When many of us travel, we are ushered around carefully preened and planned channels that brush against but never penetrate the world known by the locals. And the exotic versions of the place offered to visitors are rarely experienced by the actual residents. This is the consideration behind Barbadian artist Ewan Atkinson’s “The Neighbourhood Project.” […]
Art
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Figures framing essence
Every so often, art collector and dealer Deborah Ronnen and her assistant Jen Burger pull together a showcase of work to exhibit at Deborah Ronnen Fine Art. Ronnen is dedicated to introducing Rochester audiences — and collectors — to work by artists they might not otherwise encounter. The current show on view, “Body and Soul,” […]
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Exhibit looks at the Xerox copier as the ‘Immovable Camera’
Xerox played a large role in West Coast art movements.
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Bright earth
A show of 18 luminous, unabashedly joyful paintings by Jay Pullman is on view at Lumiere Photo’s Spectrum Gallery through Saturday, November 28. The lovely work depicts all four glorious seasons, and even the snowy scenes are cheerful enough to quell some of my dread of the impending winter. The small paintings mostly portray the […]
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Social Reportage exhibit focuses on harvest workers
The approaching season of feasts kicked off the tastes of fall, with cheerful trips to famers’ markets for fresh apples and cider, pumpkins and squashes. But as we indulge in the fruits of the harvest, it’s important to think about whose labor brought those fruits to our tables. As the presidential election approaches, our national […]
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Turning the camera on the glitz and glamour
Photo exhibit at Eastman Museum documents the lives of the wealthy.
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When words fail
Post-war artists became not painters of pictures, but painters of conditions, reflecting — in works that properly defied tangibility – the world’s disillusionment. They expressed the mammoth weight of things that are universally experienced but not easily uttered. Viewing these works can therefore be something of a spiritual experience, where we reach out to touch […]
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MAG exhibit highlights Carl Peters and the era of WPA murals
In flourishing civilizations, public art was funded by the ruling class as a marker of how well society was doing. But in America today, arts funding always seems to be first on the chopping block. So it’s rather amazing that during the Great Depression, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal sought to create jobs […]
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Implied forces
Robert Ernst Marx’s sculptures, prints, and paintings are populated with weatherworn humans. They are portraits of nonspecific people and of the intangible things we all carry; they are some of the loveliest depictions of the fragility and resilience of humanity. A new exhibition of Marx’s work opened recently at Rochester Picture Frame, held in celebration […]
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Eastman Museum acquires William Kentridge works
The George Eastman Museum announced today that William Kentridge, an internationally renowned South African artist, has donated the complete set of his films, videos, and digital-born works to the museum. This gift includes both original negatives and positive prints representing Kentridge’s entire career as a filmmaker, as well as all of the master elements of […]
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Spotlighting the mundane
A fascinating new show, recently opened at Gallery r, considers the world’s volume of discarded objects and sidelined creatures. In “New Sense,” artist Cecily Culver explores how the non-human world almost imperceptibly brushes against our own, and imagines the strange sentience of non-human experience. Much of the work is drawn from Culver’s thesis project, “Other […]
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Glass artist creates her own Cabinet of Wonders
Axom Gallery’s current show, “Menagerie,” featuring flame-worked glass and metal by Robin Cass, explores concepts of capturing life through a fictitious version of the natural wonderland that surrounds us. The body of work is based on the tradition of the Wunderkammern, or cabinet of wonders — old-timey collections of rare natural specimens shown off for […]
