Rhode Island gets its due

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Thanks to an active export market that sent its wares to the southern colonies, Canada, and parts of the Caribbean, furniture makers of Rhode Island enjoyed an influence far greater than their industry’s small size. The region’s superlative, and often misattributed, craftsmanship from the colonial and early Federal periods is the focus of a new exhibition, Art and Industry in …

Dramatic Encounters at the 2016 Biennale des Antiquaires

Exhibitions

There was an air of confident renewal at this year’s Biennale des Antiquaires, the grand and sophisticated Paris showcase for art, antiques, jewelry, and antiquities which, despite its name, will become an annual event next year under a new name to be announced in October. A dramatic wood figure from Yimam, circa 1650, at the booth of Galerie Meyer. Photo by Marisa Bartolucci. …

Disruptive influences in Philadelphia

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

This fall the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents two exhibitions about art and artistry that upended the cultural apple cart—albeit in vastly different times, places, ways, and contexts.   September 3 saw the debut of Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House—a showcase for a suite of furnishings designed by the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe and fabricated in …

Meet the Meyers at the Jewish Museum

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

By Stephanie L. Herdrich, Metropolitan Museum of Art John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children, a dazzling display of fin-desiècle opulence and bravura painting, is the focus of a dossier exhibition this fall at New York’s Jewish Museum. The exhibition explores the sitter’s identity and life as a privileged Jew in late Victorian London and affords visitors a …

A Look at the Life of “Blind Tom” Wiggins

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

The once famous career of the musical prodigy Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, born a slave and raised to entertain audiences here and abroad with uncanny feats of musical mastery, tainted virtually everyone who touched it. Wiggins’s owners exploited him and profited hugely from his earnings (his concerts and sheet music yielded an astonishing $20,000 in 1879); critics and reporters wrote …

Art Brut in New York

Editorial Staff Art, Exhibitions

Although the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition space has contracted since it moved to 2 Lincoln Square from the now-demolished Tod Williams and Billie Tsien building on West Fifty-Third Street, it continues to expand thematically. Following its recent exhibition of self-taught performance artists, When the Curtain Never Comes Down, which stretched from Japan to Brazil, the museum is now mounting …

Pictorialist Photography in Cleveland

Editorial Staff Art, Exhibitions

Julia Margaret Cameron’s “photography has been a touchstone for generations of photographers. The pictorialists adored her,” writes Phillip Prodger in our article about the British photographer in this issue. And he couldn’t be more right, says Barbara Tannenbaum, curator of photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art and co-curator of the museum’s stunning exhibition Shadows and Dreams: Pictorialist Photography in …

“As seen through the work of women”: The New Hall Art Collection at Cambridge University

Editorial Staff Art

Art pilgrims intent on making Cambridge, England, their destination should extend their journey beyond the university’s majestic Fitzwilliam Museum and its old masters and Kettle’s Yard, the fey modernist cenacle of British art between the wars, to include the New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, one of three exclusively women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge. Unknown to …

One Off

Editorial Staff Art, Exhibitions

“There has never been another artist like George Caleb Bingham”   Fig. 1. The Jolly Flatboatmen by Bingham, 1846. Oil on canvas, 38 by 48 ½ inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., Patrons’ Permanent Fund. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, most American artists were “outsider” artists, in the sense that these denizens of the New World stood …

Current and coming: The Scene

Editorial Staff Magazine

When it opened last fall on Newport’s swank Bellevue Avenue, the Audrain Automobile Museum was immediately up to speed (metaphors drawn from car culture are inexcusable but somehow inevitable with the Audrain), exhibiting a small but head-turning group of rare pre-World War II luxury cars, such as a fire-engine red 1930 Pierce-Arrow Convertible with a custom fitted compartment for your …