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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Alice Neel

Wednesday, January 28, 2026 | Karl Cole

Alice Neel was a great American portraitist. Her portraits were insightfully realistic, although not to the point of Photorealism, for her works tended to emphasize rich color. The most enduring aspec ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Nathan Oliveira

Friday, December 19, 2025 | Karl Cole

The work of painter Nathan Oliveira is an interesting example of how the West Coast of the US nurtured its own forms of modernist experiments, including abstract figuratioin, that were quite apart ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Neil Jenney

Thursday, November 6, 2025 | Karl Cole

Painter Neil Jenney has been part of what the Whitney Museum called in 1978 New Image Painting. It is neither Pop-oriented or abstract. Jenney’s work emphasizes vigorous, exciting brush work ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Moe Brooker

Wednesday, September 24, 2025 | Karl Cole

Moe Brooker was one of several African American artists who championed a spiritual type of abstraction as an important contribution to contemporary African American and American art. ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Sarai Sherman

Tuesday, September 2, 2025 | Karl Cole

Painter, interior designer, and ceramic artist Sarai Sherman was a Jewish American whose paintings were a combination of reality and reminiscences, producing a unique form of abstraction. ...

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Curator's Corner

August Is Here: Willem de Kooning

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 | Karl Cole

In New England, it is generally said that summer is coming to an end in August. But I have a particular fondness for August because it’s when I discovered the house in Provincetown, Massachusett ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Wednesday, June 11, 2025 | Karl Cole

Nay, who was forbidden by the Nazis to paint or even buy art supplies after 1937, painted abstractions secretly in a French sculptor’s cellar while serving as a cartographer in the German army i ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Wols (A.O.W. Schulze)

Tuesday, May 27, 2025 | Karl Cole

Wols was a major figure in the School of Paris that developed after World War I (1914–1918). He was a pioneering artist in Lyrical Abstraction, and was a major influence on the Tachisme movement ...

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Curator's Corner

Jewish American Heritage Month: Gandy Brodie

Monday, May 12, 2025 | Karl Cole

Jewish American Heritage Month is celebrated in May to recognize and honor the contributions of Jewish Americans to the United States. It's a time to celebrate the diverse experiences and rich history ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: George Elmer Browne

Tuesday, May 6, 2025 | Karl Cole

George Elmer Browne was an American painter, one of the many who, in the late 1800s, studied painting in Paris at the height of the Impressionist period. His West End School of Art in Provincetown, Ma ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: John Chamberlain

Wednesday, April 16, 2025 | Karl Cole

John Chamberlain was part of the constructed steel sculpture movement that blossomed following World War II (1939–1945). Constructed sculpture had been experimental before the war, and became th ...

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Curator's Corner

Hispanic Heritage Month 2022: Emilio Cruz

Monday, October 3, 2022 | Karl Cole

The works of Emilio Cruz form a counterpoint to the Abstract Expressionist style that dominated the art world when Cruz first went to New York. His work is important not only because it was figurative ...

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Curator's Corner

Women's (Art) History Month: Vera Klement

Monday, March 29, 2021 | Karl Cole

I have always been fascinated by how progressive (i.e., abstract) styles have continually found their footing as a counterpoint to the pervasive tradition of realism in American art since the early 19 ...

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Curator's Corner

Women's History Month 2011 IV

Wednesday, March 30, 2011 | Karl Cole

For my last posting for Women’s History Month, I am leaving you with what has to be my all time favorite painting in the Worcester Art Museum. It is well worth the climb up three flights of stai ...

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