Howard Kaplan

The weather in American Art's Lincoln Gallery has gotten a bit cloudier, thanks to the addition of April Gornik's 1992 painting, Virga. Its dramatic swirls of cumulus that dip like a crow's wing over troubled water depict a storm brewing on the horizon. The painting is a recent gift to the museum from James F. Dicke II, the sponsor of the museum's annual lecture in contemporary art that bears his name.

Most people, if they're going to fall anywhere in the vicinity of paradise, are likely to fall from it. Bill Viola's installation from 2005, The Fall into Paradise shows a couple who seem to have reversed the process and entered their own private Eden.

In 1952 Sara Roby established a foundation to encourage artists creating figurative works, at a time when Abstract Expressionism was the dominant force in the art world in the years following World War II.

This is the thirteenth in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums. Take a look at Howard's other blog posts about seeing things.

The snow was coming and I was racing around town before my weather sequester began. When I got to the store the parking lot was filled, and cars were backed out onto the street (obviously, everyone's storm timing was in sync).

My favorite new story comes from the writings of poet Naomi Shihab Nye and her prose piece, "Museum," from her collection, Honeybee.

Remember when LOVE was all the rage, as opposed to social media's lukewarm, one-size-fits-all, "Like"? Robert Indiana's iconic Pop image from 1970 seemed to sum up the era in its message as well as its delivery: bright colors and strong graphics.

Time magazine art critic Richard Lacayo spoke the other evening on the work and lives of aging artists as the second speaker in this year's Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art.

Teresita Fernández's Nocturnal (Horizon Line), installed in the third floor galleries of American Art, strikes the viewer for both its beauty and its weight, as this piece is made of mined graphite. But in the artist's hands, the dense mineral becomes a canvas, and her work blooms into an homage to the beauty and mystery of evening, much the same as James McNeill Whistler's tonalist works and ethereal Nocturnes of the late 19th century, examined the beauty and poetry of twilight and the hours that followed.

This is the twelfth in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums. Take a look at Howard's other blog posts about seeing things.

Visual storyteller and insider into the worlds of high art and everyday objects, stage and street, Irving Penn is one of the most renowned photographers of the last century. He is perhaps best recognized for his fashion work for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue that helped to transform the images from magazine portraits into fine art.

With the recent acquisition of Cloud Music, a collaboration between Robert Watts, David Behrman, and Bob Diamond, one window-lit corner of the Lincoln Gallery has been turned into a sky-driven audio/video installation.

This is the eleventh in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums. Take a look at Howard's other blog posts about seeing things.

The elegant Grand Salon was the setting for a panel discussion on the many lives and interests of Thomas Day, the subject of the Renwick Gallery’s, Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color.

April is National Poetry Month.

The Civil War was anything but civil, as Harvard president and noted historian Drew Gilpin Faust reminded us the other evening when she spoke at American Art in conjunction with the current exhibition, The Civil War and American Art.

Eye Level had a chance to speak with Leslie Umberger, curator of folk and self-taught art, about the museum's recent acquisition of the Mingering Mike collection, comprised of well over one hundred pieces of musical ephemera made between 1965 and 1979 by a self-taught Washington, D.C. artist who has consistently chosen to conceal his true identity.

This is the tenth in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums. Take a look at Howard's other blog posts on the subject.

Nam June Paik was more than a guy who made sculptural work with televisions. He was a thoughtful, prescient artist who turned ideas about communication on its head in the middle of the twentieth century.

This is the ninth in a series of personal observations about how people experience and explore museums. Take a look at Howard's other blog posts on the subject.