The Museum of Modern Art

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Kathryn Bigelow introduces her retrospective at MoMA

Bin there, done that
For the first woman ever to be awarded the Best Director Oscar, and who most recently has set out to make a film about the biggest triumph in the war against terror, the killing of Osama bin Laden, Kathryn Bigelow certainly is humble.
By BRETT MICHEL | June 09, 2011

Review: ''New Mythologies'' at Candita Clayton Studio

Prickly pop art
Two years ago I wrote that someone needs to put together a big local survey of Xander Marro's art. As far as I can tell it still hasn't happened.
By GREG COOK | May 03, 2011

Review: The eye-popping vitality of 'Printed in Providence'

Lasting impressions
Providence printmaking continues to be the primary representative of the city's art in books from Street World (2007) to Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today (2009) to the Museum of Modern Art's Modern Women (2010). It's a printmaking of posters and zines, do-it-yourself art often operating underground, on the streets, outside the usual institutions.
By GREG COOK | February 23, 2011

10 exhibits that are worth another look

Excellent expressions
Here's our rundown of the best art of '10.
By GREG COOK | December 22, 2010

Cheap thrills

The inky delights of Dr. Lakra
They say Dr. Lakra got his pen name from the doctor’s bag he carried around when he first began tattooing, two decades ago. “Lakra” puns on the Spanish word “lacra,” meaning scar or blemish, but it’s also slang for “delinquent” or “scumbag.”
By GREG COOK | April 21, 2010

Birth of a museum

A push in Portsmouth
Nobody starts an art museum. Most of the art museums in America were founded in the later 19th century, when esthetics became part of the larger cultural language — the Portland Museum was started in 1882.
By KEN GREENLEAF | March 03, 2010

Point of no return

The end justifies the meaning in Don DeLillo's Omega
Don DeLillo's novels have been shrinking, like a star collapsing into itself, perhaps, or vapor fading on a glass.
By PETER KEOUGH | March 02, 2010

Alternative universe

Boston Expressionism in context
In the 1930s and '40s, Boston painters developed a moody, mythic realism. They mixed social satire with depictions of street scenes, Biblical scenes, and mystical symbolic narratives, all of it darkened by the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II.
By GREG COOK | December 16, 2009

Wild about Harry

Trailblazing along a narrow path
What I want to do — what most photographers want to do — is write Harry Callahan a love letter. At the very least, he deserves an elaborate thank-you note for innovating or validating 80 percent of the successful photographs we ever took.
By CLIF GARBODEN | December 09, 2009

Alternative energy

GASP marks five years
At the end of August, the seven-month-old Massachusetts Creative Economy Council released its first report on the state of culture here.
By GREG COOK | October 19, 2009

Trouble at the Newport Film Festival

High Drama
For more than a decade, the Newport International Film Festival has been a highlight on the state's cultural calendar.
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG | September 23, 2009

Architecture of Heaven and Earth

Félix Candela's curves, Walter Gropius's boxes
Looking at the wavy roofs of Félix Candela's most iconic structures, like the restaurant Los Manatiales (1958) in Mexico City, I think of pinwheels or the fluttering dress of a spinning dancer.
By GREG COOK | September 02, 2009

Places that are gone

O. Winston Link and Carmel Vitullo document an era
It wasn't until the 1970s that O. Winston Link got noticed by the art world. The New Yorker had been a professional photographer since the 1930s, shooting publicity shots for an advertising firm before World War II and doing freelance commercial photography afterward. It was a decent living, but it was anonymous work.
By GREG COOK | August 05, 2009

Brave new RISD

After a year at the helm, president John Maeda is balancing broad shifts in the worlds of art, design, and business
The Rhode Island School of Design, for all its artful ambition, is a conservative place. Students draw. They mold clay. They are awash in taxidermy. So there was more than a little anxiety when John Maeda — sneaker designer, MIT professor, digital media rock star — took over as RISD president last summer.
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG | May 27, 2009

Boston exposures

Photography by Nicholas Nixon and Joe Johnson
Photographer Nicholas Nixon of Brookline first burst onto the scene in the show "New Topographics."
By GREG COOK | April 21, 2009

Neo-rococo

Laurel Sparks at Yezerski, plus Julie Miller, Sheila Gallagher, Darren Foote, and Michael Ellis
Jamaica Plain's Laurel Sparks has become one of our best local abstract painters, as her new collection of bright, fun, juicy, abstracted chandeliers at Howard Yezerski Gallery attests.
By GREG COOK | February 20, 2009

Interview: Art Spiegelman

Drawing conclusions
"When you don't understand a painting, you assume you're stupid. When you don't understand a cartoon, you assume the cartoonist is stupid."
By MIKE MILIARD | November 13, 2008

War of independents

The Independent Film Festival of Boston fights for freedom of the screens
The IFFB is determined to wrest cinematic freedom from the imperial power of the Hollywood studios.
By PETER KEOUGH | April 22, 2008

Lines of inquiry

‘On Drawing’ at the New Art Center, Gateway Arts at Simmons, Jeff Koons at Harvard, and Jenny Saville at BU
The idea of drawing has taken on great romance and importance since about the 1970s, when this originally humble cousin to Painting and Sculpture started to find its own footing in the world of contemporary art.
By RANDI HOPKINS | March 25, 2008

They’ve got issues

The bookworm’s gift that keeps on giving
As newspapers and magazines slim and shift their focus to online content and revenue streams, it has become sadly commonplace to overlook the unique capabilities of periodically printed matter.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | December 12, 2007

What was, and what might have been

Sara and Gerald Murphy in Williamstown
Sara and Gerald Murphy are back, and in the words of their friend Cole Porter, “What a swell party it is.”
By WILLIAM CORBETT | November 08, 2007

The Candy Man

Félix González-Torres at The Carpenter Center, Modern and Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting at the Sackler, and Chuck Close and Robert Storr at BU
Glittering piles of cheap candies are probably Cuban-born artist Félix González-Torres’s most iconic works.
By RANDI HOPKINS | October 23, 2007

Seal of approval

The ICA plays it safe with Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia is a safe, easy choice for the new ICA’s first big artist retrospective.
By GREG COOK | June 06, 2007

Thinking inside the box

Joseph Cornell in Salem
Joseph Cornell was the quintessential odd duck.
By GREG COOK | April 24, 2007

Shape up

Fernand Léger at the Fogg, ‘Encounters’ at the BCA, ‘War’ at the MFA and Pierre Menard Gallery
“Fernand Léger: Contrasts of Forms” is a powerful contribution to our understanding of Léger’s role in the development of abstract art in the early 20th century.
By RANDI HOPKINS | April 03, 2007

An exile’s journey

María Magdalena Campos-Pons gets a retrospective in Indianapolis
Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons arrived at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art one December day in 1991.
By GREG COOK | February 20, 2007

Must warn others

"It's Alive!" at Montserrat, "2007 North American Print Biennial" at 808 Gallery
It’s a cliché of bad novels and late-night movies that scientists and artists represent two extreme — and mutually exclusive — poles of objectivity and subjectivity.
By RANDI HOPKINS | February 06, 2007

Playing with history

Kara Walker's civil war
In February 1862, with the Civil War not yet a year old, Union forces took Fort Henry, a Confederate outpost on the Tennessee River, as they began to open up Southern waterways for supply lines.
By GREG COOK | January 30, 2007

Sex, Iraq, and pop culture

The war for our attention
How many times a day do you think about sex? How many times a day do you think about the war in Iraq?
By ELLEE DEAN | January 11, 2007

Photo realism?

The Links, and the Refugee All Stars
The staid BBC goes tawdry and tabloid with Paul Yule’s “noir” documentary, The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover , which is getting eight screenings at the MFA, December 15 through 30.
By GERALD PEARY | December 13, 2006