerville, Massachusetts.
Monday, Oct. 1
Deadline for 2013 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship applications in Crafts, Dramatic Writing, and Sculpture/Installation.
Monday, Oct. 1
Deadline for Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fellowships for Choreography, Drawing & Printmaking, Music Composition, New Genres and Painting.
Tuesday, Oct. 2, 5:30 p.m.
W. J. T. Mitchell, Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, speaks about “Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture” at the Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Free.
Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012, 7 p.m.
Dallin Museum trustee Christine Sharbrough speaks about “Dallin and the Native Americans” at the museum, 611 Massachusetts Ave., Arlington, Massachusetts. The late culptor Cyrus Dallin was creator of “Appeal to the Great Spirit” outside Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts plans to debut its new Michael C. Ruettgers Gallery for Ancient Coins on Sept. 25. The museum reports:
“It is the only gallery dedicated to coinage in a major US art museum and is unique for its emphasis on ancient coins as works of art—masterpieces on a miniature scale. The gallery will also illustrate how coins are both a form of cultural expression—reflecting the customs, beliefs, and ideals of those who produced and used them—and primary documents of ancient history. … Ancient coins, shown thematically and chronologically, will be drawn from the Museum’s extensive numismatic collection, which comprises more than 19,000 coins, medals, medallions, paper currency, and tokens ranging from the 7th century BC to the mid 20th century.”
Shay Culligan’s political broadsides in his exhibit “No Inherent Wisdom,” at NK Gallery (the gallery’s final show) are a withering indictment of conservative politics of the past decade.
The Irish native, who’s lived in Boston since 1992, hangs Bush Administration leaders with their own words. CIA Director George Tenant is framed by his statement, in giant stencil letters, “Slam Dunk”—stating his confidence that their evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was true. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice warns, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Colin Powell sits behind a sign reading “United States,” with Tenant behind him, as he presented the Bush Administration’s case that Iraq was harboring WMDs to the United Nations. Culligan doesn’t add anything to this one, he just lets the buzzing television image damn itself.
Vice President Dick Cheney proclaims in 2003 that “We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insists that the Iraq war won’t last more than five months. Need it be said that every one of these Bush Administration proclamations about Iraq proved false?
Culligan’s screenprints deploy stencil lettering and acid-colored, grainy reproductions of the players photographed from televisions. The effect is familiar and simple but effective. The Bushies buzz as bloody-minded incompetents.
Culligan’s punches fall wide of their marks when he tries to hit presidential candidate Mitt Romney saying he doesn’t care about poor people, his vice presidential running mate Paul Ryan, a teary-eyed Speaker of the House John Boehner, Newt Gingrich, Russian President Vladimir Putin, bankers and financiers. The images don’t have the same grittiness (Culligan says he’s now photographing from high definition televisions) and he’s less sharp at identifying the powerbrokers’ most self-damning quotes—perhaps because history hasn’t shaken them out yet.
Shay Culligan, “No Inherent Wisdom,” NK Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., Boston, Sept. 7 to 21, 2012.
Rethink Robots of Boston this week announced its development of “Baxter,” a manufacturing robot designed to help “small, mid-size and large domestic manufacturers use automation to compete with manufacturers in low-cost regions of the world.” But what stands out to us is that the sort of spidery, sort of humanoid machine features an LCD monitor with cartoon eyes to give “clear visual feedback.” And which make it seem so, ahem, warm and friendly/creepy. The monitor also serves as a computer screen for programming.
Shipments of the robots (starting at $22,000, which apparently doesn’t include base and hands!) are planned to begin in October. The company was founded by Rodney Brooks, former director of MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-founder of iRobot, best known for the Roomba vacuum cleaner robot, but which also produces military bots.
Ezra Jack Keats published “The Snowy Day” in 1962 — around the time Freedom Riders were being beaten for trying to integrate bus travel in the South and James Meredith was being barred from the University of Mississippi.
The picture book — a civil-rights landmark in its own right — was a calm and beautiful and poetically simple tale, stylishly illustrated, of a little African-American boy named Peter, who is entranced when snow transforms his city neighborhood into a wonderland. It was one of the first times — and the most prominent occasion — that an African-American was the star of an American children’s book. Previously, the most famous black children’s book character was the racist caricature Little Black Sambo. “The Snowy Day” deservedly won the Caldecott Medal, which honors great picture books, the following year.
“The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats” at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, organized by New York’s Jewish Museum, marks the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication with a survey of Keats’s career (1916-1983).
“The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats,” Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, 125 West Bay Road, Amherst, June 26 to Oct. 14, 2012.
Pictured at top: Ezra Jack Keats, “Crunch, crunch, crunch, his feet sank into the snow.” Final illustration for “The Snowy Day,” 1962. Collage and paint on board. All Keats images from Ezra Jack Keats papers, de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection, McCain Library and Archives, The University of Southern Mississippi. Copyright Ezra Jack Keats Foundation.
Above: “So he made a smiling snowman, and he made angels.” Final illustration for “The Snowy Day,” 1960. Collage and paint on board.
“He told his mother all about his adventures.” Final illustration for “The Snowy Day,” 1962. Collage and pencil on board.
“Before he got into bed he looked in his pocket.” Final illustration for “The Snowy Day,” 1962. Collage, paint, and pencil on board.
Ezra Jack Keats, “Peter’s mother asked him and Willie to go on an errand to the grocery store.” Final illustration for “Whistle for Willie,” 1964. Collage and paint on board.
Ezra Jack Keats, “In his great hurry, Peter bumped into Amy.” Final illustration for “A Letter to Amy,” 1968. Watercolor, paint, and collage on board.
When Minimalist art began in the 1960s and ’70s, it was difficult stuff. Painters reduced their vocabularies to lines and grids as they pared painting down toward its essential ingredients. It was often severe, ascetic, and buttoned-up, a sort of colonic for the senses predicated on the notion that if you concentrated on it hard enough — and were worthy — you might discover transcendence.
But Dan Walsh’s works in “Uncommon Ground,” a selection of eight paintings plus three handmade books chosen by curator Judith Tannenbaum at the RISD Museum, are part of a warming trend in Minimalism that is also seen in the crowd-pleasing sculptures of Anish Kapoor, Tara Donovan, and the like. It still has the clean, fresh simplicity of classic Minimalism, but now it’s sweeter, friendlier, more playful.
Walsh still adheres to lines and grids as can be seen in his 2009 painting “Visitor” (pictured above), a grid of violet concentric squares against a black background. As in classic Minimalism, the paintings are about process. You can see how it was built, how each brushstroke was dragged across the canvas. The grid, which can often seem mechanical, is softened by Walsh’s not-quite-perfect marksmanship. The lines wiggle and wobble a bit, vaguely doodley, making the composition more obviously handmade and human.
Brandeis student laments: I was hugely proud to be afforded the opportunity to graduate with a degree that would help me get into graduate school or give me a leg up while finding a job. Now when I tell people I go to Brandeis, their only response is, Oh, the school that wanted to close the Rose Art Museum?
Stephen Huneck of Vermont, famed for his folksy carvings of dogs, took his own life on Jan. 7. He was apparently despondent over having to lay off most of his employees because his art business was hurting.
Amazing bubble-maker Keith Michael Johnson of Warwick, RI, recalls his beginnings: There were very few people working with serious bubbles at the time. Just a couple of people.
RI marine salvage Captain Ed Hughess brush with cancer inspires him to take up nature photography: "Animals don't run away from me. They should. But they don't. They let me get close."
Shepard Fairey admits he lied, faked evidence and destroyed evidence to conceal which Associated Press photo he, uh, appropriated for his famous Obama Hope poster. The AP, which has sued the RISD alum for copyright infringement, notes that Faireys attorneys, led by Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University, have informed the AP that they are withdrawing. Fairey insists that regardless of which of the two images was used, the fair use issue should be the same.
Wall Street Journal: There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama "Hope" poster [by Shepard Fairey] previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists.
Egypt wants back a bust of pyramid builder Ankhaf from the Boston Museum of Fine Art.
World Monuments Fund warns that farm system that has survived in Hadley, Mass., since 17th century is now endangered.
Did Bostonians transplanted to California fake theft of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Renoir and Miro? San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 30: Pebble Beach Men report art theft. Boston Globe, Oct. 2: Ransom asked in theft. Monterey County Herald, Oct. 4: Art heist puts collectors in spotlight. San Jose Mercury News, Oct. 5: A curious case of art theft. San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 7: Art theft smells fishy, investigators say. Boston Herald, Oct. 8: Art heist suspect: I have proof. San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 10: List of art stolen in Pebble Beach raises doubt. Boston Herald, Oct. 11: Art experts smell a rat.
Farnsworth Museum tightens belt, despite 30 percent attendance growth.
Salary cuts for a third of US museum directors, including Gardner, MFA,
and a little at ICA.
City finally finds a use for art: Boston recruits local artists to help ward off graffiti. (By the bye: If you use the cliche outside the box you are by definition thinking inside the box.)
RISD is one of the most dang neighborly schools in the U.S., according to some guy.
Mystic Seaport mills centuries-old live oaks from Texas to restore 1841 whaling ship.
Maine furniture craftsman Wayne Hall honored by Center for Maine Contemporary Art.
Jimmy Sampas of Holliston produces film about his uncle Jack Kerouac.
Exhibit of Mexican Christian art, organized by Michael Komanecky, currently interim director of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, opens in San Antonio.
Julie Feingold of Harwich makes Lost Heroes Art Quilt, honoring post 9-11 military dead.
David Brigham, former director of Worcester Art Museum, named president of Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Brown U is Hogwarts for Harry Potters Emma Watson.
Providence artist/rocker Brian Chippendale on his artwork for Lightning Bolts new album: Im actually very excited about the artwork for this one. I think its the best stuff Ive ever done for one of the records. My stuff tends to be really full of color, no white space at all, but the new one has a lot of white space, which makes it feel really energized. Ive been kind of getting into white space suddenly, out of the blue.
Boston Police sketch artist Robert Neville: Usually when youre nearing the end, thats when you start to realize youve really hit a chord. You know when they react theyre not just saying it to make you feel good because youre the artist. You did a good job. You start to realize, Thats the guy .
Harvard Book Store getting magic book making machine that will allow it to conjure up books on demand.
Boston Dynamics, the folks behind the super creepy/amazing BigDog robot, to produce military robot that can leap over 25-foot obstacles and keep going.
Phil Bissell, creator of New England Patriots logo Pat Patriot, says, "People just like Pat. They seem to know this guy is getting down to business. He's going to give it all. Flying Elvis [the newish Patriots logo] is just going around the field pointing to the sky. It just isn't the same."
South End Boston photographer Peter Urban dies at age 61.
Concord tries to save house built in 1780s by towns first freed slave.
Harvard prof exercises his right to have cow at his retirement party.
Boston Museum School alum David Lynch has an art show.
Mass. Governor Deval Patrick: "The digital gaming industry is on fire in Massachusetts - one of the fastest
growing sectors in technology and entertainment in the country. Also, gaming site says: Video gaming as we know it today can trace its birthplace to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Three sculptures have been stolen and a sculpted bench badly damaged while on display as part of the Prescott Park New Hampshire Sculpture in the Park exhibition.
Former RISD Provost Jay Coogan hired as president of Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Farnsworth Museum launches $12 million campaign to remember Andrew Wyeth in particular to create an endowment to fund maintenance and operations of its four Wyeth-related properties.
Shep Abbotts String Castle Theory in Gloucesters Dogtown.
Piscataqua Fine Arts closes in Portsmouth, opens in Gloucester.
Peter Diepenbrock of Jamestown, RI, unveils sculpture at URI.
Peggy Fogelman named chairman of education at NYs Met, leaving her post as director of education and interpretation Salems Peabody Essex Museum.
Mass. artist Matt Charros walking 3,444 miles across U.S. to raise awareness about disease affecting his sister, multiple sclerosis.
Art association in Newfields, NH, to turn old post office into community art center.
Boston Comics Roundtable is part of a a thriving comic book culture in Somerville and throughout greater Boston. No longer underground, it's definitely a sub-culture that's rapidly breaching the boundaries of pop culture.
New Bedford community cultural collaborative AHA! marks 10th anniversary of promoting arts there.
Brian Fox of Somerset, Mass., paints baseball stars at All Star Game.
Vermont judge orders $100,000 restitution for 23 metal sculptures stolen from artists studio.
Cambridge artist Doug Kornfeld installs boring but big stick-figure sculpture at DeCordova. Coincidentally Kornfeld installs a 23-foot-tall stainless steel stick-figure outside Indiana State Universitys new Student Recreation Center.
New book about late decoy carver George H. Boyd of Seabrook, N.H.
Yale fights for ownership of Van Goghs Night Caf with great-grandson of Russian guy who had it before Bolshevik government nationalized his collection.
Patty Martucci began work as program director in May at the newly renovated Warwick Museum of Art in R.I.
Vermont Arts Council tries to promote art by giving out 9,500 wood puzzle pieces and 51,000 paper puzzle pieces for people to decorate.
Remembering artist Sarah Wyman Whitman of Beverly, Mass., a pal of James, Lowell, Sarah Orne Jewett, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Eliot Norton and Isabella Stewart Gardner.
Woburn artist Gina Johnson gives portraits of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to their families.
Jamie Wyeth depicts seven deadly sins, using sea gulls.
Preservation society documenting history of mills in Warren, R.I.
Damon Richs map of New York foreclosures, which began its life at MIT, opens at Queens Museum of Art after MIT curator Larissa Harris gets a job there.
New Walker curator studied at Bates and Williams College, then was a fellow at Harvard.
Plan to revitalize Pittsfield with a new carousel attracts dozens of volunteer carousel animal carvers.
Mainers Josh Farr and Mikhela Stinson build Palace of stones and junk along Burlington, Vermonts shore of Lake Champlain. Also people apparently are stacking stones all across New England.
Mysterious petroglyphs appear in riverside rocks of Bellows Falls, Vermont.
Wadsworth Atheneum director Chick Austin made awesome avant-garde art happen in Hartford during the Great Depression. May this be a lesson to you no good lazy depressed layabouts.
Worcester Art Museum plans to convert existing studio into a 130-seat public lecture hall, improve access to the lobby and make upgrades to the museum caf with help from $310,000 grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Fund.
Everybody in North Adams Loves Mass MoCA, except for Vinny Patel, the owner of Corner Market convenience store: Im expecting more, put it that way.
Official portrait of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by New Hampshire artist Richard Whitney unveiled at State House. Says Mitt: You'll note that one thing this painting has in common with real life is that, in the painting, my hair doesn't move either.
Over the hill Globe columnist Sam Allis discovers OMG art in Bostons Jamaica Plain. Owner and curator Brent Refsland, tall and 27, was holding the fort, a straw pork pie hat on his head from the local funky shop, Salamagundi. You assume when you meet him that hes hopped up on something because of the energy he emits and the machine gun bursts in which he speaks. Maybe some Ritalin would help this overactive child, I say to myself. Bingo!
Did you know that Ben Shattucks show at 5 Traverse in Providence last year sold out - in an hour? The painter recalls thinking: "Good Lord, maybe I'm onto something.
Retirement from a life in banking prompts sculptor Claude ODonnell of Holden [Maine] to unleash the creative hippie hidden in the gray flannel suit.
Sculptural bust of Broadway musical songwriter and Providence native George M. Cohan unveiled in Providence.
First-grader Paul Taraszuk of Georgetown, Mass., is the awesomest drawer of ideal schools, according to the Massachusetts School Building Authority.
Needham artist Rachel Perry Weltys Facebook performance included in New Haven exhibit of art inspired by the rapacious social-networking site TM.
Architect magazine names Bostons William Rawn Associates the top architectural firm in the country.
They love the ICAs Tara Donovan show in Des Moines.
The Davis Square Tile Project is trying to track down the kids who painted the tiles in the Davis Square T station back in the late 1970s to better understand the history of Somerville.
Glastonbury, Connecticut, artist Harry White collages landscape scenes from the flowers in his garden.
Massachusetts artist George Sherwoods Orchid is one of 16 pieces of art scattered in the heart of Albany, for the latest edition of the citys Sculpture in the Streets series.
Did you know Jonathan Lethem has a part-time residence in Maine?
Elephants paint at Providence zoo. Previously: Gorilla art at Boston zoo. Also, Rhode Island dog exhibits his paintings: I just decided to put some paint on his tail and paper beneath it. I was amazed with what I saw beautiful configurations.
Nantucket antiques dealer David L. Place charged by Feds with illegally importing and illegally trafficking in sperm whale teeth. Previously: Nantucket scrimshaw artist charged with dealing in black market whale teeth.
Brown University breaks ground on new arts center in Providence.
Rockporter Erik Ronnberg Jr.s model of a factory trawler to be featured in Smithsonians On the Water: Stories from Maritime America exhibit.
Federal judge rules that Kokoschka painting allegedly sold under duress in Nazi-occupied 1939 Vienna legally belongs to Bostons Museum of Fine Arts. Because, for one, the three-year statue of limitations period on such claims has passed.
Addison Gallery staff begins planning to move back into the renovated and expanded building which is expected to reopen in spring 2010.
Oliver Brothers of Boston restores 65 artworks damaged in fire at Yaddo more than a year ago.
A video visit with Jamie Wyeth at Tenants Harbor, Maine, on the occasion of his new show of paintings at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland: Maine ... it's really of no fault of Maine, but it has produced more bad art than any state in the union. Maine is very emblematic. But what interests me is to go deeper, to go beyond cuteness and prettiness, to get to the angst, of which there is a lot in Maine.
AS220 in Providence, with help from federal stimulus money, offers 32 art jobs for young people.
C.D. Wright of Barrington, Rhode Island, wins $50,000 (a bit less in U.S. dollars) Griffin Prize for poetry. The Brown English professor won the $500,000 MacArthur genius grant in 2004.
Massachusetts-born artist Dan Nelson follows up his book All Known Metal Bands with project to raise $1 million. So far hes collected $60.
For the first time in its history, Mass MoCA is close to breaking even without a desperate round of fund-raising.
Belcourt Castle in Newport, Rhode Island, goes on sale. It was a birthing ground for the Newport Jazz Festival. Also maybe haunted. Yours for $7.2 million.
Zsuzsanna Szegedi, artist in residence at the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts: "I wasn't planning to paint this many trees. But every painting gave me a new idea for the next one. Trees are easy to work with. They don't talk back.
Documentary on John Marin to begin filming in Maine.
Derrick Cartwright, former director of the Hood Museum in Hanover, New Hamsphire, to lead Seattle Art Museum.
Six public art projects in Maine funded by $60,755 from the Maine Arts Commission thanks to the Harry Faust Art Fund.
Bostons Bren Batclan to be featured on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. This follows reports that he leaves his paintings around San Francisco for Free: "The economy is so bad now. People are losing their jobs, so this is how I can help. Also Batclan planned to leave 50 paintings of colorful creatures in random spots around [Chicago] with notes saying they're free.
Profile of Michelle Wojcik, owner of Galeria Cubana in Boston and Provincetown.
Sanford Robinson Giffords 1859 painting of Mount Mansfield, Vermont is one of two works recently sold by the National Academy, sparking a controversy in the art world.
Retired Falmouth attorney Robert R. Mardirosian sentenced to 7 years in prison plus $100,000 fine following conviction in a case arising from the theft of a Cezanne and other pieces of art from a Stockbridge home in 1978 the largest burglary from a private residence in Massachusetts history.
Maine artist T. Allen Lawson paints White House Christmas card. He doesn't get paid for the work, and the White House gets to keep the original. But Lawson figures that's OK.
Dorchester artist Greg Rogers paints with his feet.
Somerville cartoonist Tim Fish, creator of Cavalcade of Boys, interviewed.
Former Salem News cartoonist Scott Allie now edits comics for Dark Horse.
Exhibit by self-taught artist Joseph Sorel, a Providence native who really began to explore art in earnest when he was incarcerated for about seven years following his time in the service during the Vietnam War.
Attendance numbers for the Nasher Museum of Art's 'El Greco to Velazquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III' did not meet an ambitious goal set one year ago. The show also appeared at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where it also fell approximately 30,000 visitors short of its target. And the Nasher may have to cut costs as a result.
William Rudolph will become curator of American art at the Worcester Art Museum in January after four years as the Dallas Museum of Arts associate curator of American art.
What was the art project that a UMaine senior did to collect food and raise money for needy? He spent 19 hours riding a seesaw on the Campus Green last week dressed as Marie Antoinette. While Berry planned for a 24-hour event, the cold and fatigue convinced him to end it after 19 hours.
Joe Cote, whose cartoons appeared in the Fitchburg Sentinel and Townsend Common, has died.
Marylin Hafner of Cambridge, who illustrated more than 100 childrens books as well as the comic strip Molly and Emmett for Lady Bug magazine and later Cricket magazine, has died after being hit by car.
Late Brown U prof Hugh Townley remembered in The Wizard with Wood exhibit at Wheaton College.
The Vermont Arts Council has declared 20 artists finalists to present proposals in January to take part in 'Art in Action: Shaping Vermonts Future Through Art.' This art project will fund work to reflect and respond to issues and challenges facing Vermont.
New clues on masterpieces stolen from Bostons Gardner Museum in 1990? In The Gardner Heist, which is to be published in February, author Ulrich Boser posits that the art may be closer at hand as he puts it, in a retired crooks beach house in Marshfield or Plymouth, a storage shed in Brockton, or a farm building in western Massachusetts.
Public art project? Ballot measure that would have named San Francisco sewer plant after George W. Bush fails.
Frank Cieciorka, a graphic artist, art director and watercolorist whose woodcut rendering of a clenched-fist salute was a model for the New Lefts most ubiquitous emblem, died on Monday at his home in Alderpoint, Calif. He was 69.
Bowdoin College Museum of Art renovation wins architecture honor.
Tufts Daily hates on Tara Donovan: the work does not have much significance for the viewer. And, like much of modern art, the works leave a befuddled observer desperately searching for a purpose and clinging to the belief that art must have some sort of underlying motivation.
Pinta the Modern and contemporary Latin American Art fair offers $150,000 to eight museums, including the Harvard Art Museum, to encourage them to collect Latin American art.
Profile of designers Pete Cardoso and Darren Johnsons Ghost-Town Studio in Pawtucket, RI.
17 artists picked for 2009 Portland Museum of Art Biennial.
Portland Museum of Art debuts blog. And new online culture mag Maine Art Scene debuts.
Interview with San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker, who got his start in Boston.
Crafty New York artist detained at Maine-Canada border because US customs agent found her sketches suspicious.
Edgers: Arts organizations across the state say they're bracing to hear from more donors like Nash: generous and loyal givers squeezed by the economy. To prepare, they've been making lists of potential cuts, enacting hiring freezes, and shifting reserve funds so they're better protected and easier to get at.
Star Simpson a year after Logan Airport art-terrorism confusion: I was waiting on the traffic island for the next shuttle bus to get on the subway when all of a sudden my hands were grabbed from behind me. It turned out to be the state police. They have this magic trick where 40 of them can appear all at once out of nowhere.
Police investigate theft from St. Johnsbury, Vermont, gallery: someone took life size wooden sculptures of a golden retriever, a black and white cat, white Scottie dog and a black pug.
Patrick Dougherty sculpts stickwork Twisted Sisters at Wheaton College in Norton. Brown University to remove another Dougherty sculpture which was partly destroyed when an elm fell on it in March.
Brit romance columnist loves Providences WaterFire: a living ritual in which fire, water, sound and smell all play a part to reduce you to awestruck silence and (in my case) tears of joy.
Reviews of RISDs new Chace Center. ProJos Bill Van Siclen: the Chace Center, which officially opens on Saturday, is a gem a compact yet powerfully sculpted building that pays its respects to its historic College Hill neighbors while remaining proudly and recognizably contemporary. It may even be the best building its designer. Another ProJo columnist: Moneos Chace Center is boxy and unimaginative. Boston Globe: bold and stunningly executed.
Providence Mayor David Cicilline announces Creative Providence plan: The cultural plan will focus on stimulating economic development, building links with the creative economy, developing a strong network of arts learning opportunities and enhancing the quality of life through civic engagement in the arts.
In Indianapolis art talk, Providence Police Chief Dean Esserman transcended the usual message on the importance of art in society to discuss basic principles he'd learned growing up and being in law enforcement. Children thrive in environments of support and love, not fear, pain or punishment. He said it is the community's responsibility to create that supportive atmosphere where the arts can play a role.
Shepard Fairey, formerly of Providence and soon at Bostons ICA, has show in San Francisco: When asked why he picked the Tenderloin gallery as the appropriate venue for his work, Fairey adjusts his blue velour collar and flashes a toothy smirk, because its punk as fuck.
Jane Portal named chair of MFAs Art of Asia, Oceania, and Africa department.
Providences Jonathan Bonner is finalist for Florida public art project.
Boston artists to redecorate city electrical boxes.
A notorious international graffiti queen - accused of tagging trains and buildings from Chicago to New York to the capitals of Europe - will be hauled to the Hub to face charges she caused millions in damages to [Boston] Back Bay brownstones.
Wall Street Journal: Cities are being swept up in a wave of inane pranks. Prankster groups are sprouting up around the country. Boston-based Banditos Misteriosos says its mailing list has doubled to more than 2,000 people since the start of the year.
Boston Museum of Science cuts staff by 10 percent. But potential $3 million budget deficit not the driving factor, president says "Regardless of the budget, we would have made cuts.
Police seek painting that could be by 15th century Italian master which was stolen from Hopedale home in 2006.
Globes Robert Campbell looks at major architectural problems at Harvards Busch Reisinger Museum: Its exterior walls have deteriorated so badly that Harvard says the only way to repair them would be to take them off and start over."
Providences Lydia Stein plans to paint mural of Fall Rivers Quequechan River with young artists.
Former Rose Museum director Joseph Ketner resigns curator job at Milwaukee Art Museum to teach at Emerson.
Caroll Spinney of Woodstock, Connecticut, on playing Big Bird: "You have to not be claustrophobic. You have to be willing to walk, not seeing anything in front of you."
DA drops hoax device charge against MIT student Star Simpson who freaked out Logan Airport security with her LED shirt. She apologizes and is placed on pretrial probation on disorderly person charge.
Ron Wallace of Greene, Rhode Island, reportedly broke the world record for heaviest pumpkin during the 28th annual Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off at the Topsfield Fair in Massachusetts on Friday. The monster he grew this summer came in at 2,009 pounds and is believed to be the first pumpkin weighing more than a ton. Which won him $10,000 in addition to $5,500 he won for taking first place in the contest. 
Photos courtesy of the Topsfield Fair.
