new england art

In the Realm of Spectacle and Dreams [Part II]: 19th c. Artists and Writers Shape a New America

Curator’s Note: This is Part II of a virtual ‘exhibition’ examining America’s self image during the Gilded Age, Mark Twain’s derisive term for a period of U.S. industrial and cultural expansion during the last quarter of the 19th century. It offered rich material from some of America’s best-known artists and writers. This exhibition focuses specifically on the cities of the Northeast and here, their rural and coastal environs. The art selected for inclusion in not intended to illustrate the text in any direct or literal sense; any more than the narrative excerpts are meant to be descriptive of the meaning or intent of any painting. Rather, they combine to provide a contemporaneous view of the painter’s visible world and writer’s literary sphere. The pairing of ‘narrative’ painting with a ‘painterly’ narrative yields a multi-sensory experience for the virtual gallery visitor which will hopefully prove larger than the sum of its parts.

The Waterfront
“The seaside is a good place to rest in, especially if one can control his surroundings. The quiet, the calm, the peace, the pleasant color, the idyllic sights and sounds, all tend to allay nervous irritation, to tranquilize the soul, the repress the intellectual, and to invigorate the animal functions in a very remarkable degree. But this is not rustic life; it is only the waterfront retreat of the city resident.” xxxxxxMore

Sculptor, Wendy Klemperer: ‘Restraint and Release’ in Nature’s Realm

There’s something enchanting about autumn in New England. Envision a stroll on a sprawling university campus where trees flank walkways that meander past ivy-covered brick buildings. Add the crackle of fallen leaves underfoot and the experience is complete.

Left: Wendy Klemperer, ‘Alert Wolf’ (2005-7), salvaged steel, 56 x 76 x 26″ Collection: Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, Booth Bay, ME.

Typically this time of year, Mills Courtyard, a U-shaped area the Paul Creative Arts Center encompasses on three sides, is rife with trees shedding their autumn attire, leaf-strewn sidewalks, and students hustling toward classes. But today and for the next couple of years this area of the University of New Hampshire campus also presents a touch of the unexpected. artes fine arts magazineMore

‘Clybourne Park’ at Long Wharf: What Happened Next

www.artesmagazine.com — Melle Powers (Francine) and Leroy McClain (Albert) in Clybourne Park. All photos: T. Charles Erickson

Near the end of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 breakthrough play, A Raisin in the Sun, Karl Lindner, a representative from the homeowner’s association of a white neighborhood, visits a black family, the Youngers, who have just bought a house in his exclusively white enclave. He has come to essentially bribe them not to move in. Mama Younger rejects his offer, and as the frustrated Linder leaves he says to her, “I sure hope you people know what you are doing.” They do, and they don’t, but they are determined to move into a house located in Chicago’s Clybourne Park. artes fine arts magazineMore

Boston’s American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) satellite, Oberon, with ‘Beowulf’

There is always a bit of an edge to any production at the A.R.T. and by extension its satellite Oberon. This is true of Beowulf—A Thousand Years of Baggage now at the Oberon. This version of the English/Danish epic poem uses song and silliness to tell the story of the hero and the blood-thirsty monster. In this production, like some less than sterling stanzas in overly long epic poems, the parts are much better than the whole. artes fine arts magazineMore

Winslow Homer and His Newly-Renovated Studio, at Portland Museum of Art

: Winslow Homer, Weatherbeaten (1894). Portland Museum of Art. Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson.

Ubiquitous Winslow Homer images of the surf-battered, rocky Maine coastline and pastoral scenes of American life in a simpler time, are so deeply embedded in our sense of national identity that we hardly ‘see’ them any longer. Too many posters of youths in fields and boats, stalwart, wind-swept women gazing out to sea, and gallant sailors reckoning with nature’s wrath have numbed us to the applied skill and visionary genius of Homer’s oeuvre. After a multi-year conservation/renovation process, the Portland Museum of Art has recently opened Homer’s carefully-restored Prout’s Neck studio, just twelve miles from the museum, itself, in Scarborough. To commemorate this important event, a concurrent exhibit features some of his best-known works—38 major oils, watercolors and etchings created during his tenure at the studio—during the last three decades of his life (1883-1910). Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine, is on view through December 30, 2012. The Prout’s Neck Studio is a permanent part of the museums collection and is now available for tours. artes fine arts magazineMore

Hartford Stage: Murder Afoot and a Few Laughs, Too!

There’s murder afoot up at Hartford Stage, murder motivated by revenge, revenge for a family wronged. And it’s in a musical. No, it’s not “Sweeney Todd,” Stephen Sondheim’s dark and brooding tale of the demon barber of Fleet Street, for Sweeney wouldn’t be caught dead in this musical. Given the barber’s dyspeptic nature, I doubt he would enjoy a moment of “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” but that’s Sweeney’s problem, for the opening night audience absolutely adored this light, frothy, witty tale of a young man’s rise to titled wealth over the bodies of his murdered relatives.

Above: Heather Ayers, Ken Barnett and Jefferson Mays in Hartford Stage’s production of “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” Photo: Joan Marcus artes fine arts magazineMore

Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven: “Satchmo” Beguiles and Engages

So Santa Claus is standing there, going “Ho, ho, ho,” a big smile on his face, hands patting his round, red belly, and then all of a sudden he lets loose with a string of expletives that would make a sailor blush. Your eyes widen, your jaw drops. After you recover from the shock, the first thing that comes to mind is, what the hell, this ain’t the Santa you know. Could it be Santa isn’t the saint you thought him to be?

That’s the initial effect John Douglas Thompson has on the audience at Long Wharf Theatre as he, portraying Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, cuts loose. This ain’t the Satchmo we remember, the smiling, laughing icon, sweat rolling down his forehead as he sings and plays his way into our hearts, rasping a “Hello, Dolly” greeting. This is Satchmo the man, a man who sleeps with whores, a man who has a long standing relationship with Mary Jane, a man who curses his manager, Joe Glaser, for having screwed him, a man who once worked for Al Capone, a man who, as the child of a whore, delivered coal to the New Orleans whorehouses to put bread on the table, a man who, at the top of his career, lovingly known as “Pops,” is bedeviled by slurs from members of his own race. He is called a “clown,” an Uncle Tom. artes fine arts magazineMore

Hudson River Painter, Frederic Church at Portland Art Museum, Maine

Frederic Edwin Church’s lengthy love affair with the State of Maine is revealed in Maine Sublime: Frederic Edwin Church’s Landscapes of Mt. Desert and Mt. Katahdin, opening on June 30th at the Portland Museum of Art.

As a painter, Church was a prolific, inexorable part of New York’s art scene—and dedicated to his life’s masterwork and longtime home, Olana, majestically situated on a promontory in the midst of the Empire State’s iconic Hudson River Valley. He was surrounded with sylvan wonder in New York, but the artist sought new horizons, his eventual forays into the seductive wilds of Maine’s inland and coastline ultimately setting him apart from so many of his contemporaries, further characterizing and distinguishing his work with increased depth and intensity. A series of 23 oil sketches from his assignations there will be on exhibit in Maine Sublime. artes fine arts magazineMore

Critic, Francine Miller, Reviews the Recent Work of Contemporary Boston-Area Sculptor

Tory Fair Artes fine arts magazine — Tory Fair, In the Wall I (2010), Resin, mica and foam, 43 x 36 x 24"

Forty-one year-old, Boston-based sculptor Tory Fair likes to think of herself as a “late bloomer,” and the evolution of her artistic career is allied with her varied experiences as an athlete, environmentalist, traveler and spiritualist dreamer. [1] For her second solo show at South Boston’s, La Montagne Gallery, in spring 2010, Fair created three life-sized, self-portrait figures designed (literally and metaphorically) to look beyond the conventional boundaries of the white walls. The ‘In the Wall’ figures—cast in resin from Fair’s own body and seen from the rear—appear to be in the process of submerging their heads into the wall or floor. Sensual and strong, these hybrid figures are animated with hundreds of hand-designed and hand-cast resin flowers. fine arts magazineMore

Connecticut’s Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, Trains a New Generation of Artists

fine arts magazine — Christopher Gann, Monster (2010) o/c, 72" x 52"

The next generation of artists faces a variety of daunting and complex challenges. Principle among them is the ever-shifting nature of the visual art world and what constitutes art, itself. Paint on canvas or graphite on paper is increasingly relegated to the mundane as installation and performance pieces vie for public attention and the critics’ affirmative nod. Added to this is the increasingly crowded field of self-declared artists who appear to bank on personal style and a well-managed public image to propel them into the spotlight. A third factor is the intrusion of technology into the artist’s studio and the exponential increase in low-cost facsimile works produced with a mass market in mind. The few galleries that attract the uninformed consumer, who is finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate between computer-generated simulations of original art or aftermarket reproductions produced en masse in foreign countries, do so in the name of revenue production. Especially in these difficult economic times, with 125 galleries going out of business in New York City in 2009, alone, the need to survive at any cost is paramount. Fine Arts MagazineMore