Exhibit Reviews

The Ceres Gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and the Tivoli Artists Gallery in the Hudson Valley village of Tivoli (Dutchess County), New York share much in common. The Ceres Gallery in the great Metropolis is a not-for-profit cultural center that is “dedicated to the promotion of contemporary women in the arts and the remediation of […]

Earlier this summer, our review of the Clark Art Institute’s current exhibition, Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth (Open through October 15, 2023) in Williamstown (Berkshire County), Massachusetts, noted that Munch’s questioning of “humankind’s place in a cosmic cycle of life” is stunningly of the moment. As the summer of 2023 evolved, there were increasing concerns about the […]

This museum goer feels fortunate that my home in Albany in upstate New York is only a 40 mile bucolic drive to the Clark Art Institute (the “Clark”) in Williamstown (Berkshire County), Massachusetts. Over the past few years, the Clark has mounted extraordinary art exhibitions that have made this scenic college town a destination. In […]

If you search this website for the words Art and Appetite, reviews of various art exhibits will be returned and notably Art and Appetite, American Painting, Culture, And Cuisine (4/9/2014) that was nearly ten years in the making by the curators at the Art Institute of Chicago and included paintings on loan from more than […]

Although it’s in Manhattan, the Museum of the City of New York on the eastern edge of the northern reaches of Central Park at 103rd Street, is a respite from the urban hustle and bustle and a wonderful destination for City natives and tourists. Founded in 1923, the museum was originally housed in Gracie Mansion, […]

A current exhibition at The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown (Otsego County) in upstate New York, Growing Tomorrow’s Farmers (through October 30, 2022) provides evidence that for the first time in more than a century there are trends across the country that indicate a return to “small family farming with commitments to growing healthy food within […]

The Tivoli Artists Gallery in the Hudson Valley village of Tivoli (Dutchess County), New York, is operated by and for its members. The Gallery began as a holiday crafts fair in Rhinebeck (Dutchess County) in 1989 and established a permanent presence in 1993 in Tivoli, just down the road from Bard College. Its two gallery […]

The website pickyourown.org “provides local listings of pick your own (also called U-pick or PYO) farms in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other countries.”  Its New York crop harvest calendar shows the “Most Active” period for picking pears as August 10-August 31, and for picking apples from August 27-October […]

Last year, we noted that Plowline: Images of Rural New York (“Plowline”), a comprehensive photography collection initiated in 2010 by the Farmers’ Museum  in Cooperstown (Otsego County) in upstate New York had grown to a remarkable 17,500 images. The Farmers’ Museum has put together a ten-minute mini-documentary Cultivating the Character of Rural New York that […]

Michaelina Wautier (1604-1689) until recently has been omitted from art history. The Journal Of Art In Society has been spotlighting forgotten women artists in a series of articles. Art historian and writer, Philip McCouat, in the fourth article in this series of articles, “Michaelina Wautier: Entering The Limelight After 300 Years,” noted how in 1993, […]

The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown (Berkshire County), Massachusetts is on a rural campus of 140 acres of rolling hills, meadows, streams and forest. It is the perfect venue for an exhibition of paintings, woodblocks and prints of the Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928). The exhibit, Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway (through September 19, 2021) […]

Elizabeth Downer Riker is an American realist painter who lived in Oaxaca in southern Mexico for many years. About 10 years ago, she returned to New York City with her family where she began work on a series of paintings of the rooftop farms and vegetable gardens in the urban Metropolis. Riker had a solo exhibit […]

Len Tantillo’s forty years of history painting has been rightfully recognized and honored by a major retrospective exhibit, A Sense of Time: The Historical Art of L.F. Tantillo (January 27-July 25, 2021), at the Albany Institute of History & Art (founded in 1791 and one of the oldest museums in the United States) that brings […]

Omnivorous humans can consume all kinds of food indiscriminately, both animal and plant. Michael Pollan in his ground-breaking The Omnivore’s Dilemma (The Penguin Press, New York, New York, 2006) provided a context for understanding why “organic,” “local,” and “biological” have become the basis for a growing good food movement, rooted in a regenerative agriculture that […]

The first survey in around fifty years of the artwork of Swiss-born French artist, Felix Vallotton (1865-1925), who in the words of art critic Roberta Smith sat out modernist abstraction preferring representational styles, is currently on exhibit (until January 26, 2020) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. No surprise that this […]

Sometimes savored, food is too often not mindfully consumed, especially during the holiday season. Chew: Food as Muse, the current exhibition at the Opalka Gallery in Albany, New York, is an imaginative, playful and sometimes daring look at food through the lens of contemporary art. The show is summed up in the curators’ succinct description: […]

The end of the academic year means student art exhibits mounted by colleges to showcase the creative energies of their graduating seniors. Three years ago, we praised the playful and insightful designs for edible food-like substances created by Meredith Kill and Annemarie Dolfi, two 2016 graduates of the Sage College of Albany included in the […]

What becomes apparent as you examine the exhibition, Like Sugar, is that the exhibition is all around us, all the time. What Skidmore College’s Tang Museum has done is isolate a number of elements – sweet, bittersweet, and merely bitter – to resonate with our sugar-infested world, and remind us of its loathsome past. I’ve always […]

More than 50 paintings, drawings and watercolors of the British landscape artists, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) and  John Constable (1776-1837) are on display this winter at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown (Berkshire County), Massachusetts. The exhibition, Turner and Constable: The Inhabited Landscape (Dec. 15, 2018-March 10, 2019), organized by curator Alexis Goodin is […]

This summer’s exhibit, Art and the New England Farm (May 11-September 16, 2018) at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme (New London County), Connecticut confirms the museum’s importance as a destination for art lovers. Located on the southeastern Connecticut coast at the mouth of the Connecticut River (halfway between New York and Boston), the museum […]

The National Museum of American History (NMAH) is part of the Smithsonian Institution located on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Opening in 1964 as the Museum of History and Technology, it was renamed in 1980, and in recent years was renovated to add new exhibition spaces and an education center. The NMAH collects and […]

“Art for art’s sake” (l’art pour l’art) is a phrase that has a long history, summed up very well in a Wikipedia article. In the 19th century, it was a slogan of defiance in the face of those “who thought that the value of art was to serve some moral or didactic purpose” and “that […]

In Woody Allen’s movie Manhattan (1979), his alter-ego protagonist Issac (a divorced television writer) ponders what makes life worth living? Issac’s full list: Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the 2nd movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, Louis Armstrong’s Potato Head Blues, Swedish movies, Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, those incredible Apples and Pears by Paul Cezanne, […]

Vermont Historical Society’s current exhibit, Freaks, Radicals and Hippies: Counterculture in 1970s Vermont, suggests that the American local and organic food movement, now so vital across the United States and Canada, had its beginnings, in some good measure, in the back-to-the-land movement, which was a big part of the counterculture in 1970s Vermont. This fascinating exhibit, which opened […]

In late May and early June, the art departments of many, if not all, colleges bring attention to the creative energies of their graduating seniors, who have studied art and design. Here in the Capital Region of upstate New York, it’s an enjoyable experience to visit the student art exhibits mounted by colleges in the […]

Farmer artist Lavern Kelley (1928-1995) and his brother Roger, neither of whom married, lived their entire lives on a 230 acre dairy and livestock farm, in the village of Laurens just outside Oneonta (Otsego County) in upstate New York, which had been their family’s farm since the late 19th century. Twenty years after his death, […]

Founded in 1887, Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (better known as the Penn Museum) has three gallery floors with art and artifacts from all over the world.  This extraordinary institution has conducted more than 300 archaeological and anthropological expeditions, and Penn archaeologists and anthropologists are still exploring, excavating, and researching around the world today. […]

Nine years ago in 2005, curators at the Art Institute of Chicago including Judith A. Barter, the Art Institute’s Curator of American Art, first discussed “a fresh look at still-life painting through the food represented in the pictures.”  This early beginning has culminated in an enthralling and major art show.  With paintings on loan from […]

The American Museum of Natural History , at Central Park West and 79th Street on Manhattan’s upper West Side has organized a major exhibit on our world’s food, “Our Global Kitchen, Food, Nature, Culture” (open Daily, 10:00AM-5:45PM until August 11, 2013).  The exhibit, curated by Eleanor Sterling, director of the museum’s Center for Biodiversity and […]

The New York Public Library at its main Fifth Avenue (at 42nd Street) branch, a Greek temple-like monumental building guarded by impressive stone lions, is currently hosting a thought provoking (and free) exhibit that is nothing less than an historical and cultural analysis of “the lunch hour” (until February 17, 2013):  Lunch Hour, NYC  (Open […]

An independent federal agency created in 1934, the National Archives and Records Administration is the national record keeper for the United States.  The agency safeguards records of all three branches (executive, judicial, and legislative) of the federal government.  At its monumental building on the National Mall in Washington, DC, the Declaration of Independence, Constitution of […]

The Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts [1 Science Park, Boston, Ma, 617.723.2500] is currently presenting “What I Eat- Around the World in 25 Diets,” a provocative exhibit of 25 individual “food portraits” created by the husband/wife team, photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D’Aluisio, on display until January 1, 2012 in the Museum’s Blue […]

  Warren Mackenzie, an American potter [http://warrenmackenziepottery.com/], studied in Great Britain in the years after World War II with Bernard Howell Leach, the father of the British studio tradition of handmade pottery, at the Leach Pottery in St. Ives, Cornwall [http://www.leachpottery.com/].  Until 2006, Mr. Mackenzie maintained a small showroom for his pottery, which he operated […]

A Fable for Tomorrow is the perfect subtitle for a must-see exhibition currently on display until May 8, 2011 at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum in Washington, DC of the wondrous and powerful art of Alexis Rockman (Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and F Street (NW), Washington DC, 202.633.7970 [http://americanart.si.edu/].  After Washington, DC, the exhibition […]