Daily Archives: May 18, 2018

Friday, June 1 & Saturday, June 2, 9:00 am – 4:00 pm – Concord Museum Garden Tour

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The famed Concord spokesman for individualism and self-reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, once wrote: “When I go into a good garden, I think, if it were mine, I should never go out of it.” This year the Concord Museum is celebrating 29 years of “going into good gardens” on the annual Concord Garden Tour.

The Museum’s Guild of Volunteers has organized this pre-eminent garden tour, an unequaled opportunity both to share in the delights of beautiful and historic private gardens in Concord and to support the Museum’s Education Programs which annually serve over 12,000 students from 85 Massachusetts communities and 22 states.

The Museum’s Garden Tour has become a New England tradition for garden lovers from near and far. The Garden Tour will take place on two days, Friday and Saturday, June 1 and June 2, rain or shine. Each of the private gardens reflects the individual interests and passions of the owners and their families and will inspire both new gardeners designing their first perennial bed and accomplished landscapers with acres of “garden rooms.”

The tour of Concord-area gardens is self-guided and self-paced, beginning each day at 9:00 a.m. and continuing until 4:00 p.m. Garden-goers should arrive at the Museum to pick up their maps prior to starting out. Tickets are good for either or both days, but each garden may only be visited once. No refunds; no photography.

Early Registration Tickets are available online at http://www.concordmuseum.org/special-events-garden-tour.php : $30 Concord Museum Members, $40 Non-Members. Tickets purchased after May 28 or at the door are $35 Concord Museum Members, $40 Non-Members.

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Through Sunday, June 3 – Cao Jun: Hymns to Nature

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Cao Jun was born in 1966 and raised in Jiangsu Province in southern China, where the lakes and rivers shaped his childhood environment. For eighteen years he studied and worked near Mount Tai, one of China’s most ancient places of worship and ceremonial ritual. Concrete experience of both aquatic sites and mountainous terrain informed Cao Jun’s approach to artistic creation. After formal training in Beijing, he settled in New Zealand yet traveled throughout Europe and the United States. More recently he journeyed to the polar regions and northern Alaska.

Hymns to Nature is Cao Jun’s first exhibition in the United States. It examines the deep roots of his art in the experience of nature and how he portrays our place within it. It also illuminates his novel responses to admired, earlier paintings by his countrymen, encouraging us to ponder a dynamic dialogue between Chinese art of the past and that of the present.

Arranged thematically, the exhibition opens with his early works depicting wild animals. It moves on to later paintings where he employs the techniques of ink- and color-splashing to render mountain landscapes, water, and flowers. Subsequent areas display his calligraphy and porcelain. The exhibition concludes with more recent abstract works exploring the various configurations in which spatial phenomena can appear.

Hymns to Nature is accompanied by a catalogue, edited by John Sallis, with contributions by Chinese and American scholars that examine the ways in which Cao Jun’s art fuses elements of classical Chinese painting with modern abstract forms akin to those of Western art. Essays also discuss the philosophical and poetic dimensions of the artist’s work, as well as Cao Jun’s profound connections to the natural world.

Organized by the McMullen Museum, Hymns to Nature has been curated by John Sallis and underwritten by Boston College with major support from the Patrons of the McMullen Museum.​ The show may be seen in the Daley Family and Monan Galleries at Boston College through June 3.  For more information visit https://www.bc.edu/sites/artmuseum/exhibitions/cao-jun/