An exhibition at Pepperdine University in Malibu chronicles the achievements and contributions of African Americans over the last five centuries. The residency program awards 17 visual artists a year of rent-free studio space in New York City. Applications are due by February Thomas was a major artist who in her lifetime was unjustly denied the acclaim she merited. This show is a brave beginning. For years, Fueki has been quietly creating a singular body of mind-bending work that has never fit into the New York art world.
What if every regional museum could offer free or subsidized daycare that taught secular values about participatory democracy and culture? A 6-foot clerestory cut into ceiling high above invites natural light. And most important are her new gallery-mates: Hercules and Athena and Apollo and Zeus, Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, her natural kin.
The metaphor works: After a long climb, she and her team of curators had finally reached the summit. All were in on-and-off states of partial closure for decades as the museum shuffled priorities everywhere else.
It would take until , and the discovery of Juno in Brookline, for the real planning to begin. Finally, in , the entire wing closed, and the actual work started.
So nearly 21 years later, Kondoleon can be forgiven a moment of satisfaction and a critical look back. Juno, the misfit, was the catalyst. It was a makeshift solution. But it was denigrating to the objects. We have to enrich and present them in a way that shows we respect them. This is no longer a problem. Beyond, the classical world from Greece to Rome unfolded in a chain of voluminous galleries chock-full of singular wonders as well as everyday things — more than 1, objects all told.
For the years it had been shuttered, the wing was like a ghost limb affixed to a vibrant and ever-changing institution. Having arrived in Boston not long before the closure, I was seeing these spaces for the very first time — a vast 15,square-foot swath of the building that I barely knew to exist.
The largest space, devoted to Early Greek culture, is connected by a grand staircase to the Egyptian galleries which, until just a few weeks ago, led up to a walled-off landing. Now, everything is connected — in the museum as in the ancient world.
A haunting full-figure marble of a priestess, enveloped in the folds of her flowing habit. An impish young boy, from 50 CE, missing his nose — common in antiquity; with marble, the nose is the first to go — glares devilishly at the viewer.
In a glass case, a rare terra-cotta bust of an older man from the first century BCE is perfectly intact, as though made last week and not 2, years ago. People are still people, despite thousands of years in between. A cluster of works by Cy Twombly, spare and magnetic, occupies a generous space in the Early Greek Art galleries, the artist having been deeply inspired by classical motifs. The galleries also have fundamental historical lessons to teach, which they do with a light touch, letting the objects speak for themselves.
Constantine had ended the Roman persecution of Christians, embracing the faith as legitimate and helping it to spread as far as Egypt and beyond. At the heart of the room is a ravishing product of that vision: the towering Monopoli altarpiece, framing 15th-century panel paintings of the Virgin and Child, Saints Christopher, Augustine, John the Baptist, Stephen, Nicholas, and Sebastian in shimmering gold.
Here, a quibble: A tall vitrine, with Byzantine devotional objects dangling, obscures what would otherwise be a jaw-dropping moment on entry, of a clear view of the altarpiece.
The jaw still drops, but only halfway until you get up close. A problem of too much remarkable material is a good one to have if you have the time and the space to indulge it. So: A corridor leads from Rome and Byzantium to Greece, the length of it lined with so much awe-inspiring work that you could lose hours just getting from A to B.
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