Murray Whyte
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Art stuff from @BostonGlobe art critic Murray Whyte. Also other stuff. x -@TorontoStar, bylines @nytimes @guardian, always 🇨🇦 Insta: @murrayscottwhyte
Articles by Murray Whyte
82 fun things to do in and around Boston this summer - The Boston Globe
Christiani Pitts (Robin) and Sam Tutty (Dougal) in rehearsal for "Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)."Nile Scott Studios TWO STRANGERS (CARRY A CAKE ACROSS NEW YORK CITY) The two strangers in question in this musical two-hander are Dougal, a cheery Britisher in his mid-20s traveling to attend the wedding of his father — whom he has never met — and Robin, also in her 20s, a hard-bitten native New Yorker who is the sister of the young woman Dougal’s father is about to marry.
[2406.19294] Short presentations for transformation monoids
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Five museum shows to enrich your summer excursions, from Connecticut to Maine
Environmental watercolors, the work of Native American Pueblo artists, quilted portraits, and more are on view at New England museums.
Michael Snow’s work was finding wonder in a moment seen and lost in the same instant Original
In 1967, Michael Snow created “Wavelength,” a pioneering experimental film that had all the immediate charm of ragged nails being dragged slowly, painfully across a particularly janky chalkboard.
A deeper look at the Black painter who changed Providence
NEWPORT, R.I. — Making his way through the crowd at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, Edward Mitchell Bannister brushed aside the barbs and the jibes along with the bodies that stood in his way. “As I jostled among them,’’ he wrote years later, “many resented my presence, some actually commenting within my hearing in the most petulant manner: What is that colored person in here for?’’ They would soon see.
‘Nothing short of a miracle’
How the Gardner Museum pulled off a once-in-a-lifetime reunion of Titian’s six ‘Poesie’ paintings TITIAN: WOMEN, MYTH AND POWER At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way. Aug. 12-Jan. 2. 617-566-1401, www.gardnermuseum.org Everyone remembers where they were on March 11, 2020, the day our pre-pandemic world ended. For Peggy Fogelman, director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the memory is more acute than most.
'My Parkdale is gone': how gentrification reached the one place that seemed immune
By now, Michael Nguyen expects them: every month or so, someone representing one international real estate investment firm or another crosses the threshold of the Parkdale Intercultural Centre, a non-profit immigrant settlement agency he runs on a busy stretch of Toronto’s Queen Street West. “It’s the same every time: Who owns the building? How do I get in touch with them? Do they want to sell?” shrugged Nguyen, whose centre has been helping new immigrants adjust to Canadian life for decades.
Opinion | Katharine Mulherin believed in Toronto before Toronto did
The entrance to Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in its longtime home on Queen St. at Dovercourt. The gallery recently reopened near Dupont and Lansdowne. By Murray WhyteSpecial to the Star Fri., July 19, 2019timer4 min.
Why Richard Florida's honeymoon is over | The Star
But the laughing stopped quickly. "Richard Florida's exotic city, his creative city, depends on ghost people, working behind the scenes. Immigrants, people of colour. You want to know what his version of creative is? He's the relocation agent for the global bourgeoisie. And the rest of us don't matter." Honeymoons, typically, are short.
5 Immersive Outdoor Installations at Toronto's Ice Breakers 2019
Article Details Animating Toronto’s wintry waterfront in late January, Ice Breakers 2019 features five installations organized around the theme of Signal Transmission. Here’s what to expect. Seasonal affective disorder be damned. Cities like Toronto are giving hibernators reasons to brave the cold: last year, the city unveiled The Bentway, a cathedral-like events space (complete with a skating rink) under the Gardiner Expressway.
Paint it black: The dark landscapes of David Milne at the McMichael Collection
Is it too much to call David Milne the forgotten man of Canadian historical painting? I think so, but not by much. Milne, a recluse who dwelled in poverty much of his life — in tents, in wilderness shacks, in at least one totally unfurnished, ramshackle house, much to his long-suffering wife’s dismay — has never been much knit into the dominant mythmaking of early 20th century Canadian art.
Sprawling Anthropocene project shows humanity’s enormous impact on the planet
The camera sweeps slowly, right to left, along a towering ridge of ochre stone. The sense is of the monumental — the kind of majesty and scale that only the primal force of violent nature, operating at planetary scale, could yield. Then you see it, and the world turns suddenly sideways: An enormous, churning machine enters the frame, like some kind of apocalyptic ferris wheel, carving grooves into the cliffside with its set of jagged claws.
Five best bets at Nuit Blanche Toronto
“You Are Here,” the big-tent theme to this year’s Nuit Blanche Toronto, might feel at first glance like a catch-all cop-out, but look closer and you’ll see what it means. The notion of “here,” in this ever-growing hurricane of difference and exclusion, is a moving target, and that’s what this year’s model is all about.
Nuit Blanche brings the art party to Scarborough — what took so long? | The Star
A few years ago, a young artist contacted me about coming to see a collective gallery/studio space he and some friends, all recent University of Toronto graduates, had set up in an old light-industrial bay. I do these kinds of things all the time, so I was happy to accept. Then he gave me the address: 1345 Morningside Ave. in Scarborough. The cognitive dissonance alone was enough to lure me outside my usual downtown parameters.
MOCA’s show Believe rewards our faith and patience
BELIEVE, say the big white neon letters presiding like a totem over the foyer of the Museum of Contemporary Art Canada.
MOCA’s art of survival: a timeline
MOCA — or the Art Gallery of North York, or MOCCA, all of which figure into the plucky museum’s patchwork history — has covered miles and years from Mel Lastman Square all the way, finally, to its stately, spanking new home on Sterling Road. David Liss, the museum’s curator, has been along for almost all of that ride. Did he ever doubt this day would come? “Not for a moment,” he said. Did he foresee the long and winding road along the way? “Ah, no,” he says with a laugh. Here it is, step by step.
Five who kept MOCA’s dream alive
It’s been a roller-coaster three years for MOCA, amid setbacks, leaps ahead and everything in between. But the long-mothballed museum is finally, actually, happening this weekend. Along the way, people committed to making the museum live again, this time on Sterling Rd., have endured a lot. What do the final few days before opening look like? Let’s let five of them talk about persisting through a long, sometimes messy journey.
Relief for Milton family as Halton Catholic board backs away from plan to take over farmland for new school
David McCann, part of a long line of farmers to ply his family’s 200 acres near Milton, had a very different experience at the local farmers’ market this weekend than he’s had in recent months. “People were coming up to our stand to congratulate us, or give us high fives,” said the elated farmer, whose family has been working the same land here since 1827. “It was sure a lot nicer than the last few months of condolences and regrets.” McCann and family had plenty of reason to celebrate.
Relief for Milton family as Halton Catholic board backs away from plan to take over farmland for new school | The Star
David McCann, part of a long line of farmers to ply his family’s 200 acres near Milton, had a very different experience at the local farmers’ market this weekend than he’s had in recent months. “People were coming up to our stand to congratulate us, or give us high fives,” said the elated farmer, whose family has been working the same land here since 1827. “It was sure a lot nicer than the last few months of condolences and regrets.” McCann and family had plenty of reason to celebrate.
The mystery of Flavio da Silva, poverty’s poster child
On June 16, 1961, a two-page photo spread in Life magazine said more than the words describing it ever could: On the left page, a corpse, wrapped in white sheeting and laid prone on a cross, candles on either side; and on the right, a 12-year-old boy captured in an eerily similar pose, half-covered in a tatty blanket, his face a gnarl of exhaustion-wracked pain.
Christo: Art on the edge
By Murray WhyteVisual Arts Critic Tue., Sept. 11, 2018timer4 min. read Walking on Water is the title of Andrey Paounov’s new documentary on Christo, the 83-year-old Bulgarian-born artist who, with his late wife Jeanne-Claude, spent decades producing some of the most vast, arresting and elegantly monumental public artworks, well, ever. Be warned, though: the title’s obvious-seeming reference to the miracle-making of another fellow whose name begins with C is, in fact, its paradox.
Painter Mary Pratt found intimacy in everyday objects
No one did light like Mary Pratt. It felt like entire universes dwelled in the unearthly glow her brush would leave behind, and in the most unremarkable of things: A crease of plastic food wrap crinkled by the weight of a shimmering salmon; the sun falling across broken eggshells tucked neatly in their carton; a roast beef riven with gristly veins lying prone on a mirror-sheen silver tray; cod fillets, crumpled in fleshy folds, caught in a late-afternoon glow.
Nuit Blanche Toronto will host a dumpling-themed night market
James St. will host Ken Lum's International Dumpling Festival
Nuit Blanche Toronto will host a dumpling-themed night market | The Star
There’s not much to the block-and-half-long stretch of street between the Eaton Centre and Old City Hall, poking north from Queen St. just a few steps west of the downtown mall’s elevated walkway. You might not even know it’s called James St. unless, like countless unfortunates before you, you ducked into it looking for parking only to fall prey to a hotbed of no-standing zones and the parking cops who zealously protect them.
‘Too naked, too violent:’ The Art Gallery of Ontario’s troubling $100M masterpiece hits the road
Think again. “It’s hard to look at, I know,” sighed Sasha Suda, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s curator of European art. On a recent morning in the museum’s conservation department, Suda helped remove the plastic sheeting, revealing the work in all its terrible glory: A burly, naked warrior poised to dash a chubby infant onto the hard stone ground; a mother clawing at another assailant’s face as her own child teetered in her free arm.
Kent Monkman brings out devil in the details
You can’t let a Kent Monkman show pass unnoticed. Not that there’s really any danger of that — on a recent Saturday at Project Gallery, where Monkman’s Miss Chief’s Praying Hands opened recently, at least a dozen people milled in predictably enraptured glee — but it feels dutifully written into the Canadian media charter as an unofficial credo (show not getting press? Needs more Monkman).
Nathan Phillips Square is even uglier when you know its history
This is the fourth instalment of The Heretic, a series in which our writers express a wildly unpopular opinion. Let’s make something really clear: This article is part of a summer series called ‘The Heretic,’ in which, as the loose rubric goes, “our writers express a wildly unpopular opinion.” I know those words are perched just a few lines up on this very same page. Maybe you saw them. Maybe you didn’t.
Videos elevate anger in Grada Kilomba’s Power Plant show
Grada Kilomba is an artist who likes to lay it bare, make things plain. Secrets to Tell, her show at the Power Plant, by way of the Musuem of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, does plenty of that.
OCADU’s Diagrams of Power: All these maps and it’s still a bit lost
Maps, you’d think, deal in fact: Point A here, point B there, and (thanks, Waze) the path that tracks the shortest distance between the two. But really, maps are the most graphic illustration I can think of that facts depend on your point of view. Slapping down roads and drawing up boundaries is hardly a neutral act; depending on which side you fall, their divisions can be violently exclusive or just plain violent, full stop — ask people on either side of the border in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.
A look beyond the handgun ban
Williams, an affable 28-year veteran of the force, sat in his office in the blue-paneled bunker of the CPD's District 5 headquarters in South Chicago. As he managed his constantly pinging email and two BlackBerrys vibrating at regular intervals on his desk, he suggested a worrying paradox. CHICAGO—Deputy Police Chief Eugene Williams had a tough week. Wednesday morning, a two-storey house in his jurisdiction on the South Side. Five people, shot dead. The following afternoon, two more shootings.
Ellen Gallagher on rot, race and the persistence of life at the Power Plant
A big black box sits lakeside at Harbourfront Centre, a ramp up to its only door framed by golden rails. Inside, it’s hot — black paint, July humidity and a conspicuous lack of shade mix poorly — and when the door shuts behind you, the darkness isn’t the only thing closing in.
Brenda Draney’s memories on linen prove affecting at Oakville Galleries
You just don’t know what’s going to move you on any given day in an art museum. That’s part of the reason you go — to test the fluidity of emotion and mood against the stolidness of form. Artworks don’t change, for the most part — some do, but that’s another story — but what moves you might, depending on the turbulence of your morning, or which way the wind might be blowing; a single artwork might soothe or provoke, disturb or comfort, depending on what you bring to it.
Raghubir Singh at the ROM: Genius, pioneer ... monster? | The Star
When is a photography exhibition not just a photography exhibition? When it’s attended by a preface of disturbing allegations of sexual violence against the artist himself, who complicates matters by having died almost 20 years ago. That was the dilemma faced by the Royal Ontario Museum when, late last year, the pioneering, late Indian photographer Raghubir Singh, who died of a heart attack in 1999, was accused of rape by a former assistant, the New York-based artist Jaishri Abichandani.
Visitors to the Aga Khan Museum can help rebuild a destroyed Iraq library, book by book
An expanse of pale bookcases line the wall of a second-floor gallery at the Aga Khan Museum, shimmering in low light. There’s something quietly reverential about the scene, an implied hush that suggests mourning for something lost. “They almost look like tombstones, the shadows they make,” says Wafaa Bilal, surveying an array of slim, evenly spaced volumes that stand upright on every shelf here. The memorial, though, is just one half of the greater whole.
Give Toronto’s most hated new piece of public art a second chance
This is the third instalment of The Heretic, a series in which our writers express a wildly unpopular opinion. “My God, it’s big” blared the headline of a recent CBC.ca article, predictably decrying the latest addition to the city’s admittedly spotty collection of public artworks. Taken as a statement of fact, it’s hard to refute. The piece in question, Three Points Where Two Lines Meet, a new sculpture by the much-lauded Canadian art duo Daniel Young and Christian Giroux, is anything but discreet.
Rebecca Belmore’s work is monumental, yes, but poetic too
There’s a moment during the informal walk-through of her new exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Facing the Monumental, when a talked-out Rebecca Belmore has a moment to herself. As the group shuffles forward and she pauses for a breath, I ask her what, exactly, to call this outsized display of her storied career. Retrospective isn’t it. “I’m not old enough for that yet!” she blurts, with an easy laugh.
Royal Ontario Museum confronts artists’ sexual misconduct in #MeToo and the Arts
Here was a towering practitioner of contemporary photography who pushed back against conventional wisdom: that the medium and its innovations were entirely owned by the West, whether in Europe by such figures as Henri Cartier-Bresson or Eugène Atget, or in America with luminaries such as Edward Weston and Robert Frank. “I flip-flopped on a daily basis,” said Deepali Dewan, the ROM’s curator of South Asian Art and Culture.
AGO’s new J.S. McLean Centre reveals a broad and unapologetic take on Canadian art
For years at the Art Gallery of Ontario, a smallish space adjacent to the J.S. McLean gallery of Canadian art held a curious permanent feature: a Victorian salon, complete with an ornate oak staircase that led to a mezzanine to better view the crowded floor-to-ceiling hanging of mostly Victorian paintings to be found there.
AGO offers a broad and unapologetic take on Canadian art
For years at the Art Gallery of Ontario, a smallish space adjacent to the J.S. McLean gallery of Canadian art held a curious permanent feature: a Victorian salon, complete with an ornate oak staircase that led to a mezzanine to better view the crowded floor-to-ceiling hanging of mostly Victorian paintings to be found there.
Tunirrusiangit at the AGO is a star-making display of Inuit art
On a bright and sunny evening this June, the slowly thawing carcass of a seal lay on the floor of Walker Court, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s central and most public hub. A group of Inuit carved carefully into its pale hide, revealing the dark crimson meat below, and distributed it piece by piece to the large, slightly-apprehensive crowd that waited all around. The occasion was an art opening, the likes of which the gallery has hosted hundreds of times. But never, perhaps, quite like this.
At the Art Gallery of Ontario, an ancient culture informs the present
On a bright and sunny evening this June, the slowly thawing carcass of a seal lay on the floor of Walker Court, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s central and most public hub. A group of Inuit carved carefully into its pale hide, revealing the dark crimson meat below, and distributed it piece by piece to the large, slightly-apprehensive crowd that waited all around. The occasion was an art opening, the likes of which the gallery has hosted hundreds of times. But never, perhaps, quite like this.
Robert Lepage is shaking up Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival
STRATFORD, Ont.—A suddenly animated bust of Coriolanus begins speaking on the stage of the Avon Theatre, startling the audience into awkward titters of surprise. It’s the first clue that this production of the violent Shakespearean tragedy of a Roman ruler struck down by pride won’t be much like any other — but that much you’d have known before the curtain went up. After all, it’s directed by Quebec City-based master of theatrecraft Robert LePage, who never does anything by the book.
The best Group of Seven work you’ve never seen — and it’s not a landscape | The Star
A Black man sits slightly hunched on a drape of pale fabric, one leg crossed in casual repose. His expression suggests a fierce intelligence with ennobling intensity — that elusive moment, rarely grasped in portrait sittings, where the subject becomes as much an author of the piece as the artist. Shirtless, he gazes upward and away, in command of the scene. The image is frank, forthright and self-possessed, a tribute by the artist to his subject.
How did Toronto’s Banksy thief get away? A mystery grows
It's almost the stuff of comedy: A man wearing a dark jacket, pulled high to mask his face, slips unperturbed into an empty gallery, lifts a $45,000 Banksy print from the wall and strides almost casually out the same door he came in. There was nothing urgent about the early-Sunday-morning theft, and why would there be? If not for the security cameras, it would have been the perfect crime, and not for any particular skill by the thief.
How did Toronto’s Banksy thief get away? A mystery grows
It's almost the stuff of comedy: A man wearing a dark jacket, pulled high to mask his face, slips unperturbed into an empty gallery, lifts a $45,000 Banksy print from the wall and strides almost casually out the same door he came in. There was nothing urgent about the early-Sunday-morning theft, and why would there be? If not for the security cameras, it would have been the perfect crime, and not for any particular skill by the thief.
Banksy print ‘Trolley Hunters’ stolen from Toronto exhibition
In 2014, "Stealing Banksy," an auction of works by the notorious British street artist, put up for sale several pieces peeled, chipped or otherwise removed from the streets where he had made them. Had they waited until this year, they could have added one more to the list: a print stolen from a huge exhibition of the artist's work in Toronto before it even had a chance to open on Wednesday.
Banksy print ‘Trolley Hunters’ stolen from Toronto exhibition
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How did Toronto’s Banksy thief get away? A mystery grows
It’s almost the stuff of comedy: A man wearing a dark jacket, pulled high to mask his face, slips unperturbed into an empty gallery, lifts a $45,000 Banksy print from the wall and strides almost casually out the same door he came in. There was nothing urgent about the early-Sunday-morning theft, and why would there be? If not for the security cameras, it would have been the perfect crime, and not for any particular skill by the thief.
Banksy print ‘Trolley Hunters’ stolen from Toronto exhibition
In 2014, "Stealing Banksy," an auction of works by the notorious British street artist, put up for sale several pieces peeled, chipped or otherwise removed from the streets where he had made them. Had they waited until this year, they could have added one more to the list: a print stolen from a huge exhibition of the artist's work in Toronto before it even had a chance to open on Wednesday.
Banksy print ‘Trolley Hunters’ stolen from Toronto exhibition
In 2014, "Stealing Banksy," an auction of works by the notorious British street artist, put up for sale several pieces peeled, chipped or otherwise removed from the streets where he had made them. Had they waited until this year, they could have added one more to the list: a print stolen from a huge exhibition of the artist's work in Toronto before it even had a chance to open on Wednesday.
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