Three hundred years after the Salem Witch Trials, we are still reckoning and learning from this period of American intolerance and injustice. The trials of 1692-1693 led to the deaths of twenty-five innocent people, most of whom were women.
Art Galleries & Museums
The North Carolina Museum of Art began its “collection of art for the people” in 1928 when the then North Carolina State Art Society received a bequest of approximately 75 paintings from Robert F. Phifer.
Ugandan multidisciplinary performance and installation artist, Acaye Kerunen, is making quite a splash on the international art scene. Combining storytelling, writing, acting, and activism in her art, Kerunen designs and creates ambitious, beautifully rendered biomorphic textile installation pieces.
Eight years in the making, this sprawling show of some 350 photographs, videos, and multimedia installations is filled with factual content and ambiguity.
Oman, a country neighboring Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, witnessed the opening of its largest private art gallery during the pandemic, Alia Gallery. A converted warehouse located in Muscat’s industrial area of Al Rusayl, the gallery is the brainchild of Omani artist Alia Al Farsi, one of the Sultanate’s most established artists. With a career spanning decades, Al Farsi has exhibited her work in cities such as Paris, Brussels, Seoul, Venice and Tokyo. But the gallery, which carries her name, remains her proudest achievement to date.
Two decades before he was interred beneath a stark tombstone, the artist Andrew Wyeth imagined his own funeral. In about fifty drawings from the early 90s known as the “Funeral Group,” he sketched family and friends gathered around a coffin containing his supine corpse.
“New York: 1962-1964” is a celebration of the institution hosting it. The Jewish Museum has been a venerable fixture in New York’s cultural firmament for what seems like forever, but six decades ago, under the directorship of Alan Solomon, it was the premier incubator for cutting-edge art when NYC was its undisputed center.
The curators set a welcome stage for the visitor to the Center. Greeting them at the entrance is Martin Sharp’s Blowing in the Mind/Mister Tambourine Man (1968). Sharp is known as the mastermind behind posters and album covers for some of the biggest names in ’60s rock and roll history.
The Benin Bronzes of Nigeria, their provenance, and the possibility of restitution have been making headlines of late. Currently scattered across the world, this collection of a thousand plus statues and plaques was stolen in 1897 from the African Kingdom of Benin, modern-day Nigeria, by British troops.
Fresh off its survey of Faith Ringgold, the New Museum presents a retrospective of another veteran African American painter whose aesthetic DNA courses through subsequent generations of black artists. “Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott” is the artist’s first museum outing since 1989.
