ARTES MAGAZINE

Near the end of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 breakthrough play, A Raisin in the Sun, Karl Lindner, a representative from the homeowner’s association of a white neighborhood, visits a black family, the Youngers, who have just bought a house in his exclusively white enclave. He has come to essentially bribe them not to move in. Mama [...]

There is always a bit of an edge to any production at the A.R.T. and by extension its satellite Oberon. This is true of Beowulf—A Thousand Years of Baggage now at the Oberon. This version of the English/Danish epic poem uses song and silliness to tell the story of the hero and the blood-thirsty monster. [...]

  Winslow Homer, Weatherbeaten (1894). Portland Museum of Art. Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson. Ubiquitous Winslow Homer images of the surf-battered, rocky Maine coastline and pastoral scenes of American life in a simpler time, are so deeply embedded in our sense of national identity that we hardly ‘see’ them any longer. Too many posters of [...]

There’s murder afoot up at Hartford Stage, murder motivated by revenge, revenge for a family wronged. And it’s in a musical. No, it’s not “Sweeney Todd,” Stephen Sondheim’s dark and brooding tale of the demon barber of Fleet Street, for Sweeney wouldn’t be caught dead in this musical. Given the barber’s dyspeptic nature, I doubt [...]

So Santa Claus is standing there, going “Ho, ho, ho,” a big smile on his face, hands patting his round, red belly, and then all of a sudden he lets loose with a string of expletives that would make a sailor blush. Your eyes widen, your jaw drops. After you recover from the shock, the [...]

Frederic Edwin Church’s lengthy love affair with the State of Maine is revealed in Maine Sublime: Frederic Edwin Church’s Landscapes of Mt. Desert and Mt. Katahdin, opening on June 30th at the Portland Museum of Art.  As a painter, Church was a prolific, inexorable part of New York’s art scene—and dedicated to his life’s masterwork [...]

Forty-one year-old, Boston-based sculptor Tory Fair likes to think of herself as a “late bloomer,” and the evolution of her artistic career is allied with her varied experiences as an athlete, environmentalist, traveler and spiritualist dreamer. [1] For her second solo show at South Boston’s, La Montagne Gallery, in spring 2010, Fair created three life-sized, self-portrait [...]

The next generation of artists faces a variety of daunting and complex challenges. Principle among them is the ever-shifting nature of the visual art world and what constitutes art, itself. Paint on canvas or graphite on paper is increasingly relegated to the mundane as installation and performance pieces vie for public attention and the critics’ affirmative [...]

Imagine a medieval troupe with a pageant cart carrying the universe inside, waiting to be unpacked. Tula Telfair could be their set designer. The borders to each of her canvases are marked by alternating strips of solid color, save for the lower edges, creating a series of proscenium stages. This is scenery in several senses, [...]

What do you think of when you think about Wolf Kahn? Is it the fantasia palette, the barns glowing ember-like, the tangled rushes as if singed by a fire, or his hot pink shirt, green tie and strawberry socks? The artist did not disappoint on Thursday evening at the Center for Creative Printmaking in Norwalk, [...]