Here is Wonderland’s guide to the best museum exhibitions to see around Massachusetts this spring….
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“Happy Place,” pop-up at 500 Boylston St., Boston, April 5, to June 2, 2019
A playground of sets in which to photograph selfies—a room with a giant cookie, a bathtub in a room of rubber duckies, a confetti room, a rainbow with a pot of gold (plastic balls) to jump into. It’s dazzling and bizarre and vacuous and silly and vaguely sad and also fun—especially if you go with friends. Check out my photos.
“DeCordova New England Biennial 2019,” DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, April 5 to Sept. 15, 2019
The museum’s biennial round up of our talented neighbors across Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Including new site-specific commissions in the Sculpture Park.
“Toulouse-Lautrec and the Stars of Paris,” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 7 to Aug. 4, 2019
Some 200 posters, prints and paintings by the supreme chronicler of Paris’s late 19th century demimonde—dancers, clowns, cabaret performers and other denizens of cafés and theaters. Plus art by Toulouse-Lautrec’s contemporaries Pierre Bonnard, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, John Singer Sargent and James Jacques Joseph Tissot.
![Edward Gorey “Boy at the Window” from [The Untitled Book], 1971. (Courtesy Edward Gorey House)](https://gregcookland.com/wonderland/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/picGorey_HW-untitledbook-300.jpg)
“Hippity Wippity: Edward Gorey and the Language of Nonsense,” Edward Gorey House, Yarmouth Port, April 11 to December 29, 2019
Edward Gorey House opens for season April 11 with an exhibition exploring the whimsy of the master draftsman of the grim and macabre. “Nonsense,” the museum writes, “does not imply the absence of sense, but rather another way of arriving at a truth.”
“Georgie Friedman: Fragments of Antarctica,” Museum of Fine Arts Eunice and Julian Cohen Galleria, Boston, April 13 to Sept. 15, 2019
Videos of icebergs floating out to see are part of the Boston-area artist’s body of work from a trip to the Antarctic Peninsula. “I want visitors to be challenged to consider their own relationships with nature and be aware of the current threats to our environment,” Friedman told TuftsNow.
“Wind, Waves, & Light: Art in Motion by George Sherwood,” Tower Hill Botanic Garden, Boylston, April 13 to Oct. 14, 2019
The Ipswich artist’s shimmering stainless steel sculptures dance under the power of the wind.
“Gorham Silver: Designing Brilliance 1850-1970,” RISD Museum, Providence, May 3 to Dec. 1, 2019
This exhibit surveys 120 years of production by the Providence firm that rose to be the largest silver company in the world. Mary Todd Lincoln even bought one of their tea services for the White House. They impressed with pieces ranging from a modernist cubist coffee set to ornate designs that look like something out of a fairy tale palace or Neptune’s undersea castle.
“William Steig’s Sylvester and the Magic Pebble: A Golden Anniversary,” Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, May 4 to Dec. 1, 2019
The late Boston writer and illustrator William Steig drafted fables of surpassing wonder and strangeness. For example, his 1969 book “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” which won the Caldecott Medal. It’s the story of a donkey who finds a magic pebble that he (accidentally) uses to transform himself into a boulder, much to his unhappiness. The exhibition offers preliminary sketches, storyboards, dummy books, Steig’s paints and tools, personal family photographs and his prized Caldecott Medal.
“A Passion for American Art: Selections from the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Collection,” Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, May 11 to Dec. 1, 2019
Paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Martin Johnson Heade plus sculpture, furniture, decorative art and Native American art spanning three centuries. All from the collection of Marblehead couple Carolyn and Peter Lynch, a Fidelity Investments financier.
“Ericka Beckman: Double Reverse,” MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, May 24, 2019 – July 28, 2019
The MassArt’s teacher’s films and videos offer curious games and fairy tales, construction sites and football stadiums. They can feel like “Sesame Street” shorts directed by the surrealist Luis Bunuel.
“In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950-1969,” Portland Museum of Art, May 24 to Sept. 8, 2019
In 1950, an experimental art school opened in Montville, Maine, named for nearby Haystack Mountain. This “first major museum exhibition focused solely on this school” showcases artists it attracted in its early years—Anni Albers, Dale Chihuly, Robert Ebendorf, Jack Lenor Larsen, M.C. Richards, and Toshiko Takaezu. As evidenced by 90 textiles, ceramics, glass, metalwork, paintings and prints, as well as correspondence, photographs, brochures, posters and magazine articles.
Cauleen Smith “We Already Have What We Need,” Mass Moca, North Adams, debuts May 25, 2019
The LA artist—who creates what she’s called “a cornucopia of future histories”—fills the museum’s first floor galleries with a new immersive video installation dubbed “Every Sunrise and Every Sunset All at Once” about ecology and our basic needs. Plus tables displaying African figurines, plants, a model sailboat, musical instruments. The show also offers a survey of videos from the past decade, new textiles, banners from her “In the Wake” series, a manifesto, and drawings.
“Japan on Paper,” Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, May 25 to Aug. 11, 2019
Nearly 50 Japanese woodblock prints from the 17th to 20th centuries, including works by Suzuki Harunobu (1725–1770), Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), Sharaku (active 1794–95), Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849).
Annie Lennox “Now I Let You Go…,” Mass MoCA, North Adams, opens May 25, 2019
An exhibition that is “part material diary, part art installation” by the celebrated pop singer. “Juxtaposed against her public face, as we examine this excavation of remarkably personal objects, we will come to better understand some of the underlying and more private forces that motivate her work in song, and her passionately argued campaigns for justice, global health, and social equity across gender and race,” Mass MoCA Director Joseph Thompson writes.
“Woodstock to the Moon: 1969 Illustrated,” Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, June 8 through October 27, 2019
In celebration of Norman Rockwell Museum’s 50th Anniversary, a look at the politics, music and moon landing of 1969 through the iconic poster for the Woodstock music festival, Rockwell’s album cover for “The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper,” and other illustrations and vintage archival material from that period.
“Body Worlds & The Cycle of Life,” Museum of Science, Bostion, June 16, 2019, to January 5, 2020
More than one hundred human bodies marvelously/creepily preserved through Gunther von Hagens’s signature technique of “Plastination” detail human development “from infancy to old age.” And check out how Hagens liked to pose the corpses as acrobats, football players and ballerinas. In past exhibitions, he flayed muscle to sculpt into “clothes” for the deceased.
“Be Seen: Portrait Photography Since Stonewall,” Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, June 22 to Sept. 15, 2019
The Wadsworth Atheneum marks the 50th anniversary of New York’s landmark The 1969 Stonewall riots with a show of 24 photographers—Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mickalene Thomas—exploring portraiture and playing with societal norms of gender and sexuality.
“Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, June 26 to Sept. 22, 2019
Against the persistent grain of minimalist modernism, a group show surveying artists gaga for decoration, pattern, maximalism, pluralism. Including Miriam Schapiro, Betty Woodman, Sanford Biggers, Lucas Samaras, Polly Apfelbaum, Nathalie du Pasquier, and Virgil Marti, Roger Brown, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Jeffrey Gibson, Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Ellen Lesperance, Howardena Pindell, Lari Pittman, Pae White.
If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.