Seasonal cheer at the MFA and the SMFA, Helen Molesworth at the Carpenter Center, Andrea Modica at BU
By RANDI HOPKINS | November 28, 2006
 |
The Museum of Fine Arts offers a full-out festive immersion approach to the impending holidays this year — a line of attack that, in keeping with the contemporary spirit of art, embraces performing arts, multimedia, and site-specific. From December 9 through 17, in addition to the usual fine art on its walls, the MFA will offer “MFA for the Holidays,” a museum-wide holiday-themed event, with Victorian-garbed carolers strolling its galleries, “Holiday Tea” served daily in the Upper Rotunda, children’s Christmas and Hanukkah films in Remis Auditorium, family artmaking activities scattered throughout the place, audience-participation performances by the Nutcracker Players, and an intriguing program of holiday music and dance in the galleries — much of it free with museum admission — that includes North Indian music by saxophonist and composer Phil Scarff and his world jazz ensemble Natraj, Latin American and world music by José González (no, not the Swedish indie-folk guy who’s played the Remis) and the Criollo Clásico Ensemble, traditional Korean drumming, and the Amaryllis Chamber Ensemble.While all this revelry is going on, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts will be staging its annual “December Sale” December 6-11, with more than 4000 paintings, prints, photos, ceramics, and jewelry by more than 800 artists affiliated with the SMFA. Proceeds from the sale benefit both the artists and SMFA student scholarships.
Two very different talks, by two very interesting women in the arts, on, alas, the same day. The Harvard University Art Museums recently announced the appointment of scholar, writer, and curator Helen Molesworth as their new curator of contemporary art. Molesworth comes to Harvard from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, where she organized one recent exhibition exploring Louise Lawler’s work and another looking at sculpture produced as an outgrowth of Marcel Duchamp’s erotic objects and handmade readymades of the 1960s. On December 7 at 6 pm, she gives a free lecture at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, “Ambivalence and Failure, Painting As a Feminist.”
Also on December 7, at 7 pm, the Photographic Resource Center sponsors a talk by photographer Andrea Modica at BU’s Photonics Center. Best known for her series “Treadwell, N.Y.,” which records 10 years in the lives of a group of children in rural upstate New York, Modica uses a cumbersome 8x10 view camera to create images that go beyond the documentary into the realm of theater. Her photographs have been seen in, among others, Newsweek, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair.
Related:
Who are you?, Utopia station, Skin deep, More 
- Who are you?
I’d hazard that when most of us think of pictures with “hidden meanings,” we don’t envision portraits, a genre that usually entails straight-ahead representations of, well, heads, at least.
- Utopia station
The grimy surfaces of walls, sidewalks, and utility poles in neighborhoods of San Juan have replaced canvas as a medium for Puerto Rican artist Rafael Trelles.
- Skin deep
The facial and body tattoos of New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people were originally chiseled into the skin by means of an albatross bone and vegetable-based pigments.
- Fight the power
Art mixes it up with history and politics, peers closely at electronic surveillance, worries about its own usefulness, traipses down the fashion runway, and brings cool stuff back from China and Puerto Rico in exhibitions opening this fall.
- Return to the edge of the world
Photography and new media loom large on the horizon in 2007, with cameras pointed in every direction.
- Fabulous faker
It was a sublime scene, even though the seven-foot-tall painting was cracked, threadbare in places, patched in others, and dulled by a gray-brown murk.
- East meets West
The paintings in "Shôwa Sophistication" at the Museum of Fine Arts are like the dreamiest travel posters you've ever seen.
- Going deep
A gaggle of big solo shows share the art waves with that powerful influx of computer-reliant art known as the Boston Cyberarts Festival this season.
- Exposures
In "Karsh 100: A Biography in Images," which is now up at the Museum of Fine Arts, his iconic shots of Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and Ernest Hemingway are defining portraits of the men in all their crusty manliness.
- Coming to your senses
This heady, two-part exhibition examines the influence of technology on the experiences our bodies are having in this world.
- Our town
After living through decades of Big Dig construction and disruption, the average Bostonian has developed a keener design knowledge and sensitivity.
- Less
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Entertainment, Music, Jose Gonzalez, More
, Entertainment, Music, Jose Gonzalez, Harvard University, Visual Arts, Cultural Institutions and Parks, Museums, Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard University Art Museums, Marcel Duchamp, Less
