19 stories by "Cate McQuaid"
PORTSMOUTH-The Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion has housed a governor, a merchant, and a retired British army colonel who may have been a double agent. Between 1886 and 1954, its last several deca…
BEVERLY - Objectivity, that lofty ideal of serious journalists, has lost a lot of its sheen in recent years. Everybody’s biased, the argument goes; nobody can be truly objective. News …
BROCKTON - Baskets have been around for thousands of years. Nomads and cave dwellers stowed and carried food and other items in them. These days, utility is often secondary to design, so bas…
SALEM - The Hudson River School artists had a particular and romantic agenda: to transmit the sublime experience of nature they found in the American landscape. For 19th-century artists such…
When he was a child, the artist Samuel Bak lived in the Vilna Ghetto, established by the Nazis in 1941 in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania. Out of the tens of thousands of Jews who lived there…
PROVIDENCE - Explorers and scientists have reached and documented most of the Earth, and while there aren’t too many uncharted places left to go on the planet, our culture still holds …
PROVINCETOWN - Blanche Lazzell was an early modernist who restlessly explored the tenets of abstraction, and a Provincetown habitué from 1915 until her death at 78 in 1956. In a sparkli…
MANCHESTER, N.H. - Among the idyllic 19th-century landscape paintings at the Currier Museum of Art, it’s a shock to come across a video monitor. The video shows a quiet, unchanging ima…
Jennifer Riley has cut loose. The painter, who lived for a time in Boston and now resides in New York, seems to have a show here every four or five years. In between, her imagery moves forwa…
SALEM - Only here on earth does water exist as liquid, solid, and gas. If I had to choose my favorite just based on the art in “Ripple Effect, the Art of H2O,’’ the new fam…
There’s a terrific face-off in “Close Distance,’’ a group show spotlighting six local Latino artists at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts. Curator L…
NEW BRITAIN, Conn. - For decades, artists have visited Provincetown to take advantage of the magnificent light and extraordinary community there. The light is generous, thrown down by the su…
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach,’’ wrote Henry David Th…
In the art world, “painting’’ represents a cosmology of ideas that in addition to imagery includes surface, materiality, and placement on a wall. Hang a flat tire on the wa…
Boston has great art schools. But, the complaint goes, once sprung from graduate schools with degree in hand, the artists flee for cities with more opportunity. “New and Recent Work by…
New public art, and a new model for getting it up and running, arrived on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in June. The project has all the makings of invigorating a dreadfully stodgy tr…
The photojournalist Lucien Aigner was a people’s photographer. His life spanned the 20th century, and he took up new technology – the 35mm Leica camera – early, in 1928. Th…
SOUTHBOROUGH — Through the early morning hours of June 17, 1775, American colonists dug a trench and built a wall on Breed’s Hill. As dawn broke, the British below saw the activi…
Provincetown played an integral part in the advent of abstract expressionism, thanks to Hans Hofmann, who taught painting there for more than 20 years starting in 1934. “The Figurative…
