New England Journal of Aesthetic Research news headlines

Muralist Alan Pearsall of West Newbury, Massachusetts, has been found guilty of a fatal 2009 crash that killed two motorcyclists. He had painted murals in Haverhill, Ipswich, and recently in Florida. “The day after [his] murals depicting the civil rights struggle were unveiled last month at Gainesville’s downtown bus station, the Massachusetts artist … started a 2½-year prison sentence.”

Carly Carioli has been promoted to editor of the Boston Phoenix, replacing Lance Gould. Associate arts editor Jon Garelick has been named Phoenix arts editor, and arts editor Jeffrey Gantz will temporarily become managing editor for arts.

Hub Review on the Rockport Chamber Music Festival’s new performance center: “The hall has a transparently clean acoustic unlike anything else in Boston. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard, in fact, a hall with as sparkling a top and as rumbling a bottom”

California programmer Eric Fischer maps where Bostonians photograph their city versus where tourists photograph the city. Globe: “It’s easy to think of the tourist-free blue territories as more authentic slices of the city, yet they often lack the very things that give a city its identity.”

Human Cannonball Kellan Bermudez was injured when he bounced from a net onto the concrete floor at a Cole Bros. Circus performance in Newport, Rhode Island.

Maine craftsman Steve Cayard teaches Wabanakis how to build birch-bark canoes.

The New Hampshire Art Association has picked Darci Creative in Portsmouth to create new identity and fundraising materials for their 70th anniversary fundraising initiative.

The Downtown Bangor Arts Collaborative, which organizes art walks in the Maine city, has become a nonprofit to help with its fund-raising.

Harvard and MIT come up with plan to refurbish Harvard’s faded, food-stained, graffitied Mark Rothko murals: “use a digital projector as a light source to augment those now missing colors on the original canvases.”

Rhode Island School of Design and Cooper Union in Manhattan are primary rivals … in basketball, soccer and tennis.

Maine coast painter Carol Shupp Sebold has died at age 71.

A new book about the late Massachusetts maritime painter Frank Vining Smith, authored by James Craig of Gloucester, has been published.

Apple censors gay kiss in Oscar Wilde comic.

States consider the content of films they subsidize via tax breaks, etc. Michigan declines to support horror film because its depictions of cannibalism are “unlikely to promote tourism in Michigan or to present or reflect Michigan in a positive light.”

“Touchdown Jesus,” a six-story tall foam and fiberglass monument to Christ along Interstate 75 in Ohio, burned down after being struck by lightning.

Arts giving fell by 2.4 percent in 2009, according to a report by Giving USA Foundation.

Thomas Kinkade arrested for drunk driving.

“Voltron” creator Peter Keefe of Rochester, New York, has died.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, campaigning for reelection, spoke to arts folks recently in Somerville. He said he doesn’t “think of the arts as something nice on the side, but as something that completes us.” But when asked about major cuts to state arts funding on his watch, the Somerville News reported, “the governor avoided the question.”

Boston native James Wood, who lead the Art Institute of Chicago for 24 years and has been president of the J. Paul Getty Trust since 2007, has died at age 69. Between leaving Chicago in 2004 and heading out to work in California, he resided in Rhode Island. His successor at the Art Institute, James Cuno said, “Every junior museum director, including myself, looked up to him as an example of a museum director with a clear moral bearing and a sense of regard for what was most important – that this was all done on behalf of the public and in the public’s trust.”

An interview with Massachusetts artist Brooks Kelly, who was first president of the Pembroke Arts Festival in 1968.

The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown has named its printmaking studio for the studio’s founder, Michael Mazur, the Massachusetts artist who died last August.

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport is back after a near-death experience last fall. “For some time, speculation abounded that the center would not reopen at all. But it has, and with style,” the Portland Press Herald says. “…For weeks and months over the fall and into the winter, CMCA was the target of seething anger among many artists in Maine. That ill will may never go completely away, but the wounds are healing.”

Portsmouth, N.H., installs public art for its “Overnight Art Project” through October 2010.

Harvard’s Toshiko Mori designs NYC theater.