June 23rd, 2014 | Education, General, Travel, visual arts
Art lives in that kind of white, crystalline light. It doesn’t just come alive; it takes on a whole new existence. Those top galleries in the “new” Yale University Art Gallery? They were a mystical symphony hall and the art a choir of angels. The new structure unites...
January 29th, 2014 | Education, Friends, Genealogy, General, Health, Memory, visual arts
Matthew Adelberg turned twenty-one a few days past; when I look at the artist who once was a student in my art history classroom, I see something closer to the boy at his bar mitzvah. This exhibition at the Dadian Gallery at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington...
October 23rd, 2013 | Education, General, Politics, United States, visual arts, Women
I want to be snarky. I want to be elitist and scorn cultural credibility bought by Walmart money. I am not altogether succeeding. Fact is, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is pretty damned amazing. It has the best collection of American moderns that I have...
May 28th, 2013 | Education, General, Memory, Popular Culture, Society at Large, Time Passes, visual arts
Since the class of 2002, Beloit College has published an annual “Mindset List,” a statement of cultural milestones and realities that current college freshman may or may not know or share. Needless to say, it is a list that makes my Baby-Boomer’s heart clank...
April 18th, 2013 | Education, Friends, General, Memory, Time Passes, Women
I read the new history of my school, Emma Willard School in Troy, New York and paid particular attention to the summary of my own era within those “grey walls protecting.” I am struck by the paradox of the book’s enveloping familiarity and its utter strangeness. Was...
March 12th, 2013 | Education, General, visual arts
I think the studio teacher said something like “What is that supposed to be?” during a painting critique. The comment is a variation on an old, old theme in since “Modernism” earned its capital M: “whatever you are doing, it clearly doesn’t meet the standards of ‘good...