Artist Birthday: Jasper Cropsey
This large-scale painting was executed from memory while Cropsey was in London. It is sometimes considered one of the last great works of a school of painting that fell into decline after the Civil Wa ...
Read More
Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Minami Keiko
Keiko Minami was a sōsaku hanga (creative print) artist, a group of printmakers (primarily woodcut) who created the drawing, carved the woodblock, and printed the image, as opposed to the traditional ...
Read More
Curator's Corner
Black History Month: Woodruff, Lewis, Jennings
My celebration of Black History Month continues with three more artists who are very important in the history of art—Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, and Wilmer Jennings. They represent the divergen ...
Read More
Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Alfredo Jaar
Alfredo Jaar is an installation artist whose work is conceptual and documents injustice, genocide, ongoing famine, and other major afflictions to humanity in many parts of the world. ...
Read More
Curator's Corner
Black History Month: 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 ...
Read More
Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman’s earliest paintings share the organic/biomorphic abstract forms of Mark Rothko’s early works from the 1940s. By 1946, however, his forms began to be more abstract and shed ...
Read More
Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Claes Oldenburg
Claes 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). ...
Read More
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 ...
Read More
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 ...
Read More
Curator's Corner
A Tribute to the American Limner
One of my favorite periods to study in art history is early American painting. It is fascinating to trace its development to the period right before the American Revolution (1775–1783). Early Am ...
Read More
