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GREG COOK

Latest Articles

Review: Kovac's ''Comfortable Distance'; Kurt's ''Sex Objects''

Covered up, stripped down
In Delia Kovac's painting Semi Self-Portrait As a Ski Mask , the eyes stare out of the cartooned mask doleful and maybe a bit bonkers, while the mouth hole is empty.

By: GREG COOK | June 21, 2011

Phoenix critic confesses all

Flushed
As the anniversary of the show approached, it seemed like the MFA might let this landmark in its history — and Boston art history — pass unnoted. So I stepped up as, let's say, a guest curator.

By: GREG COOK | June 24, 2011

Local artists commemorate -- and re-stage -- a legendary protest

"Flush with the Walls" at the MFA
A group of 21 local artists have snuck their drawings, prints, photos and sculptures into a pair of bathrooms at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts for a one-night, guerilla exhibit.

By: GREG COOK | June 15, 2011

Man Ray and Lee Miller at the Peabody Essex Museum

L'amour fou
"Man Ray | Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism," organized by curator Phillip Prodger at the Peabody Essex Museum, is an impressive exhibit of 76 photos, paintings, sculptures, and letters that came out of their steamy three-year affair, plus art by their pals — Picasso, Calder, Le Corbusier.

By: GREG COOK | June 24, 2011

Review: Leitzel and Billings at AS220; and ''Creative Collective''

Light and dark
In Marc Leitzel's sharply real scratchboard drawings in AS220's main gallery (115 Empire Street, Providence, through June 25), he depicts a tense moment between a couple in bed, a wind-blown woman wrapped in a cape, and a woman with tree branches and leaves bound up in her hair and opossums or rodents peeking out from the leaves.

By: GREG COOK | June 14, 2011

Angry art: ''Rhode Island Blows''

Design Dept.
A few months back, openly gay Rhode Island House Speaker Gordon Fox backed away from a same-sex marriage bill, which he believed would not pass, and threw his support behind civil unions.

By: GREG COOK | June 15, 2011

summer art gallery and museum events around boston and new england

The must-see art of the summer

Season of surreality
Summer art in New England means driving up Route 1 in Maine with the car windows down, past the odd and amazing roadside metal giraffes and caterpillars, and discovering — as I did a few summers back — a nondescript house that turns out to be Fawcett's Antique Toy & Art Museum.

By: GREG COOK | June 10, 2011

What neighbors helping neighbors can show us about good government

We take care of our own
Montana Phipps was supposed to go out for a run with a friend after school, but the dark storm clouds squelched their plans. So on June 1, she was in her bedroom at the end of Stewart Avenue, with a view across her neighborhood of wide lawns, hedges, and leafy trees in Monson, a town of some 8500 people nestled in a valley about two hours' drive west of Boston.

By: GREG COOK | June 09, 2011

Review: Cody Thompson's ''Witch Doctor'' at Craftland

The human touch
The owl-falcon smiles with demonic, googly-eyes and a wide, maniacal, fanged grin.

By: GREG COOK | June 07, 2011

DeCordova looks ahead with Andy Goldsworthy and Ursula von Rydingsvard

Digging in
Goldsworthy straddles land art and environmental art.

By: GREG COOK | June 02, 2011

Review: ''Conversations'' at West Side Arts; plus, Tayo Heuser

Darkness and light
William Schaff's art is full of bloody warmongers, flaming demons, terminally ill patients, ecstatic saints, and drunks vomiting up heaps of emaciated bodies.

By: GREG COOK | May 31, 2011

Review: ''The 2011 RISD Graduate Thesis Exhibition''

Hello, we must be going
Walking into the "2011 RISD Graduate Thesis Exhibition" at the Rhode Island Convention Center (1 Sabin Street, Providence, through June 4), you can't miss Laura Swanson's Homemade Bull .

By: GREG COOK | May 24, 2011

Review: JustSeeds' ''Resourced!'' focuses on ecology at AS220

The art of protest
The political printmaking group JustSeeds was begun by Josh MacPhee in Portland, Oregon, in 1998 as a way to distribute art and posters.

By: GREG COOK | May 17, 2011

Pulp art at the Brooks School

Thrilling, fascinating, different!
A tank with a giant drill on the front erupts from under the street of a burning city.

By: GREG COOK | May 23, 2011

RISD's 'Cocktail Culture' offers an intoxicating history of 20th-century fashion

The high life
Across the country, on January 16, 1920, citizens drank up at liquor "wakes" before the 18th Amendment, ratified a year before, went into effect at midnight, banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of "intoxicating liquors."

By: GREG COOK | May 12, 2011

The death of Osama bin Laden proves that pragmatic progressivism works

Hope at last
You saw the meme buzzing around the Net on Monday: Barack Obama, in dark sunglasses, smirking: "SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG TO GET YOU A COPY OF MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE," it read, in I Can Has Cheezburger all-caps. "I WAS TOO BUSY KILLING OSAMA BIN LADEN."

By: GREG COOK | May 09, 2011