Martin Puryear: Nexus @ Museum of Fine Arts Boston + Cleveland Museum of Art + High Museum of Art

Martin Puryear: Nexus

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

September 27, 2025 – February 8, 2026

Cleveland Museum of Art

April 12 – August 9, 2026

High Museum of Art

September 25, 2026 – January 17, 2027

For more than half a century, the preeminent sculptor Martin Puryear (born 1941) has captivated the public with works of astonishing beauty and elaborate craftsmanship, whose sources of inspiration range from global cultures and social history to the natural world. Co-organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), and the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), Martin Puryear: Nexus is the first substantial survey of the artist’s work in nearly two decades. Assembling some 50 works from across Puryear’s career, the exhibition focuses on his use of a rich variety of materials and media—from sculptures in wood, leather, glass, marble, and metal to rarely shown drawings and prints.

After debuting at the MFA, where it is on view in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, the exhibition travels to the Cleveland Museum of Art from April 12 through August 9, 2026, followed by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta from September 25, 2026 through January 17, 2027. Martin Puryear: Nexus is accompanied by a catalogue produced by the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Martin Puryear: Nexus reflects the artist’s singular practice, one that combines the distinctive techniques of production with the formal histories he has encountered through a lifetime of movement, research, and study. The exhibition begins with works on paper from the early 1960s and follows Puryear’s subsequent innovations in form, material, and process. Rooted in new scholarship, Martin Puryear: Nexus illuminates the ways in which the artist’s unique vocabulary has been shaped by his enduring interests in global traditions of material culture, African American history, and the natural world.

“With this exhibition we are pleased to feature an exceptional artist of our time and powerful works that speak to Martin Puryear's creativity and exceptional craftsmanship, and the lifelong learning that has fueled his practice,” said Pierre Terjanian, the MFA’s Ann and Graham Gund Director. “The sculptures included in this survey extend a compelling invitation to engage with themes of culture, identity, and history. We are grateful to our colleagues at the Cleveland Museum of Art for their partnership in making this project possible.”

“Martin Puryear’s art is staggeringly beautiful and also moving in the way that it invites us to see with fresh eyes the world we inhabit,” said William M. Griswold, Sarah S. and Alexander M. Cutler Director, the Cleveland Museum of Art. “Given the remarkable range of aesthetic traditions, cultural histories, and techniques of making that Puryear integrates in his work, we are especially pleased to present his career retrospective at museums with comprehensive collections from around the world, and spanning thousands of years of history.”

Martin Puryear: Nexus - Exhibition Highlights

Martin Puryear, Self (1978, The Joslyn Art Museum)

One of Puryear’s most iconic sculptures, Self shows the importance of dynamic formal oppositions in the artist’s work. At once a dark monolithic mass, Self is light and hollow, enclosing a hidden interior volume. It was assembled piece by piece through cold molding, a technique that Puryear learned through boat-building and which he has integrated into some of his most celebrated sculptures.

Martin Puryear, Night and Day (1984, Nasher Sculpture Center)

A rarely exhibited work, Night and Day reflects Puryear’s enduring interest in natural manifestations of black and white, which divide the two halves of the work’s semicircular arch. One end of the arch sits on the floor, while the other hovers just above it.

Martin Puryear, On the Tundra (1986, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Puryear’s interest in the natural world and ornithology are reflected in his creation of this cast iron sculpture, an abstracted form suggesting a falcon perched on a rock. It was partially inspired by a work from the MFA’s collection: a 1619 portrait of a gyrfalcon by the Mughal court painter Mansur (active around 1590­–1630). Mansur’s painting—a reproduction of which hangs in Puryear’s studio—was immediately compelling for him not only within the history of ornithological portraiture but also as a representation of geopolitical trade routes, as the gyrfalcon is not native to India and likely arrived via diplomatic trade channels from Europe. The exhibition also includes On the Tundra (Winter) (2022, collection of the artist), a recent iteration of the original sculpture in white marble.

Martin Puryear, Confessional (1996–2000, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Composed partly of wire mesh covered with tar, this work evokes a hollow inner space that is visible and obscured at the same time. Its title suggests one possible reading, delineating the wooden platform as a place upon which a confessor—implicitly, the viewer—may kneel and “confess.” Confessional is included only in Boston’s presentation.

Martin Puryear, Big Phrygian (2010–14, Glenstone Museum)

This colossal sculpture is the most dramatic representation of Puryear’s sustained engagement with the lineage of the Phrygian cap. This headdress signified formerly enslaved people in ancient Rome and later became a symbol of resistance to persecution during the French and American Revolutions. In the exhibition it is shown alongside the etching Phrygian (Cap in the Air) (2012, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Martin Puryear, Hibernian Testosterone (2018, courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery)

This large, wall-mounted sculpture reproduces in full scale the 12-foot antlers of the Irish elk, an extinct species of deer common during the Ice Age. Scientists of the 1700s had a theory that its antlers—which likely evolved to help the species survive combat and demonstrate sexual prowess and whose growth was propelled by testosterone—contributed to its extinction as they eventually became too heavy for the animal to hold up. Martin Puryear distills this parable-like history from the animal kingdom into a straightforward visual statement, suspending the antlers from an inverted cross.

Martin Puryear, Aso Oke (2019, Jack Shear Collection)

Encountered by visitors before they enter the exhibition, this monumental sculpture, cast in bronze, borrows its form from the fila gobi, a ceremonial cap worn by the Yoruba people of Nigeria. The intricate open latticework is a recurring technique used by Martin Puryear throughout his career.

Martin Puryear, A Column for Sally Hemings (2021, collection of the artist)

One of Puryear’s few indoor site-specific sculptures, this was created for the US Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Responding to the pavilion’s architecture, which was modeled on Monticello—the primary residence and plantation of Thomas Jefferson—the work’s fluted base echoes the Doric columns between which visitors passed to enter the exhibition space in Venice. The sculpture’s title refers to Sally Hemings (1773­–1835), the enslaved Black woman, with whom Jefferson had at least six children.

Martin Puryear: Nexus also features a film that documents Puryear’s most recent outdoor work Lookout (2023), a permanent site-specific commission for the Storm King Art Center. In Cleveland and Atlanta, additional film footage as well as prints, drawings, and documentation of other public commissions will also be on view, demonstrating how Puryear extends his studio practice into the public realm and maintains his commitment to craft and concept on a monumental scale.

Artist Martin Puryear

Over the past five decades, Martin Puryear has created a body of work based on abstract organic forms rich with psychological, cultural, and historical references. His labor-intensive sculptures are made by hand at his studio in upstate New York. They combine practices adapted from many different traditions, including wood carving, joinery, and boat building, as well as more recent technology. As a student, Puryear studied ornithology, falconry, and archery, and in the 1960s he volunteered with the Peace Corps in west Africa, where he was exposed to the region’s Indigenous crafts. Since then he has continued to travel extensively, observing a range of cultures and their unique approaches to object making. “I think there are a number of levels at which my work can be dealt with and appreciated,” he has said. “It gives me pleasure to feel there’s a level that doesn’t require knowledge of or immersion in the aesthetic of a given time or place.”

Martin Puryear was born in Washington, D.C., in 1941. His first one-person exhibition took place in 1968, and since then he has exhibited throughout the world, including public commissions in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. His work was featured in Documenta 9, and in 1989 he represented the U.S. at the Bienal de São Paulo, where he was awarded the festival’s Grand Prize. In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a survey of his work, which traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. In 2015, the Art Institute of Chicago organized an exhibition of 50 years of his works on paper, which traveled to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Martin Puryear received a MacArthur Foundation award in 1989 and a National Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2011. In 2019 he represented the U.S. at the 58th Venice Biennale. His recent commissions include outdoor works at Madison Square Park, the Storm King Art Center, and the Deichman Library in Oslo.

Martin Puryear: Nexus - Exhibition Catalogue

Martin Puryear: Nexus is accompanied by an expansive and richly illustrated catalogue. Designed and published by the Cleveland Museum of Art, with distribution by Yale University Press, the publication is anchored by five essays authored by a new generation of scholars: Rizvana Bradley, Joan Kee, Emily Liebert, Michelle Millar Fisher, and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi.

Martin Puryear: Nexus

Exhibition Catalogue Cover

Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art

Image courtesy Yale University Press

Artwork © Martin Puryear

240 Pages, 10.50 × 13.00 in, 212 color + b-w illus.

Published October 2025

Additional perspectives enter the book through series of responses to individual works, contributed by thinkers and makers from a range of disciplines, many of whom are long-time interlocutors of the artist. They include Nairy Baghramian, Alex Da Corte, Thelma Golden, Maya Lin, Kerry James Marshall, Julia Phillips, Charles Ray, and Billie Tsien. Alongside these contemporary perspectives, the catalogue features archival materials that have never before been published.

Martin Puryear: Nexus - Exhibition Curators

The exhibition is co-curated by Emily Liebert, Lauren Rich Fine Curator of Contemporary Art, Chair of Art of the Americas, Modern and Contemporary Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and Reto Thüring, Head of Culture at the Foundation for Art, Culture, and History in Winterthur, Switzerland and former Beal Family Chair, Department of Contemporary LArt at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with Gabriella Shypula, Leigh and Mary Carter Director’s Research Fellow, The Cleveland Museum of Art. The MFA’s presentation is organized by Ian Alteveer, Beal Family Chair, Department of Contemporary Art with Daisy Alejandre, Curatorial Assistant, Contemporary Art. The High’s presentation is organized by Michael Rooks, Wieland Family Senior Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art.

MFA - MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS BOSTON

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Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore @ MFA Boston - A Major Exhibition

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

October 13, 2024 - January 20, 2025

Georgia O'Keeffe 

Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3, 1930 

Oil on canvas 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 

Bequest of Georgia O'Keeffe, 1987.58.2. 

© Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Henry Moore 

Reclining Figure, 1959–64 

Elmwood 

©  The Henry Moore Foundation: 

Gift of Irina Moore 

Photo: Jonty Wilde

American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) and British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986) are among the most distinctive artists of the 20th century. They have long been admired for their extraordinary distillations of natural forms into abstraction—O’Keeffe’s iconic paintings of flowers and Moore’s monumental public sculpture. The major exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is the first to bring these two artists together, using compelling visual juxtapositions to explore their common ways of seeing. Each artist experimented with unusual perspectives, shifts in scale, and layered compositions to produce works that were informed by their surroundings—Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico and Henry Moore in Hertfordshire, England.

Featuring over 150 works—including about 60 works by Georgia O’Keeffe and 90 by Henry Moore—the exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, as well as faithful recreations of each of the artists’ studios containing their tools and found objects. Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is an unprecedented collaboration with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Henry Moore Foundation.

“Looking at O’Keeffe and Moore together, we can see how both artists were inspired by and also made use of natural forms. O’Keeffe hoped that her paintings would make people pay attention to things they usually overlooked—the soft gradations of a flower petal, the patterns within a landscape, or the shapes between two objects. As O’Keeffe said herself, ‘to see takes time.’ The chance to see her work in person is not to be missed,” said Erica Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings.

“While many of our visitors here in Boston will know O’Keeffe’s work and reputation well, they might be less familiar with Moore, one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. The generous loans from the Henry Moore Foundation allow us to recreate the artist’s studio and will really help bring Moore alive and show how found objects played a role in the creation of his large-scale public sculpture,” said Courtney Harris, Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture.

Through careful observation of their surroundings and the objects they collected, O’Keeffe and Moore reimagined natural forms—bones, stones, shells, flowers, and the land itself—into dynamic abstractions. Each played with scale, exploring the effects of making small things large. They twisted and turned pieces in space, searching for balance, looking within their complex interiors, and exploring how objects transform the spaces around them. The exhibition presents their works both individually and in dialogue, presenting unique juxtapositions such as:

O’Keeffe’s Red Tree, Yellow Sky (1952, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Moore’s Working Model for Standing Figure: Knife Edge (1961, The Henry Moore Foundation): Georgia O’Keeffe often envisioned how miniature forms might become monumental. In this painting she juxtaposed a small piece of wood against a distant landscape, conflating near and far, large and small. Henry Moore similarly made a small thing enormous, inspired by the breastbone of a bird to create a figurative sculpture that twists in space and encourages viewers to walk around it.

Henry Moore’s Helmet (1939–1940, The Henry Moore Foundation) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3 (1930, National Gallery of Art, Washington): This work by Moore was the first in a series of small sculptures with hollow shells that encased unique interior forms. O’Keeffe similarly used a technique of enclosure in her painting of a deep purple flower with its complex interior and billowing leaves.

O’Keeffe’s Pelvis IV (1944, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum) and Moore’s Reclining Figure Bone (1975, The Henry Moore Foundation): O’Keeffe plays with scale, depth, and perspective by showing an entire vista through the aperture of a sun-bleached pelvic bone. Her interest in simplification and negative space is mirrored in Moore’s reduction of the human figure to a simple curve. His choice of travertine, with its porous texture and off-white color, maintains its connection to his inspiration in a weathered animal bone.

There were many other artists active in the U.S. and Europe in the mid-20th century who also looked to nature. The MFA’s presentation of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore draws upon the Museum’s modernist collection to provide a broader context. O’Keeffe and Moore’s works are put into dialogue with photographs, prints, sculpture, and paintings by artists including Edward Weston (1886–1958), Alexander Calder (1898–1976), Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975), Arthur Dove (1880–1946), Jean Arp (1886–1966), Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976), and Maria Montoya Martinez (Poveka or Water Pond Lily), (Powhogeh Owingeh [San Ildefonso Pueblo]) (1887–1980).

At the core of the exhibition are recreations of the artists’ studios, built with original contents from Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch studio in the hills of New Mexico and Henry Moore’s Bourne Maquette Studio in Perry Green, a small hamlet surrounded by sheep fields in Hertfordshire, England. Though both O’Keeffe and Moore remained within reach of city life, the two artists worked in rural settings, both amassing large personal collections of animal bones, stones, seashells, and other natural materials that served as key sources of inspiration. These found objects can be seen in these spaces alongside tools, unfinished works, and plaster maquettes. The studio installations illuminate the heart of O’Keeffe and Moore’s artistic practices—something rarely made visible in museum spaces—and create richer portraits of the artists by encouraging visitors to imagine how they worked and lived.

Georgia O’Keeffe Biography

Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 and grew up in rural Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She first studied art in Chicago and then, in New York, with the American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase. But she pursued a more modern approach, inspired by Arthur Wesley Dow, whose compositional theories were rooted in Japanese art. In the 1910s, O’Keeffe, then an art teacher in West Texas, began to make nature-based abstractions, learning to love the landscapes of the southwest.

Georgia O’Keeffe came to New York in 1916. Without her knowledge, a friend had sent her drawings to the New York art dealer, photographer, and champion of modernism Alfred Stieglitz, who gave O’Keeffe her first show at his gallery 291. With Stieglitz’s support, she came back to New York in 1918. They began a romantic relationship, marrying in 1924. O’Keeffe painted flowers, skyscrapers, and, following trips to New Mexico, bones, which she shipped back in barrels to New York. But the stark beauty of the southwest always beckoned. O’Keeffe visited for long periods and began to acquire property, first at Ghost Ranch and then in Abiquiú. She moved to New Mexico permanently after Alfred Stieglitz’s death in 1946.

Georgia O’Keeffe carefully nurtured her art, her career, and her persona, earning a place in the center of the New York art world. Her work was featured in a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1946—the museum’s first show devoted to a woman artist. She gained public recognition after a 1968 cover story in Life magazine. In 1997, The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico opened to the public.

Henry Moore Biography

Henry Moore was born in 1898 in Castleford, a mining town in the northern English county of Yorkshire. He served in World War I and upon his return, enrolled at the Leeds School of Art as the first student of a new sculpture department. Through the 1920s and ’30s he exhibited at shows in London and worked in a studio in Hampstead in northern London. During the World War II, he served as an Official War Artist, making drawings of Londoners sheltering in the Underground during the Blitz.

In 1940, after his London home was damaged by German bombs, Henry Moore settled permanently at Hoglands, a cottage in Perry Green in Hertfordshire, about 35 miles north of London. He spent the next four decades creating some of the most recognizable works of public sculpture of the 20th century. He was enormously successful and well known. He was honored with a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1946, the same year as O’Keeffe’s. He was appointed to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1948, and participated in the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Today, Moore’s legacy lives on through the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green and in Leeds. His work is also celebrated in an important suite of galleries at Tate Britain in London and in the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. His sculpture can be found in public spaces across the world.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore was organized by the San Diego Museum of Art in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is on view at the MFA in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery.

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON - MFA

465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115

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Annette Lemieux @ Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Annette Lemieux: Mise en Scène
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Through March 4, 2018

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), honors Annette Lemieux, a conceptual artist and the recipient of the 2017 Maud Morgan Prize, with her first solo museum exhibition in Boston in more than three decades. Annette Lemieux: Mise en Scène debuts a new body of work inspired by films that Lemieux felt an affinity for as a child growing up in small-town America: François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) and Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Although they are more than half a century old, the issues broached by these classic motion pictures—including repression, censorship, racism and classism—continue to resonate in today’s political climate. Extracting select elements from each film’s mise en scène—its environment, ambiance and visual mode of storytelling—Lemieux turns familiar images from cinematic history into stand-alone objects and paintings. In addition to new works, the exhibition also showcases five prints from the artist’s Censor portfolio (1994), drawn from the MFA’s collection. Annette Lemieux: Mise en Scène is on view in the Richard and Nancy Lubin Gallery, inside the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art.

Established in 1993 in recognition of the spirit of adventure and independence embodied by noted New England artist Maud Morgan (1903–1999), the MFA’s biennial Maud Morgan Prize honors a Massachusetts woman artist who has demonstrated creativity and vision, making significant contributions to the contemporary arts landscape. One of the most important artists of her generation, Lemieux (born 1957) has shaped conversations on idea-driven art since the mid-1980s, combining the aesthetic and conceptual tactics of her contemporary art predecessors with a singular vocabulary of mid-20th-century found objects and images.

The drama and charged social issues unfolding today inspired Lemieux to seek inspiration in films that shaped her political consciousness as a young person. Black-and-white films that aired on television made up a good part of her early cultural education while growing up in small-town Connecticut in the 1960s and ’70s, and antiquing with her mother helped to develop the artist’s sharp eye for objects with multiple past lives. In her new series of works, she extracts key moments from the narratives of classic mid-20th-century motion pictures, focusing on certain objects that seem vaguely familiar or, in the case of film aficionados, are instantly recognizable icons of cinematic history.

“By reaching into her own past and films that speak to our national history, Annette’s exhibition bravely attempts to counteract today’s incessant acts of rewinding and repeating,” said Munsell.

The exhibition opens with Censor (A-E) (1994), five prints from a portfolio in the MFA’s collection. One of Lemieux’s earlier works linked to film, the series borrows imagery from an iconic scene in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), which satirizes Hitler through a fictional character named Hinkle. Lemieux’s manipulated images show Hinkle alone in his study, spinning a globe soon revealed to be a balloon that he bounces on his desk and pirouettes around the room. This choreography culminates in Chaplin popping and destroying the globe in a disturbing metaphor for Hitler’s aims of world domination. Released before the U.S. entered World War II, Chaplin’s film was an outright criticism of fascism, in support of American military efforts to counter it. The Great Dictator was banned in many parts of Europe, and Chaplin himself was later censored: the British native was accused of being a communist sympathizer during the McCarthy era and exiled from the U.S. in 1952.

Two new works that touch on the issue of censorship are inspired by Fahrenheit 451, François Truffaut’s 1966 film based on Ray Bradbury’s book of the same title. The Watchers (2017) is a direct visual quote from the opening credit sequence. The grid pattern recalls the TV color bar, which originally served as a mode of calibrating all television sets to present the same color and audio during transmission. The spy devices and satellite antennas that premise the film set the stage for a story that occurs at an unknown point in the future, when human life is highly regulated by government-controlled televised media, sedative drugs and book-burning raids. The literary bonfires are carried out by firemen, and Fire Cone (2017) is a replica of the object used by them in the film to secure the perimeter, its blue light and red stripes signaling a nationalist authority in a state of emergency intended to go unquestioned.

Set to a wallpapered backdrop reminiscent of Lemieux’s childhood bedroom, an installation within the exhibition features sculptures that the artist created to resemble objects that appear in pivotal moments of the German Expressionist film M (1931) and the American classic To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), based on the 1960 novel by award-winning author Harper Lee. Two of the sculptures replicate a toy seen in the opening scene of M—a ball bounced by little Elsie Beckmann on the street immediately before she encounters her soon-to-be kidnapper. The serial murderer entices Elsie with a clown balloon before kidnapping her during the final moment in which the child appears on camera. M was one of the first films to gesture at mental illness and the possibility of pedophilia, as well as to make a plea against the death penalty, raising key questions in an increasingly modernized world. Meanwhile, the carved wooden sculpture of Scout, To Kill a Mockingbird’s young protagonist, references the moment in which she and her brother find miniature carved figures made to look like them, hidden in the knot of a tree outside the home of their condemned neighbor, Boo Radley. The Scout sculpture’s scale—the size of a child rather than miniature—and the full color of one of Elsie Beckmann’s balls bring these originally black-and-white objects from the screen into the present.

Additional works that reference To Kill a Mockingbird include Area of Refuge (2017) and Spin (2017). The former features an image of the author Harper Lee revisiting her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Lee’s memories of her neighbors and family, as well as an experience she had as a young child, are said to have inspired the plot of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which takes on issues of racism, poverty, mental illness, difference and the struggle of equality for African Americans in the South. In Area of Refuge, Lemieux questions ideas of safety and home.

Spin depicts an image, repeated three times, from a key moment in To Kill a Mockingbird, when Scout unintentionally rolls into the yard of her feared neighbor, Boo Radley, while playing with her brother, neighbor and a tire. Although Boo is rumored to be insane and uncontrollably violent, he later saves the children’s lives from a white supremacist attacker. Spin’s pop composition acts as a full-color warning flag against the whitewashing of history.

ANNETTE LEMIEUX

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Annette Lemieux received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford in 1980. After graduation, she spent a decade in New York City, working as an assistant for artist David Salle and contributing to a burgeoning scene of appropriation artists—alongside Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman—who frequently incorporated text, images, objects and symbols from mass media and pop culture into their work. Her work was featured in the Whitney Biennials of 1987 and 2000, as well as the Venice Biennale in 1990. Currently a Senior Lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, Lemieux has influenced younger generations of artists as a teacher for more than 20 years. Lemieux is the recipient of awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, Brown University and the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Germany. In 2009 she received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Montserrat College of Art. Her work has been exhibited internationally and acquired by museums across the U.S. and Europe. In addition to the MFA, these include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Victoria and Albert Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art and more. Lemieux’s critically acclaimed projects include solo exhibitions Unfinished Business (2012) at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the mid-career survey The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux (2010) at the Worcester Art Museum.

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
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Frances Stark @ Museum of Fine Art, Boston

UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991–2015
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
September 17, 2016 – January 29, 2017

With both visual and written language at the heart of her practice, FRANCES STARK (born 1967) explores various modes of self-expression in the digital age. This fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), presents UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991–2015, the sole East Coast venue for the most comprehensive survey to date of the Los Angeles-based artist and writer. Organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, UH-OH touches on a wide range of subjects that reflect Frances Stark’s roles as an artist, mother, woman and teacher. Nearly 120 works—from early carbon-copy drawings and intricate collages, to more recent video installations and digital slide shows—provide an in-depth examination of her ongoing interest in communication. The exhibition title refers to the link between the mind and the body and that instinctual oral response, “uh-oh,” when we go beyond what’s acceptable, are faced with a complex problem or have shared too much information. The moment of reveal is seen again and again in Stark’s works, and the artist takes this spontaneous utterance as inspiration to go beyond our initial reactions and to look deeper, think harder and listen more carefully. UH-OH is on view from September 17, 2016–January 29, 2017 in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art.

“Frances’ unique voice has influenced artists, curators and other multidisciplinary thinkers locally in Los Angeles and across the world,” said Munsell. “Throughout her career she has developed alternative modes of art education such as mentorships and, now, free-schooling. These methods bring up questions of access to higher education, and will provide important insights for Boston, a city centered on academic enterprise and intellectual exchange.”

The daughter of a telephone operator and an electrical engineer who worked in the printing business, Frances Stark has consistently shown interest in communication, merging her love of language with an urge to make things. The Inchoate Incarnate: Bespoke Costume for the Artist (2009, Valeria and Gregorio Napoleone Collection, London), a telephone dress worn by Stark in her 2010 performance I’ve Had It! And I’ve Also Had It!, is a direct nod to her mother and an embodiment of her insatiable urge to communicate.

Among Frances Stark’s earliest works is How does one sustain the belief in total babes (power/recognition) which has been recognized for its debilitating effects on that person who lacks the total babe (embodiment of power/recognition) and access to the total babe by means of one’s own total foxiness/power? (1991/2014, Collection of Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip Aarons). The hooked rug, originally inspired by a note Stark wrote in her junior high school yearbook, both asks a question and makes a statement about how the self is expressed and perceived by others.

“Seeing so much of Frances’ work together allows viewers a rare opportunity to draw out ideas that thread through her work over time, and transports us into her brilliant mind,” said Subotnick. “The more close reading she encourages in her work, the more viewers mirror her passion for learning, comprehending and interpreting art and life through a personal lens.”

In addition to being a prolific writer, Frances Stark is also an avid reader—many of her artworks incorporate text drawn from literature. Six life-size “Chorus Girl” collages from the series Torment of Follies (2007–08, various lenders) are arranged throughout the exhibition, featuring showgirls whose dresses are made from spiral patterns with dizzying effects. Shown in various positions, they grasp pages displaying text from Witold Gombrowicz’s satirical novel Ferdydurke.

Alongside her analog methods of tracing and collage, Frances Stark both embraces and manipulates technological advancements in modes of communication. The video installation My Best Thing (2011, Hammer Museum) is derived from the artist’s experiences with online sex chats—a new platform for Stark’s writing. Featuring animated characters set against a green screen backdrop, the 100-minute video presents intimate Skype exchanges and discussions about art, literature, history, music and politics with two online lovers whom Stark met through Chatroulette. The breakthrough work, showing Stark exploring both her artistic and literal promiscuity, debuted at the 54th Venice Biennale.

Over the past few years, social media has become an integral part of Stark’s storytelling. The slide show What Goes on @therealstarkiller (2014, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne) presents a selection of posts from her Instagram account, featuring images of her daily life—her artwork, her son, what she’s reading, what she sees when driving in Los Angeles.

Other highlights of the exhibition include three salon-style hangs of primarily works on paper, among them collages and landscapes of letters that transform words into imagery. The series If conceited girls want to show they have a seat (2008)—directly inspired by a Goya etching—showcases Frances Stark’s engagement with art history, and the large mixed-media collages Push (2006, Whitney Museum of American Art), Pull After “Push” (2010, Collection Nancy and Joachim Bechtle) and Push After “Pull After Push” (2010, Hammer Museum) capture the artist’s studio and its array of contents, such as junk mail and exhibition announcements. Additionally, UH-OH features Frances Stark’s Cat Videos (1991–2002, courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York), produced long before the genre became a staple on YouTube.

UH-OH culminates in one of Frances Stark’s most ambitious and provocative works to date—Bobby Jesus’s Alma Mater b/w Reading the Book of David and/or Paying Attention Is Free (2013, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Hammer Museum). The large-scale video installation is inspired by her relationship with her studio apprentice, muse and friend Bobby Jesus. A mural with a black-and-white checkerboard floor is populated with images of political and religious figures, hip-hop legends, Bobby Jesus, Renaissance paintings, as well as Stark herself. Text based on conversations with Bobby Jesus, as well as lyrics from Prince, DJ Quik, the Fall and the Beatles, scrolls one line at a time above the photo collage. Music by DJ Quik provides the soundtrack, and takeaway posters and an illustrated key that decodes all the images on the checkerboard are available for visitors to peruse.

Publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, UH-OH Frances Stark 1991–2015, which offers the first comprehensive overview of Stark’s work. It features newly commissioned essays by Ali Subotnick and Howard Singerman, Phyllis and Josef Caroff Professor of Fine Arts, Dept. Chair, Hunter College, New York. The monograph also includes a special section of texts by various artists and writers in which they revisit previous discussions with Stark about specific concepts in her work.

“UH-OH: Frances Stark 1991–2015” was organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. UH-OH was organized by Hammer Museum curator Ali Subotnick in close collaboration with the artist. The MFA’s presentation of the exhibition was coordinated by Liz Munsell, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Special Initiatives, a position supported by Lorraine Bressler.

The exhibition is presented at the MFA with generous support from The Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Fund for Education, Public Programs and Special Projects. Additional support from the Robert and Jane Burke Fund for Exhibitions, the Amy and Jonathan Poorvu Fund for the Exhibition of Contemporary Art and Sculpture, the Diane Krane Family and Jonathan and Gina Krane Family Fund, the Barbara Jane Anderson Fund, the Bruce and Laura Monrad Fund for Exhibitions, and the Susan G. Kohn and Harry Kohn, Jr. Fund for Contemporary Prints.

The exhibition was originated with support from Brenda Potter, along with generous support from Karyn Kohl and Maurice Marciano.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
www.mfa.org

Photographer Mario Testino Exhibition at MFA, Boston

Mario Testino: In Your Face and British Royal Portraits
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Mario Testino: In Your Face, through February 3, 2013 
Mario Testino: British Royal Portraits, through June 16, 2013

Mario Testino’s compelling fashion and celebrity photographs have appeared in international magazines and advertising campaigns for leading fashion houses for the past three decades.  Beginning October 21, the man behind the camera that has captured countless iconic images for Vogue and Vanity Fair is featured in two exhibitions of his work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA)—Mario Testino: In Your Face and British Royal Portraits. 

Kate Moss, London, 2006 © Mario Testino 

Photo Courtesy of the artist and MFA, Boston

Mario Testino: In Your Face showcases 122 images by the photographer, known for works that evoke elegance, beauty, style, irreverence, and contradiction. The range and quality of Testino’s career is illustrated in photographs of international superstars, such as models Kate Moss, Stephanie Seymour, and Gisele Bündchen; actors Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow; musicians Mick Jagger, Madonna, and Lady Gaga; and athletes David Beckham and Tom Brady. Mario Testino: British Royal Portraits focuses on the portraits he has taken of generations of the British royal family. Mario Testino has personally chosen the works for these exhibitions. The photographs on view offer a retrospective of his prolific career, which began shortly after Testino’s arrival in London from his native Peru in 1976. In Your Face draws upon thousands of exquisitely styled images that document his creative journey in pursuit—and in celebration—of beauty.  Mario Testino’s photographs are bold, graphic, and “in your face.” The exhibition illustrates fashion, elegance, sex, and nudity, reflecting the photographer’s unique aesthetic and stylistic range. “I am honored to be invited by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to exhibit my work in these two exhibitions, my first in the United States,” said Mario Testino. “These exhibitions are a very personal reflection of the past 30 years in which I have been a photographer.”  

Mario Testino 

Photo Courtesy MFA, Boston

In Your Face provides access to Mario Testino’s world—from models, movie stars, and musicians, to a host of glitterati.  At the entrance to the Gund Gallery, a wall of 16 screens offers behind-the-scenes video of the globetrotting photographer. In addition, visitors to the exhibition can experience Mario Testino in action and recalling career-defining moments on the Museum’s hand-held multimedia guide, which features audio and video selections relating to works in the exhibitions. Among the many famous faces on view are Jennifer Lopez, Keith Richards, Kate Winslet, and Ashton Kutcher. Styled portraits are juxtaposed with candid private party snapshots, nudes with fashion, black-and-white with color, and interiors with exterior settings. These arrangements capture the interplay of mass media, celebrity, and glamour, showcased in an installation that offers the observer a more intimate connection with the works. The photographs, many of them printed on aluminum, rest on shelves running the length of the teal-colored Gund Gallery. Images vary in size, ranging from monumental color prints (8’x6’) to intimately sized (1’x2’) black-and-white snapshots.   

“The MFA’s relationship with Mario Testino began when he came to the Museum in 2010 to participate in the Karsh photography lecture series” said Anne Havinga, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs at the MFA.   “These two exhibitions are the result of a wonderful collaboration between Mario and the Museum, and reveal the artist’s perspective on the popular culture of our time.”  

Mario Testino is highly regarded for the photographs of British royalty he has been commissioned to take throughout his career, and he has chosen his personal favorites for the exhibition British Royal Portraits. “I have been so fortunate to have documented key moments in the lives of the British royal family. I have always been inspired by their sense of tradition and duty—it is always a huge honor for me to photograph them and I am delighted that many of these pictures will be on display, together for the first time, in the Herb Ritts gallery at the MFA,” said Mario Testino. 

TRH The Duke & Duchess of Cambridge, London, 2010 

© Mario Testino 

Photo Courtesy of the artist and MFA, Boston

British Royal Portraits is the first US showing of the 2010 engagement portraits Testino was commissioned to take of Prince William and Kate Middleton, now TRH The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.  Also on view is the iconic and elegant black-and-white portrait he took of Diana, Princess of Wales, which first appeared in Vanity Fair magazine in 1997 and was her last official sitting before her death that year. The framed images of the royals—many measuring approximately 3’ x 4‘—are shown against royal blue walls. They range from a snapshot of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to informal black-and-white images of Prince Charles with his sons William and Harry.  Also on view is the first picture Mario Testino took of members of the House of Windsor a few years after arriving in London from Peru. The photographer snapped an impromptu black-and-white shot of The Queen Mother and her grandson, Prince Edward, as they passed by crowds gathered in London’s streets to celebrate the marriage of HRH The Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Since then, Mario Testino has become a preferred photographer of the royal family.    

To complement the exhibition Mario Testino: In Your Face, a variety of publications, limited-edition prints by Mario Testino, designer jewelry, and select fashions are being offered in the MFA Bookstore and Shop. The 223-page publication Mario Testino: In Your Face (Taschen, 2012) features 122 black-and-white and color images taken by Testino from 1993 through 2012 and includes contributions by Anna Wintour, Editor in Chief of Vogue; Jennifer Allen, editor of the contemporary art and culture magazine, frieze d/e; and Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA. Other Testino books on sale include MaRio de Janeiro Testino (Tashen, 2009), and Kate Moss by Mario Testino (Taschen, 2011), as well as limited editions of Visionarie No. 46: Uncensored (Visionaire, 2005), a book edited by Testino highlighting the work of various artists on the theme of sex.  Additionally, the shop is offering four limited-edition prints signed by Testino featuring images of models Kate Moss, Carmen Kass, and Natalia Vodianova, and actress Sienna Miller. 

These exhibitions, his first in the United States, are co-sponsored by Stuart Weitzman and Swarovski.  Additional support for Mario Testino: British Royal Portraits is provided by British Airways.  

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum's website: www.mfa.org

MFA Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – The New MFA opens

MFA - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to open Art of the Americas Wing
and Shapiro Family Courtyard,
designed by Foster + Partners

The highly anticipated wing for the Art of the Americas and Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), will open to the public on Saturday, November 20. In celebration, the Museum is hosting a free Community Day to welcome visitors to see The New MFA. The wing and enclosed courtyard are the focal points of the Museum’s transformational expansion and renovation project, designed by internationally renowned architects Foster + Partners (London). These additions elegantly incorporate a modernist aesthetic into the Museum’s 1909 Beaux Arts building. The MFA’s project represents the most expansive initiative focused on American art and culture happening in the world today. It allows for more than 5,000 works from the Museum’s Art of the Americas collections to be on view, which more than doubles the number previously displayed. Complementing the wing is a soaring glass courtyard—the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard—one of the most distinctive architectural spaces in Boston, which serves as a dynamic central meeting place within the MFA.

“With the opening of the new wing for the Art of the Americas and the Shapiro Family Courtyard, our vision for The New MFA will be realized. These beautifully designed spaces will enrich the visitor experience and set a dramatic stage for the Museum’s Art of the Americas collections in a unique setting—Boston—where much of this country’s history took shape,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the Museum. “The MFA chose to collaborate with Foster + Partners because of the firm’s unparalleled reputation for space planning and its deep understanding of how to best present the Museum’s great works of art. Foster + Partners has succeeded in not only designing a magnificent addition that is innovative and functional, but also in developing a comprehensive master site plan for the Museum for future generations.”

Foster + Partners, the Pritzker prize-winning international studio for architecture, planning, and design, is led by its founder and chairman, Lord Foster, who supervised the design of the MFA’s expansion and renovation with Spencer de Grey, Senior Partner and Head of Design, and Michael Jones, Partner.

“This has been one of the most fascinating projects—how to combine the constraints of history with a new intervention that will show off the Museum’s extraordinary collection of American Art in a way that will excite, entrance and educate the MFA’s public,” said Spencer de Grey. “Learning from the Museum’s original master plan we have re-addressed the balance of the Museum, creating contemporary spaces for the display of the collection and a new heart for the MFA encapsulated in glass.”

The MFA’s expansion and renovation project will provide additional space for the Museum’s encyclopedic collections, special exhibitions, and educational programs. It increases the building’s total square footage by 28 percent, from 483,447 to 616,937 square feet. The design by Foster + Partners reestablishes the MFA’s important north-south axis envisioned by Guy Lowell, the Museum’s original architect (1870–1927), which brings visitors to the heart of the MFA and improves navigation throughout the building. New landscaping surrounding the Museum’s campus, designed by landscape architects Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd. (Seattle, WA), complements the building. The design, which includes more than 1,000 holly bushes and 50 trees, was inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted’s nearby Back Bay Fens, part of his famed Emerald Necklace.

The 121,307-square-foot wing for the Art of the Americas, located to the east of the Museum along Forsyth Way, features a central glass building flanked by two pavilions of glass and granite, one north and one south. Foster + Partners developed a bespoke, state-of-the-art glazing system for the glass with Seele in Germany and worked with Deer Isle granite from Maine—the same stone used in the MFA’s original building. This dialogue between the old and new is a signature element for which the architects are renowned. The wing’s transparent design makes the Museum more welcoming to the surrounding community, and from the top floors of the four-level building, visitors enjoy a sweeping vista of Boston—from Fenway Park to the Back Bay skyline.

The Art of the Americas Wing contains 53 galleries—totaling 51,338 square feet—which include nine period rooms and four Behind the Scenes galleries. Also featured is the 150-seat Barbara and Theodore Alfond Auditorium—measuring 2,128 square feet—for films, concerts, and lectures, located on the ground level. Adjacent to it are two studio arts classrooms and a seminar room. Additionally, the wing incorporates administrative offices and meeting rooms on the top two levels of the pavilions.

The MFA’s wing offers a broad context for American art, expanding the definition to include works from North, Central, and South America that span the course of three millennia, up to the late 20th century. For the first time since the Museum’s founding in 1870, magnificent works representing all of the Americas are presented together in a wide range of media, including paintings, sculpture, works on paper, furniture, decorative arts, and musical instruments, as well as textiles, fashions, and jewelry.

Galleries are arranged chronologically on the four floors, allowing visitors to travel through time as they rise vertically. They begin on Level LG, which is dedicated to ancient American, Native American, 17th Century, and Maritime Art; Level 1 features 18th-century art of the Colonial Americas and early 19th-century art; Level 2 examines 19th-century and early 20th-century art; and Level 3 presents 20th-century art through the mid 1970s. In the center of each level, large-scale core galleries run along a central spine where key works of art highlight thematic elements of each period. Adding depth and breadth to the broad narratives of these core galleries are additional galleries that run along each side on the north and south.

“The new galleries allow us to present our collections in a variety of ways that highlight different periods, cultures, styles, artists, makers, and themes,” said Elliot Bostwick Davis, the John Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the Americas Department at the MFA, who led the department’s curatorial staff in the planning and installation of the Museum’s new wing. “We hope visitors will discover a range of objects—whether familiar or entirely new to them—that speak to the breadth, richness, and diversity of artistic expression emanating from the United States and, more broadly, from the Americas.”

The wing was designed specifically around the Museum’s Art of the Americas collections. Many galleries feature walls adorned in rich period colors, sumptuous silk brocades, and imported 18th- and 19th-century wallpapers. Light oak floors from the Pacific Northwest have been used in most of the galleries, and more than 200 climate-controlled display cases made by Goppion of Milan are located throughout the wing. Accommodations have been made for works large and small drawn from the MFA’s Art of the Americas collection. On Level 1, where the ceiling height is 15 feet, a special niche was created above one wall of the New Nation Gallery for The Passage of the Delaware (1819), Thomas Sully’s monumental painting and the first canvas to be hung in the new Art of the Americas Wing. Allowances had to be made for both the painting (measuring 12 feet high and 17 feet wide) and its massive frame. While most of the galleries are 15 feet high, on Level 3 the core galleries have a 21’ 5” glass ceiling (with louvered panels to filter light), which allows for the exhibition of large-scale works.

Many iconic works from the Art of the Americas collection are on view in the galleries, including:

- Goldwork in the Ancient South America Gallery and patterned ceramics by the ancient Mimbres and Anasazi in the Native North America Gallery
- Paul Revere’s historic silver Sons of Liberty Bowl (1768), paired with John Singleton Copley’s portrait (1768) of the silversmith and patriot in the Colonial Boston Gallery
- Winslow Homer’s charming canvas, Boys in a Pasture (1874), in Homer and Eakins: The Civil War Gallery
- More than 40 paintings, watercolors, and drawings by John Singer Sargent, including his masterpiece, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), in the Sargent Gallery, paired with the two large Japanese vases pictured in the painting
- A brilliant stained-glass window by Louis Comfort Tiffany, Parakeets and Gold Fish Bowl (about 1893), showcased in the Aesthetic Movement Gallery
- A Folk Art Pictorial quilt (1895-98) sewn by former slave Harriet Powers - Joseph Stella’s spectacular painting Old Brooklyn Bridge (about 1941) in the American Art and Design: The 1920s and 1930s Gallery
- Argentinean artist César Paternosto’s recently acquired bold and vibrant oil Staccato (1965), on view in the Abstraction: A Revolution Gallery

The wing’s nine period rooms (located on Levels LG, 1, and 2) offer full-scale settings illustrating the lifestyles of several prosperous New Englanders in the 17th through 19th centuries, such as two mid 19th-century rooms from the Roswell Gleason House in Dorchester, Massachusetts, installed within the Museum for the first time. The four Behind the Scenes education galleries give visitors a hands-on, insider’s view of the work done by Museum curators and conservators. Digital displays and interactive touch screens in many of the galleries enhance the appreciation of works of art and stylistic periods. In addition, three rotating galleries showcase light-sensitive works—photographs, prints, and textiles—such as images by Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz, prints by Mary Cassatt and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Colonial Boston embroideries and samplers.

The Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard, a soaring glass structure enclosing one of the Museum’s two courtyards, is adjacent to the Art of the Americas Wing. The spectacular light-filled gathering place, where visitors can meet, relax, and dine in the café, affords year-round enjoyment of the outdoors and also serves as a venue for special events. Measuring 12,184-square feet and 63 feet high, the courtyard is almost entirely composed of double- and triple-glazed glass—504 large panels, totaling 29,550 square feet—supported by a steel frame. Inside the courtyard, ivory “crema luna” limestone from France lines the eastern wall where it meets the Art of the Americas Wing and frames the wing’s “floating” staircase. Kuru Grey granite from Finland is used for the floor. The courtyard offers a link between the Sharf Visitor Center in the heart of the Museum’s historic building, and the new wing for the Art of the Americas to the east. Because of its location within the Museum’s original building, the design for the courtyard incorporates landscaped areas along its north and south perimeters featuring sculpture and plantings.

A new Ann and Graham Gund Gallery for special exhibitions is located below the Shapiro Family Courtyard on Level LG, where it connects to the wing for the Art of Americas. The gallery measures 8,280 square feet and nearly 16 feet high. It incorporates a square, open plan and moveable walls, allowing maximum flexibility for the display of artwork, and features a state-of-the-art lighting system. Adjacent to the gallery is a Museum shop. A wide range of special exhibitions reflecting a variety of cultures and time periods will be presented in the new Gund Gallery. The first exhibition is Fresh Ink: Ten Takes on Contemporary Chinese Tradition (on view November 20, 2010, through February 13, 2011), which offers a dynamic dialogue between masterpieces of the MFA’s collection and newly created works of contemporary Chinese art.

In addition to new construction, the MFA’s expansive building project incorporated significant renovations to the Museum’s historic building, including the State Street Corporation Fenway Entrance to the north and the Huntington Avenue Entrance on the Avenue of the Arts to the south, which reinforced the MFA’s original axis. This enhances the ways visitors encounter the Museum and its encyclopedic collections, and offers a coherent plan for navigation throughout the building. Also renovated were the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Visitor Center, numerous galleries, and conservation labs.

The MFA’s building team, in addition to Foster + Partners, included CBT/Childs Bertman Tseckares Inc., Boston, architect of record, and John Moriarty & Associates, General Contractor, Boston, construction manager. The project, which broke ground in 2005, was supported by a $504 million campaign, which included $345 million for new construction and renovations, and $159 million for endowment of programs and positions, and annual operations. More than 25,000 people contributed to the campaign, which concluded in 2008.

These ambitious expansion and renovation initiatives underscore the MFA’s mission, to make art more accessible and exciting for the more than one million families, school children, college students and adults who come to the Museum each year for inspiration and education, and who value it as a vital community resource. The MFA’s enhancements enrich the experience for visitors from Boston and around the world by offering vibrant new spaces and by showcasing works from all of the Americas in a comprehensive new context. In celebration of The New MFA, a number of special events are planned, beginning with the free Community Day on Saturday, November 20. Those individuals interested in a preview are encouraged to support the MFA by becoming a Member and attend special Members Week activities November 14–19.

ART OF AMERICAS PUBLICATION

 

A NEW WORLD IMAGED  © MFA

In conjunction with the opening of the MFA’s new wing for the Art of the Americas, A New World Imagined: Art of the Americas (MFA Publications, 2010), will be published in November. The book offers a bold new look at the art of the Americas by viewing it through its intersections with the world at large. Taking the vast geography and cultural diversity of the North and South American continents as its starting point, it introduces the ways in which American art, broadly defined, has been shaped both by its encounters with cultures around the globe and by its own past—from the ancient and native populations who first inhabited these territories to the European, Asian, Scandinavian, and Latino émigrés who settled here. Edited by Elliot Bostwick Davis, the John Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the Americas Department at the MFA, A New World Imagined presents essays by Museum curators who discuss more than 200 works of art from the MFA, including some of its most celebrated paintings, sculpture, and furniture. The 350-page book features approximately 300 color images. By Elliot B. Davis, Dennis Carr, Nonie Gadsden, Cody Hartley, Erica E. Hirshler, Heather Hole, Kelly H. L’Ecuyer, Karen E. Quinn, Dorie Reents-Budet & Gerald W. R. Ward. It is available in hardcover for $60 at the MFA Bookstore and Shop or at mfa.org/publications

Other MFA's related publications

American Painting - MFA Highlights   © MFA

By Elliot B. Davis, Erica E. Hirshler, Janet L. Comey, Karen E. Quinn, Ellen Roberts & Carol Troyen
232 pages. 150 color illustrations

"Over 100 masterworks from 1670 to 1960, by artists as diverse as Sargent, Whistler, Cassatt, Hopper, Gorky, and Pollock. Both a brief history of American painting, from the British colonies to the mid 20th century, and a discussion of its crucial themes, this is a valuable and enjoyable resource."

Native American Art - MFA Highlights   © MFA

By Gerald W. R. Ward, Pamela A. Parmal, Michael Suing, Heather Hole & Jennifer Swope
192 pages. 154 color & 6 b/w illustrations, 1 map

"The collection of Native American artworks is one of the hidden treasures of the MFA, with many of its finest objects seldom displayed to ensure their preservation. This book presents 100 of these little-known works—many published for the first time—ranging from ancient to contemporary, and covering objects from across the North American continent."

American Decorative Arts and Sculpture - MFA Highlights © MFA

By Gerald W. R. Ward, Nonie Gadsden & Kelly H. L’Ecuyer
224 pages. 188 color illustrations

"With over 100 carefully selected masterpieces of furniture, silver, glass, ceramics, coins and medals, basketry, and sculpture, this volume offers a unique window into the beauty and meaning of the decorative arts as they have flourished in the American context, broadly conceived."

Masterpices: Great Paintings of the World in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston  © MFA

Foreword by Malcolm Rogers
224 pages. 170 color illustrations

"Whatever form it takes, the expressiveness and adaptability of paint have stirred artists throughout history. This completely rewritten and redesigned edition of a longstanding favorite presents 150 works by artists from Asia, Europe, and the Americas: delicate Song-dynasty handscrolls, jewel-like images of medieval piety, scenes of mythic drama, austere still lifes, sensitive portraits, grand landscapes, and jarring modern visions. Featuring artists such as Rembrandt, El Greco, Copley, Monet, Sargent, and Picasso, anonymous masters of medieval Europe and Asia, and living painters of uncompromising vision such as Gerhard Richter and David Hockney, Masterpieces is a lavish celebration of the possibilities of paint."

Silver of the Americas, 1600-2000: American Silver in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston  © MFA

Edited by Jeannine Falino & Gerald W. R. Ward
560 pages. over 1,000 duotone illustrations

"Nearly 700 objects from the 17th century to the present, including the Colonial era, Federal period, 19th-century Revival styles, the aesthetic movement, the Arts and Crafts period, and 20th-century modernism."

The MFA Handbook: A Guide to the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston © MFA

By Gilian Shallcross, introduction by Malcolm Rogers
400 pages. Color illustrations throughout

"Featuring more than 500 objects from all times and places (nearly 100 of them new to this edition)—Native American ceramics to European shoes, Egyptian funerary arts to Warhol silkscreens, not to mention the Museum’s world-renowned collections of paintings and sculpture—The MFA Handbook provides a window on works that have surprised, delighted, and inspired visitors since the MFA first opened its doors in 1876."

Director's Choice: A Tour of Masterpices in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston © MFA

By Malcolm Rogers
80 pages. 80 color illustrations

"Discussing some 70 objects from across the MFA’s extensive collections, Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, takes readers on a virtual tour of the Museum’s most outstanding masterworks. The objects presented cover the full range of times and cultures, from Yorumba veranda posts, Mayan drinking vessels, and Asian decorative arts to paintings, sculptures, and prints by the likes of Hopper, Homer, O’Keeffe, Pollock, Rubens, Turner, El Greco, Renoir, and many others."

Invitation to Art: A History of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston  © MFA

By Maureen Melton
96 pages. 60 color & 55 duotone illustrations

"This social and architectural history traces the first 135 years of the MFA, from its beginning as a repository for armor to its current status as a leading arts institution. Informal, anecdotal, and profusely illustrated, Invitation to Art sketches Boston’s transformation from the post-Civil War era to the present, showing how the MFA’s role has changed as a reflection of the times. Illustrated with rare archival documents, this is both an informative history and a delightful souvenir."

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115-5523, USA
www.mfa.org
Publications are available at www.mfa.org/publications