New England Journal of Aesthetic Research news headlines

“They have brought with them a ground-penetrating radar device, as well as two beagles and a ferret, to look for what they say are weapons. But we all know what they are actually looking for — and they are looking for the paintings,” said the attorney of the alleged mobster Robert Gentile’s home in Manchester, Connecticut. Law enforcement authorities have claimed that Gentile may know something about what happened to the paintings stolen from Boston’s Gardner museum in 1990.

Sanford school committee in Maine votes to drop “Redskins” team name–making it the final high school in the state to use the name.

Benjamin Lerman Coady, a 13-year-old from West Hartford, Connecticut, spotted what seemed to be a mistake on a map of the Byzantine empire at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The front desk didn’t believe me,” he told the Hartford Courant, explaining that he never expected to hear back from the museum. “I’m only a kid.” But months later he got an e-mail from the museum’s Byzantine art curator: “You are, of course, correct about the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire under Justinian…”

MoMA curator Kathy Halbreich spent the summer of 1965 at Skowhegan, Gallerist NY reports from a New York dinner for the Maine artist residency, “and described herself as ‘the first and last 16 year old to attend.’ She also mentioned that it was ‘the first time I got stinking drunk, which prepared me for a life in the arts’ … Alex Katz, who was teaching at the school the summer Ms. Halbreich attended, had something to do with her ditching her career as an artist to become a curator and historian. His critique of one of her paintings was ‘take it away.’” Also, Kara Walker “didn’t want to talk about the time in the early 90′s when Skowhegan rejected her application.”

Two paintings by Childe Hassam and Gustave Courbet that resurfaced in 2007 after being stolen during a violent home invasion in Shcrewsbury, Massachusetts, on July 2, 1976, are scheduled to be auctioned by Sotheby’s in New York City on May 4.

National Endowment for the Arts makes big cuts in grants to PBS.

Boston’s Orchard Gardens K-8 pilot school is one of eight schools nationwide selected to participate in the federal Turnaround Arts program, a public-private partnership aiming to “test the hypothesis that high-quality and integrated arts education boosts academic achievement, motivates student learning, and improves school culture in the context of overall school reform,” the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities announced.

Thomas “Painter of Light” Kinkade died April 6 at age 54.

Art critic Hilton Kramer, who died March 27, spent his last months in the Vicarage by the Sea in Harpswell, Maine, a residential home with a nontraditional approach to caring for those with advanced dementia. “Before Kramer moved into the Vicarage last June from their home in Damariscotta, his widow said, his disease had advanced to the point where he rarely spoke. The man who founded the intellectual magazine New Criterion, and who had served as the chief art critic of The New York Times, had lost all interest in his field,” Matt Hongoltz-Hetling reports in a striking piece in The Forecaster. (H/t to Edgar Beem.) Previous care kept Kramer heavily medicated, isolated, limited his mobility, and had him putting on 30 pounds. At the Vicarage, Hongoltz-Hetling writes, they reduced Kramer’s medication and embrace patients’ behaviors. “‘If someone wants to go for a walk, we let them go for a walk,’ [founder Johanna] Wigg said. ‘We go with them.’ And if someone develops a desire to kiss the hands of all those he encounters, as Kramer did, the Vicarage doesn’t try to quash that desire with medication. … ‘His affect all came back,’ Wigg said.”

Brandeis police notes: “March 27—A party reported that he saw two people attempting to gain access to the roof of the Rose Art Museum and the Faculty Club. University Police found the people and determined that there was no malicious intent. No further action was taken,” according to The Justice.

A federal prosecutor alleges that reputed 75-year-old Connecticut mobster Robert Gentile has information about the 1990 theft of 13 masterworks from Boston’s Gardner Museum. “The government has reason to believe that Mr. Gentile had some involvement with stolen property out of the District of Massachusetts,” The Hartford Courant reports that Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham said during a bail hearing for Gentile on unrelated drug charges.

RISD students help clean up abandoned synagogue on Broad Street in Providence.

“Anyone, from kids on up, understand when they look at my regalia and watch me dance that I come from a land of fresh water ponds and rivers as well as land alongside the ocean,” Annawon Weedon, a Pequot, Narraganset and Mashpee Wampanoag man residing in Massachusetts, tells Indian Country Today about his pow wow regalia. “Rather than ribbons and fabric I prefer to use the old materials such as porcupine quill, shell, natural dyes, and hand woven fabrics. I watched my dad break the pattern of emulating western styles, a pow wow style that spoke of Native pride but didn’t show who we are as individual tribes.”

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts offers African American art tour. Color Magazine reports: “The objects are not exhibited together, but rather spread out in the various galleries of the wing, which makes it a bit of a scavenger hunt, so the tips [audio host and director of the National Center of Afro-American Artists Barry] Gaither gives you are extremely helpful. Pay attention. Although, there’s no right or wrong way to take the tour, the multimedia guide takes some getting used to.”

Stolen painting of tiger recovered in Fall River! Previously.

Dan Hirsch, formerly of Boston’s MFA and Emerson College, is named curator of performances and public programs at Michigan State’s Broad Art Museum, which is lead by Michael Rush, former director of Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum.

“Japanese Masterpieces from The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston” on view at the Tokyo National Museum in Japan through June.

“You would have to travel to Rome to see such a monumental and impressive marble sculpture,” said curator Christine Kondoleon tells the MetroWest Daily News’ Chris Bergeron as a 13-foot tall ancient Roman statue arrived at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts on March 20. “As in ancient Rome, MFA visitors will be awestruck by the physical presence of the gods and the power of the empire.” The statue is expected to go on public display April 9. More here.

$200 reward offered for return of Anthony Ferrao’s mural of a snarling tiger, which went missing in Fall River, Massachusetts.

“Cubist Opens Expanded Research and Development Facility” in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Jean Ceas leaves white dove sculptures around Providence “hoping to inspire peace with anyone who happens to find them.”

Boston Museum of Fine Arts acquires 2,000-year-old, 13-foot-tall Roman marble of Juno, which has been outdoors on the Brandegee Foundation property in Brookline for years. “The museum calls Juno the largest classical sculpture in the U.S. and pursued the acquisition for five years before buying it last spring for a seven-figure sum largely funded by an anonymous donor,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber, whom Paul Krugman once called “one of the three or four top health care economists in the nation,” is apparently looking to publish one of the top three or four most boring comic books in the nation: “Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, How It Works.” Try to top that, doodlers!

Matolcsy Arts Center in Norway, Maine, seeking $300,000 grant to fund repairs. “Town Manager David Holt said the art center’s architect has advised him that unless something is done with the building soon, it may be lost,” the Sun Journal reported.

Boston firm TurningArt is like a Netflix for art, you know, like when Netflix was cool.