Last Chance: Shows Closing this Weekend Connecticut New Britain New Britain Museum of American Art: “Courier & Ives: Impressions of America”; to April 15 Florida West Palm Beach Norton Museum of Art: “Cocktail culture”; to April 15 Georgia Athens Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia: “To Make a world: George Ault and 1940s America”; to April …
Jewels and Gems in Boston
Brooch designed by John Paul Cooper (1869-1933), English, 1908. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; gift of Susan B. Kaplan. Jewels and more jewels are to be found in the new Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which opens on July 19. Jewels, Gems, and Treasures: Ancient to Modern, the inaugural …
Edward Hopper
Of Edward Hopper shows there is no evident end and that is not a bad thing. This summer the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, is opening a massive Hopper show on a small Hopper theme-the artist’s oil sketches, paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings from his nine summers in Maine between 1914 and 1929. Some forty-five works in …
Williamsburg Forum 2011
Colonial Williamsburg will convene its sixty-third annual Antiques Forum between February 20 and 24, 2011. The theme this year, Decorative Arts Forensics: How We Know What We Know, is intended to shed light on some of the fascinating advances in techniques for historical research and scientific investigation that have opened new avenues of verification for curators, collectors, and scholars. The …
Fantastic Mr. Shearer
Fantastic Mr. Shearer A man with a mission, the elusive late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Virginia cabinetmaker John Shearer often professed his British loyalties in carving and inlay. Even when he did not, his furniture displays an idiosyncratic style that has long intrigued scholars and collectors-and made Shearer the subject of two articles in our April-May 2010 issue, written in …
The African perspective in Detroit
The Detroit Institute of Arts is presenting a fascinating and adventurous exhibition that explores the consequences on African art of cultural exchanges between Africa and Europe over the past five hundred years. Casting the European as the cultural “other,” a reversal of the usual Eurocentric perspective, the exhibition examines how African artists from diverse cultures used, and continue to use, …
Women and folk art and imperial silver in New York
So many exhibitions open in New York in any given month that it is hard to choose which ones to feature. Two that have great appeal are Women Only: Folk Art by Female Hands, at the American Folk Art Museum, and Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 13 …
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts reopens
With an atrium, a forty-foot-high glass wall, new galleries, restaurant, café, and sculpture garden, the reopening of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) on May 1 is the latest in a series of important museum renovations and one of the most anticipated. The 165,000 square-foot expansion, designed by the London-based American architect Rick Mather and the Richmond firm SMBW, …
Antiques Week in Philadelphia
Philadelphia hosts two important antiques shows in mid-April, and free shuttle service between them makes it easy to see everything on offer. The Twenty-third Street Armory Antiques Show, now in its sixteenth year, opens on Friday April 16 and features more than forty dealers showcasing eighteenth- through twentieth-century American and European fine, folk, and decorative arts. A special exhibition entitled …
Asian art in New York
Cup, Chinese, seventeenth century. Rhinoceros horn, 5 ½ inches. Photograph courtesy of Christie’s Images. Woven basket made by Kenji Fuji, 1942–1946. Crepe paper, twine, wire, and starch. National Japanese Society, San Francisco. Photograph by Terry Heffernan for Ten Speed. Asian art in New York March 20 to 28 is Asia Week in New York, when more than thirty dealers, auction …