Artist Birthday: Shimizu Seifu
The Chinese had a legend of the brave carp who swam against the current on the Yellow River to mate, and few were courageous enough to swim over the Dragon Gate waterfall. Those that did turned into d ...
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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Alfredo Jaar
Infinite Cell is a combination of mirrors and a single prison cell reflected infinitely. It is an ode to two Italian artists who were imprisoned for their Communist beliefs by the Fascists before Worl ...
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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Shinsui Itō
The shin hanga movement may have featured Western elements of perspective and more attention to sculptural form which Shinsui incoporated into his work, but he observed compositional aspects of tradit ...
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Curator's Corner
Black History Month 2025: Herring, Tolliver, Middleton
I’m kicking off National Black History Month with artists I find fascinating. Their styles are extraordinary, and their names are probably not on the tips of every art historian’s tongue&m ...
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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Alvar Aalto
Aalto designed all of the furnishings for his buildings. Using native birch, Aalto designed a number of chairs and stools made entirely of bent plywood and laminated wood. He also invented some of the ...
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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Barnett Newman
Newman’s earliest paintings share the organic/biomorphic abstract forms of Rothko’s early works from the 1940s. By 1946, however, his forms began to be more abstract and shed their biomorp ...
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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Claes Oldenburg
Oldenburg believed that art should literally be made of the ordinary world. His theory was that the reality of art would replace everyday reality. An important early work was The Street (1960). It con ...
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Curator's Corner
Visualizing Cold in Works of Art
It probably does not need saying by now, but the last week has been quite cold in New England. I thought it might be interesting to see how artists visually interpret the idea of “cold.”&n ...
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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia was a standout Cubist painter who avoided the common subject matter of Cubism, still life and portraits, opting for documenting personal experiences and memories. ...
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Curator's Corner
Jackson Pollock Month
The birthday of New York School painter Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) is January 28th, so I’m going to call January 2025 "Curator's Corner Jackson Pollock Month." I often feel that ...
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