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Just Looking
A Critic’s Eye on New England Art
Take a look at art in New England with Edgar Allen Beem. Read his recent interview on contemporary art in New England with the Abbeville Manual of Style.
He's been art critic for the Portland Independent, art critic and feature writer for Maine Times, and now is a freelance writer for Yankee, Down East, Boston Globe Magazine, The Forecaster, and Photo District News.
He's the author of Maine Art Now (1990) and Maine: The Spirit of America (2000). In 1988, he won the Manufacturers Hanover Art/World Award for Distinguished Newspaper Art Criticism for his coverage of the 1987 auction sale of Vincent Van Gogh's Irises.
Ed says, "My credo as an arts writer has long been: 'The work of art is the search for meaning.' I believe art is not only a form of personal expression but also a form of inquiry, every bit as much a quest for truth as scientific research."
Ed Beem's newest book, Backyard Maine: Local Essays, has just been published by Tilbury House, Publishers, of Gardiner, Maine. It's not about the meaning of art; it's about the meaning of family, community, and life in general.
Real Art Ways Keeps Hartford Hopping
Public art for Parkville & Frog Hollow
July 1, 2009 at 8:22 AM | Post a Comment
Real Art Ways, an alternative arts space founded in Hartford, Connecticut in 1975, is one of New England's liveliest contemporary arts venues, like Space in Portland, Maine, and AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island, presenting a heady mix of fine and performing arts.
Folk Art Is Fine Art
Old, Weird America at the DeCordova
June 25, 2009 at 9:02 AM | Post a Comment
In this pluralistic 21st century art society, the distinction between fine art and folk art is hardly worth making. An artist is an artist is an artist and art is anything an artist says it is. Art can be an object, an act, an installation, or just idea. It can be made of anything from oil paint to chewing gum. Anything goes.
Indiana Is an Island
Robert Indiana On and Off Vinalhaven
June 17, 2009 at 9:01 AM | 4 Comments | Post a Comment
Robert Indiana will be upstaging the late, great Andrew Wyeth as the featured attraction at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, this summer as Robert Indiana and the Star of Hope (through October 25) brings the artist's collection of his own work ashore from the island of Vinalhaven. The Star of Hope is the former Oddfellows Hall where Indiana has lived since 1978 and, having had the pleasure of visiting him there many times, I can tell you that Indiana is his own best curator and contents of his cavernous home is like a museum in its own right.
Call of the Coast
Coastal art colonies of New England
June 12, 2009 at 8:57 AM | Post a Comment
As fitting summer fare, the Portland, Maine, Museum of Art and the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, have teamed up to produce Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England, an exhibition of 74 paintings and prints by 48 of the artists who flocked to the coastal art colonies of Old Lyme, Cos Cob, Ogunquit, and Monhegan at the turn of the 20th century.
The Gary & Gerry Show
New England Formalism at the Currier
June 5, 2009 at 3:27 PM | Post a Comment
For its second Spotlight New England exhibition focused on contemporary artists working in the region, the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, is featuring sculpture, paintings, and drawings by Gary Haven Smith of Northwood, New Hampshire, and Gerald Auten of Norwich, Vermont and the Dartmouth College faculty. The exhibition (through September 13) pairs two artists who share an austere New England formalism, an aesthetic of the elemental and the essential.
