The Art World today is in poor shape. It depends on a group of people who are willing to sacrifice themselves, give away their labor, and be nearly constantly rejected. In the interest of the United States gaining power in STEM and conservative politics in cutting funding, it has become increasingly difficult to have the […]Read Post ›
Tomorrow is Patriot’s Day in Massachusetts. It’s a day to celebrate American Victory in the Revolutionary war. It’s the day that Bostonians host one of the most difficult to enter marathons, and reenact the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Three years ago, it was the day of the Boston Bombing. Always around this time of […]Read Post ›
Photography, for many reasons, has always been ever so slightly more available to women. It was such a new medium, without the systems of training being set up for centuries like they were in painting or sculpture. While it meant that photography had to fight for its place in the art world, it also meant […]Read Post ›
Ghosts are not the stuff of fairytales. Vibrant personalities leave their impressions on the places they inhabit. Many of these spaces suffer destruction, alteration, redecoration—look at any number of “home museums” and you’ll find period furniture, recreating the ambiance of a place and time. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum looks a bit like a haunted […]Read Post ›
In all my travels, I’ve seen her at least three times.Each time, we end up being in an odd spot where I feel bad for her, but also impressed by her beauty. I stare at her face, the smooth marble finished so perfectly and her expression so intense. I could spend few true minutes uninterrupted […]Read Post ›
(This was originally written as a justification of a purchase for an object collected by the Davis Museum. The full text may be found by viewing the object file. This is part of a Monthly Series of focusing on Female Artists by Claire Milldrum.) In the 18th century, women faced particularly difficult challenges to build […]Read Post ›
What is a wall anyways? What should it do? If you answered that it should hold up the roof, you would be right-if you lived before 1900.
(This is an edited version of a justification of an acquisition at the Davis Museum. The original can be found in the object file for 2014.127.1-.7. The works were on display at the Davis from Sept 16 to Dec 13 2015 and are part of a book edited by Dr. Claire Whitner.) Käthe Kollwitz (born 1867 in […]Read Post ›
A little while ago some of the other writers and I had a conversation about the validity of art as a serious discipline when one of our writers encountered someone who completely dismissed the idea that science and art could both be asking the same questions. The other writers and I agreed that science and […]Read Post ›
A Joshua Reynolds painting at the Davis Museum recently had a symposium on its research. Here’s a bit of back story of the preliminary research.
The Female Gaze 