Americana

It might have taken a few centuries, but works by the Dutch flower painter Rachel Ruysch are now in full bloom in a traveling exhibition that celebrates her legacy By Ashley Busby In 1750, just months before her death, a book of poems celebrated the life and accomplishments of flower painter Rachel Ruysch, heaping praise…

Art Deco celebrates its centennial this year. Art & Antiques’s DAVID MASELLO examines the effect the movement first had on him in Chicago and how it affects him still in his long-adopted city of New York where the style is omnipresent. It’s one of Chicago’s most alluring sites: the limestone facade of the Chicago Board…

Whenever she is painting, Vivian Tsao is immersed in deep conversation. It’s not with a fellow artist or even with herself, but, rather, with the natural light that streams through the windows of her Brooklyn home, a century-old, two-story townhouse on a shady street in the neighborhood known as Windsor Terrace. “I am always dialoguing…

An exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art of paintings by Marsden Hartley reconfirms his enduring place in the American canon By David Masello Marsden Hartley was always restless. For his entire working life, the self-designated “painter of Maine” was always on the move—a dynamic that has resulted in a vast archive of completed…

An exhibition of ancient sculpture speaks to contemporary audiences in many of the same ways the busts and portraits did to people centuries past. Meet the figures and motifs of the time. Written by David Masello Everyone spoke the same language in the Roman Empire, especially at its height in the second century. Even though…

Sargent and Paris, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, examines how the City of Lights was fertile soil for John Singer Sargent’s meteoritic rise, with a deep dive into his masterpiece, Madame X Patti Zielinski Long before smartphone selfies and the use of social media to catapult one’s…

A new exhibition tells the story of three American women of Japanese descent and expands the story of American Art. By Ashley Busby In recent years, the museum world has highlighted the work of previously underrecognized artists, in part to reenergize collections and tell new stories, but more importantly as a means to question the…

The Clark Art Institute receives one of its largest gifts—331 works of art from the foundation of Aso O. Tavitian. Time soon to build a new wing to house the treasures. By Patti Zielinski Shortly after Esther Bell began working as a curator at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, she was invited to…

The Norton Museum of Art puts on the gloves for an inspiring show it has mounted about the art of, and about, boxing By David Masello A group of Palm Beach senior citizens was ready for a fight when they visited the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. They had come to see…