Arts This Week:
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Harvard Art Museums, Re-openning to the public this Sunday, November 16th.
The Harvard Art Museums(Fogg Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, and Arthur M. Sackler Museum) will open their new Renzo Piano Building to the public this weekend. The renovation and expansion of the museums’ landmark building at 32 Quincy Street in Cambridge will bring the three museums and their collections together under one roof for the first time. Together, the collections of the Fogg Museum, the Busch- Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum consist of approximately 250,000 objects dating from ancient times to the present, giving students, faculty, scholars, and the public one of the world’s great institutions for arts scholarship and research. Tom Lentz, Director of the Harvard Art Museums, explained to me what it means that they encourage visitors to indulge in "slow looking".
“We very much like the notion of walking into a gallery and being confronted with maybe 50 works of art, rather than 150 works of art, and we’ve thought long and carefully about the amount of space, the air we want around works of art, the amount of space we want around people in interaction with the works of art. All the while, we are trying to maintain not only the sense of intimacy with works of art, but also trying to stay true to what we’ve always felt were historical strengths of this institution,” Lentz said.
Awake and Sing, Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company, it plays at the BU Theatre.
Meet three generations of an immigrant Jewish family, crammed into a Bronx apartment where they dream of a brighter future. Matriarch Bessie’s fierce determination keeps her family afloat whatever the cost as she faces opposition from those with vastly different definitions of success. Gritty, passionate, funny, and heartbreaking, Odets' 1935 masterpiece beautifully captures both the hopes and the struggles of an unforgettable American family fighting for security and prosperity as they emerge from the Great Depression.
Fenway Studios, Enjoy Open Studios this Saturday and Sunday (Nov. 15-16).
Fenway Studios is a limited-equity artists’ cooperative located at 30 Ipswich Street in Boston. The Arts and Crafts style building was built in 1905 with North light and 12-foot windows for all 46 studios.It is the oldest continuous artist building in the country and was designated a National Historic Landmark in the late 1990s. Artist Ed Stitt explained to me the imporatance of the building’s hallmark North light.
“To walk into these studios where you walk in on a balcony and have North light that’s 12, 14 feet high, the same light all day long, that you can paint a still life, a portrait, doesn’t’ matter. You can start at 8am and have the same light pretty much the same at 6pm is stunning. It’s just unheard of. And it’s all old technology. You don’t have to have electricity. It’s just there. And you use it,” Stitt said.
Rosewater, In theaters Friday.
The new film you've heard about from The Daily Show's Jon Stewart is based on the best-selling memoir “Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival,” written by the BBC journalist Maziar Bahari. It's a true story, and the film marks Stewart's screenwriting and directorial debut. It stars Gael Garcia Bernal.”
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This week on Open Studio I walk through the newly designed Harvard Art Museums, looking back at the renovation process with comments by museum director, Thomas W. Lentz .
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