Keeping Time review in the Globe

The Keeping Time review ran today in the Boston Globe and it's a good one! Yippee! I am in Rochester now so have my backups picking up a copy in Boston. Click here to read it.

The perspicacious Mark Feeney has some incredible insights as always. We get two wonderful literary quotes too:

"In 'Four Quartets,' T.S. Eliot writes that 'to apprehend/ The point of intersection of the timeless/ With time, is an occupation for the saint.'"...(begins the review, and later on)... "Their concern is with what Edward Abbey, in 'Desert Solitaire,' describes as 'that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.'"

Here are some of my favorite Feeney phrases (the last Morris Louis one is truly super):

Among the virtues of "Keeping Time: Cycle and Duration in Contemporary Photography," which runs at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University through Jan. 25, is the reminder it brings that time is not just the ocean photography splashes in but also the spray that it raises.

All photographs are, so to speak, sun-singed. ...Think of the process as a visual equivalent of distressing a surface. Where a photograph captures an instant in time, McCaw's techniques indicate time's ongoing effects on that instant.

As the sun casts shadows from wine bottles, drinking glasses, and the like, Cummins traces the outlines of those shadows in colored inks. Meal concluded, she photographs the chromatic accumulation. Visually, it's like having Morris Louis as your waiter.

New England Survey in the Globe! (written by their Pulitzer Prize winning reviewer)

Tuesday was an important newspaper day in Boston. Gracing the front page of the Boston Globe was the Red Sox's opening day at Fenway and the announcement that their own Mark Feeney won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, as noted in the last post.

Humbly for us, Mark Feeney's review of the current PRC landscape exhibition, New England Survey, also ran in the very same Globe. (And super luckily for us, he liked it!) I am thrilled at the confluence of events. I wrote to congratulate Mark, and he modestly replied that it's a win for the paper and different than organizing an exhibition. To his and their credit, we had several people visit today because of his review and lots of calls. Here's to the power of well-crafted words and the media!

You can read Mark Feeney's review of the PRC exhibition New England Survey here.

You can read the official Globe story on Mark Feeney's Pulitzer Prize in Criticism here.

You can read some of his nominated stories here.

Mark Feeney of Boston Globe wins 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism

I am delighted to report that Mark Feeney, resident art, photo, and culture critic at the Boston Globe, has won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism! I just learned about the great news. Congratulations Mark! You so richly deserve it!

I am also honored to report that one of the 10 stories with which Mark was nominated and won was his review for my PRC exhibition Picture Show. I had previously gone on about his insightful commentary and ability to create brilliant turns of phrases before.

You can read all of Mark's nominated, prize-winning stories here, including his reviews of the photographic efforts of several PRC friends -- Kim Sichel's aerial photography show, Arlette Kayafas's Charles Teenie Harris show, and Abe Morell's Mead Art Museum show. Being that we are a smaller non-profit in a largish city, I am thrilled and humbled that Mark has written about our shows so often, or even at all. You can read 5 of Mark's reviews of PRC exhibitions at this link.

I so very much appreciate the time that Mark spends in understanding an exhibition, something that not every critic does, and I know the artists do too. He always asks for all of the wall text and artist statements and spends a long taking in a show. In his writing, you can tell how much he enjoys pondering ideas of all stripes.

Here are some excerpts below from the Boston Globe story and above, a photo by another of my favorite Globe staffers, Dominic Chavez.

From the Boston Globe, Globe writer wins Pulitzer Prize for criticism
By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff, April 7, 2008

Mark Feeney, an arts writer and photography reviewer for The Boston Globe, today was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

It is the 20th time the Globe has won the Pulitzer, which is considered the most prestigious award in journalism, and the second time in the past seven years that the newspaper has won the award for criticism.

Feeney, 50, won for 10 essays on visual culture that ranged from photography to painting and film. A self-described Globe "lifer'' who began working at the newspaper shortly after he graduated from Harvard in 1979, Feeney noted today that the Globe has long made arts criticism a cornerstone of its identity.

"More than anything else, it's about the paper,'' he said of the Pulitzer. "There are so many people who are deserving who don't get it. It's a crapshoot. I'm just amazed, overwhelmed, and really, really pleased that the dice came up for me this time. But it's not just for me. It's for the paper.''

The awards were announced this afternoon at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. ...

Feeney won the Pulitzer for 10 critical essays that suggest the fluency and brio of his writing style, and the range of interests on which he brings that style to bear. ...

"The Globe has a great tradition of reviewers, not just such prior Pulitzer winners as Robert Campbell and Gail Caldwell, but so many others, going all the way back to Michael Steinberg, Robert Taylor, Richard Dyer, Margaret Manning, and several current colleagues whom I will not embarrass by naming,'' said Feeney.

Feeney was born in Winchester, Mass., and raised in Reading, Mass. His mother, Agnes, who still lives in Reading, will turn 90 on Saturday."I've been at a loss as to what to get her for a present,'' Feeney said. "I guess I'm all set now.''

Picture Show: Home Run!

Since it is baseball season, it's apt to suggest that the current PRC exhibition, Picture Show, is a home run! We had an EXCELLENT review in the Boston Globe, courtesy of the amazing writer Mark Feeney. The show seems to have hit a nerve and we have gotten a lot of press. I am equally a fan of Mark's insightful reviews as much as I am grateful that he actually takes the time to read and experience a whole exhibition. He always knits together culture, history, and philosophy in his art reviews; I try to do the same in my exhibitions via art, text, and the environment. Exhibitions are my art, so I couldn't be happier that someone appreciated it at that level. The idea of this show has haunted me for a while. These wonderful artists worked very hard to install this complicated show and were so excited to be in such company that many made or adapted new works for the show. Here are some of my favorite phrasings from Mark's review:

The aim of this show of contemporary art is to re-create the enchantment viewers experienced when first encountering these visual marvels a century and more ago. The PRC gallery, curator Leslie K. Brown writes, has been made over into "a space somewhere between a cabinet of curiosity, carnival spectacle, and an early motion picture theatre." An even better analogy might be to the interior of one of Joseph Cornell's boxes. There's the same sense of sly magic and delicate otherworldliness.

In "Always, Just Beyond Reach," a set of outstretched hands can never quite reach a set of pretty flowers. Futility has rarely been so sweetly appointed. It's as if Laura Ashley were hosting a garden party in honor of Tantalus and Zeno.

In a league by itself is Hans Spinnermen's "The Dream of Timmy Bumblebee." It consists of an impressive contraption of metal and glass that looks not unlike an immobilized, Jenny Craig version of Robbie the Robot from "Forbidden Planet. " Projected within it is a film of a bumblebee in flight. The film is incidental to the rather majestic monstrosity of
Spinnermen's creation, which is on loan from le Musee Patamecanique, in Bristol, R.I.

I feel humbled; what more could a curator want than to have their gallery be compared to the inside of a Joseph Cornell box! (For Cornell fans, the Peabody Essex Museum will be hosting a huge retrospective of Cornell's work opening April 28.) The second quote is brilliant, what more can a writer pack into that last sentence!

Picture Show is up until May 6th at the PRC. As the artworks are interactive and kinetic, the show needs you to work! We hope that you can experience the show, but for those out of town you can check out Picture Show installation and opening images on our Flickr site. Enjoy!