Delicate Flowerville

Because I’m such a delicate fucking flower lately (goddamned depressing “antidepressants!"), today I'm gonna keep my nose outta the news and into the arts.

Manabu Ikeda has a new big, BIG drawing (13 x 10 foot) “Rebirth.” Man oh man, I’d love to see this live, up close and in person. It’s at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin.

Here at home, there’s an exhibit of John Wilson's work at the MFA – gotta go!

There's an interesting sounding exhibit coming up at the Danforth in Beverly. Color and Line: Expressive Traditions in Boston.

Influenced by the teachings of German Expressionist Karl Zerbe, and the early work of Hyman Bloom and Jack Levine, artists coming of age in Boston in the 1940s and 1950s vividly used figuration, color, and line to translate emotion and sense of the inner self to their works. Boston’s figurative style emerged in the 1940s as an expansion of the modernist canon, and this exhibition will explore figurative abstraction as an alternative modernism.

Academic jibber-jabber about art always slays me. I’m sure all these words are just the perfect way to express the concepts which the curators are trying to get across. They're only clear though IF you’re another art history type. I may be on a hair trigger here – known too many asshats who talk like this. It's like they're speaking some ponderous, flatulent secret language – speaking only to their own kind. The elocutionists fail to understand this.

Does the work spark some emotion in you? Does it set you on fire? Soothe? Inspire laughter or grin? Knock you out with its beauty? Help you to grok some previously not-thought-too-much-about bit of reality? Yes? Cool! No? K.

In any case, I’ve never been to this museum before so…ROAD TRIP!

There’s an exhibit of Tony Oursler’s work at the MoMA. I’d like to see that – looks wild. While I’m there I could hit The Whitney – always one of my faves. Two museums in one day? Yeah, I think that’s be my limit.

There’s a round trip bus (with WIFI!) to NYC for, at most, around $50 which beats all hell out of the train’s price of, between $116 and, close to, $300. I could get a room at the Y for $118 (standard single). And then there’re the museum entry fees – $22 for the Whitney and $25 for the MoMA.

Yup, this’d be an expensive trip.

A Walk in the Meadows at Argenteuil – Monet

Closer in (so doable in one day) is the RISD Museum – the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design (Jen’s alma mater!) – down in Providence. Right now there’s an Impressionism show featuring works on paper by Degas and Monet.

And this looks interesting:

Whirling Return of the Ancestors: Egúngún Masquerade Ensembles of the Yorùbá

Whirling Return of the Ancestors celebrates the rich and varied artistry of the ensembles worn in Egúngún masquerades—performances that celebrate the power and presence of ancestral spirits among Yorùbá peoples of West Africa. In this installation, works on loan from Brown University’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology are presented alongside a magnificent, newly commissioned ensemble from Yorùbá artisans in Benin.

Never been here either – obvs need to make a trip.

Got any recommendations for other MUST-see shows?