Tag: Emily Dickinson

Museum Exhibitions

The Aldrich Decennial: It is what it is

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s decennial exhibition “I am what is around me,” devoted to Connecticut-based artists and cued by Hartford poet Wallace Stevens’ eponymous verse, is impressively catholic. Curators Amy Smith-Stewart and Caitlin Monachino have ranged throughout the state in making their selections, resisting any urge to stick too comfortably to New Haven and points west. They have also chosen works of considerable nuance and sophistication, eschewing overt political crowd-pleasers or regional pandering, from the studios of artists old, young, and middle-aged, established and emerging their ages spanning almost 60 years. 

Museum Exhibitions

Amy Sherald’s American dreams

Contributed by Margaret McCann /Amy Sherald’s paintings of mostly ordinary and upright African Americans, in “American Sublime” at the Whitney Museum, transcend portraiture, vaulting to socio-political metaphor. Their evocative titles – drawn from Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and other cultural figures – suggest an array of personalities or experiences. But the exhibition title, from Elizabeth Alexander’s poem of the same title, unsettles our understanding of what both figures and viewers behold.