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GREG COOK
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Heart-felt
These missives don't have the swooning, steamy, bodice-ripping passion of romance novel covers.
The language of aesthetics
As China marked the beginning of the Year of the Dragon with lion and dragon dances and fireworks last week, Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology was debuting "Taoist Gods from China: Ceremonial Paintings from the Mien".
Regional pride
"Contemporary and Boston, Opposites No Longer," a New York Times headline announced in October. It was another alert that $1 billion invested in expanding and endowing local museums over the past decade is paying off in a newly vigorous Boston contemporary art scene.
Tricks of the light
Paul Myoda's kinetic sculptures are beautiful and unsettling.
Selling an idea
Two hundred black wood sculptures, resembling abstracted chunks of coal from some old video game, are lined up on a shelf running around the room in Ben Blanc's installation "The Exchange" at AS220's Project Space (93 Mathewson Street, Providence, through January 28).
Intimate grandeur
The challenge from the start of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum expansion project was: how do you follow up a masterpiece? The 99-year-old Fenway institution is world-renowned for its old-master collection installed in dramatic period rooms inside a dream of a Renaissance Venetian palazzo.
Discomfort and joy
The star of New York painter Nancy Chunn's epic installation "Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear" at the RISD Museum (224 Benefit Street, Providence, through April 15) is the fabled fowl — you know, the one who mistakenly thought the sky was falling.
By design
Zink's new show, "Assembled" at Howard Yezerski Gallery (460 Harrison Ave, Boston, through February 7), features handsome, hard-edged abstractions assembled from mod, jitterbugging patterns of flat Plexiglass tiles.
Eyes wide open
From centuries-old Taoist visions to the ways technology can channel emotions, local exhibits this winter prompt comparisons between then and now.
Shapeshifting
Greater Boston's art-museum building boom continues with the debut of an expanded Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in January.
Vivid visions
After a couple of shaky years, 2011 saw the local gallery scene blossom again.
Boom town!
The following rundown of the best art exhibits of 2011 shows how greater Boston is now consistently offering some of the richest institutional art exhibition programs in the country.
Into the wild
A fact underlying the exhibit "Curiouser," in the lobby of the Providence Museum of Natural History (Roger Williams Park, 1000 Elmwood Avenue, Providence, through September 2012), is that less than two percent of the institution's collection of 250,000 preserved birds, insects, mammals, rocks, fossils, and Native American baskets is on view at any time.
Incomplete picture
In 2008, local art collector Joseph Chazan partnered with the Newport Art Museum and AS220 to present the first "NetWorks" project.
Crafty messes
"More Is More" is the oh-so-accurate title of Somerville artist Mark Cooper's overflowing cornucopia of an installation at Samson.
A sense of wonder
Brian Chippendale and Jungil Hong were at the center of the gang of artists who pioneered the rascally psychedelic art that boiled out of Providence's screenprinting/postering/comic book/puppet show/wrestlemania/noise rock underground in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Stranger danger
Laurel Nakadate has danced to Britney Spears with lonely strangers and traveled the country photographing herself in fake pin-ups.
Reconsidering the future
Jonathan Schipper's Measuring Angst (2009) might be a complicated machine built to help you ponder whether your life would be better if you could take back the stupid thing you did last night.
Natural phenomena
"Hans Haacke 1967" at MIT's List Visual Arts Center is a science museum presentation with the educational explanation stripped away, leaving just wonder.
Contrasts and comparisons
Some time back, Rebecca Macri embroidered a pillow with the rainbow bars of the old terrorism alert chart ("severe" to "low").
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