New England Journal of Aesthetic Research news headlines

Nancy Schon of Newton, Massachusetts, sculpts bear from Robert McCloskey’s “Blueberries for Sal” for new children’s garden in Boothbay, Maine. Place also includes toy lobster traps and spouting whales.

Group seeking donations to turn late poet Vincent Ferrini’s shack into the Gloucester Writers Center Inc. “The purchase is expected to be finalized within weeks,” the group says, “and the first visiting artist, author and NPR personality Sandy Tolan, has been booked.”

Jeff Bye, who was born in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, but now lives in Brooklyn, has been painting the Red Sox’s Fenway Park: “What makes a good subject is something that someone is passionate about, and I am definitely passionate about Fenway Park. … Being a fan of the park, it was something special, and it’s been developing through the years to work with the angles and shadows and expand on the abstract quality of the diamond and the structure.”

Emily Eveleth of Sherborn, Massachusetts, tells Globe why she began painting jelly doughnuts two decades ago: “What I immediately found compelling . . . was the appeal of the irony in presenting, in a seriously and formally painted manner and on a monumental scale, an object that was at once so ubiquitous, so ordinary, so everyday.”

Boston curator Pedro Alonzo’s “Viva La Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape,” an exhibition looking at street art and gallery art inspired by cities, opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (where he grew up), with a bunch a curated outdoor graffiti. “They circumvented the art world,” Alonzo says. “They circumvented the gallery system. They never bothered courting curators or the establishment; they just weren’t comfortable with what some of them referred to as the wine-and-cheese crowd.”

Maine-New Brunswick Cultural Initiative being formed to recognize artistic, cultural and historical ties between Maine and the Canadian province.

American “creativity scores” were going up and up until 1990. “Since then,” Newsweek reports, “creativity scores have consistently inched downward.” Researcher says: “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant.”

Kids urge police to do more to protect Nancy Schon’s “Make Way for Ducklings” sculpture in Boston’s Public Garden: “We think you should put alarms and a secret camera around the ducks.” (Via UniversalHub)

The year-old Portsmouth Museum of Art is already talking about expanding. “We are looking for a larger space with more of a central location,” director Cathy Sununu tells Foster’s Daily Democrat.

Prince: “The internet’s completely over.”

New Yorker Francesca DiMattio, whose terrible painting is now in the ICA’s lobby, tells Globe: “For this piece, in particular, I looked at a lot of different representations of still life. I looked at still lifes by Matisse, Picasso, Manet. … It could be a representation of the beginnings of a party or the aftermath of a hurricane.”

Last winter, ICA curator Helen Molesworth made her first trip to the Prado in Madrid: “I thought I knew what was going to happen. I didn’t.”

The great, curmudgeonly comics writer Harvey Pekar of Cleveland died July 12 at age 70. Check out the Letterman videos.

Jim Clay Harper of Wilmette, Illinois, has been sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay $10,000 to cleanup Boston T train cars that he graffitied with the name “Ether,” UniversalHub reports.

Massachusetts artist Christopher Faust, who paints the backs of people’s heads, tells ArtSake: “I had someone point out to me that there was something wrong with my composition – that the figures were too in the middle. When I told him I knew that and I did it on purpose, he kind of got angry and confused, then he stopped talking to me.”

Jon R. Cavallo, the paint engineer for the Maine Center for Creativity’s “Art All Around” oil storage tank mural project in Portland, has been given an award of merit and title of fellow from the ASTM International Committee D33 on Protective Coating and Lining Work for Power Generation Facilities. Yes!

Colby College plans to break ground in mid-2011 on a $15 million, 26,000-square-foot expansion of its museum – to accommodate a major 2007 donation of art by Whistler, O’Keeffe, Hopper, Homer, etc.

The Boston Foundation has awarded Boston’s ICA a $300,000 grant to support the museum’s general operations.

MassArt would become a university under a bill approved by the Massachusetts Senate on July 15.

Boston’s MFA announces three newly-endowed curatorships: Darcy Kuronen has been named the Pappalardo Curator of Musical Instruments, Laura Weinstein is the Ananda Coomaraswamy Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art, and Marietta Cambareri is the Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture and Jetskalina H. Phillips Curator of Judaica, Art of Europe.

Boston’s MFA is looking to hire a Mary Bryce Comstock Assistant Curator of Greek and Roman Art.

Puppeteer Frank W. Ballard of Storrs, Connecticut, who trained a generation of puppeteers at the University of Connecticut, has died at age 80.

Centenary of late Cambridge and New Hampshire “Li’l Abner” cartoonist Al Cap ignored because he parodied the Left?

Provincial Globe columnist impressed by not-so-edgy public art in East Boston: “You stand there and think: This is the kind of edgy thing they do in New York City.”

Connecticut columnist steamed by Portland Museum of Art curator’s diss of Hartford.