The Week of Shichi-go-san: Kitagawa Utamaro
“Rites of passage” refer to cultures all over the world in which certain birthdays are celebrated as stepping stones to a new period of life. A Japanese example is Shichi-go-san. The n ...
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Curator's Corner
Daylight Savings Time: Pierre Roy
Now you see it, now you don’t. Daylight Savings Time ends in about a month, and I’ll finally have a little light in the morning to see the bunnies in the yard at city hall. The paintings o ...
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Curator's Corner
Ode to Autumn Pattern: Kawanishi Hide
One of the traditions of Japanese art through the ages has been documenting the seasons and months of the year in art. My particular favorites are representations of autumn (it’s only a week awa ...
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Curator's Corner
August Is Here: Willem de Kooning
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: Jules Breton
Jules Breton was a unique artist of the Realism movement in France in the mid-1800s. Having grown up with poor rural farmers in northern France, he understood their lives and labors. His paintings pre ...
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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Cy Twombly
Forming his aesthetic during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, Cy Twombly pioneered his own unique brand of modernism. Rather than emphasizing process, he was inspired by art history past, particu ...
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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
Gem of the Month: ShirÅ Kasamatsu
Ukiyo-e was a woodblock print aesthetic that was popular from the late 1600s to the mid 1800s. The genre developed a visual vocabulary that documented the entertainments of Japanese urban centers, par ...
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Curator's Corner
Autumn Is Upon Us: Yun-Fei Ji
I’m marking the onset of autumn with a work of art from Chinese American artist Yun-Fei Ji. His work tackles many subjects about contemporary China, as well as world-wide issues such as pollutio ...
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Curator's Corner
Summer Is Waning: Georges Lepape
Once August is here, New Englanders are fond of saying, “well, summer’s almost over.” I prefer to resist that inclination, since summer always seems so short in Massachusetts anyway. ...
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