For over fifty years, acclaimed illustrator Frank M. Costantino provided the world’s leading architects, designers, and developers with hand-drawn project designs from his studio in Winthrop, Massachusetts. This Boston Athenaeum exhibition of his work features over 80 drawings and watercolors. The exhibit will be on view February 3 – May 3.
Focused on Boston and New England projects, the exhibition showcases key landmarks such as the Hynes Convention Center, Esplanade 2020 Vision, and the Old State House renovation. Costantino’s meticulous detail and vibrant depictions, from finished renderings to preparatory sketches, reveal his creative and collaborative process.
This exhibition not only celebrates Costantino’s unparalleled skill but also highlights the Athenaeum’s dedication to local artists and architectural heritage.
Get ready for a blast from the past with New England Botanic Garden’s annual orchid exhibition on February 8 – March 16. Pixels + Petals combines the vibrant world of retro video games with the delicate beauty of orchids in a one-of-a-kind experience. Thousands of living orchids in bloom will be artfully showcased throughout the Garden’s two subtropical conservatories. Rewind, flash back, and immerse yourself in pixelated charm as nostalgia and nature unite. Join us during daytime hours or experience the exhibition in a different light during our special Orchids After Dark events.
On opening weekend, February 8 -9, Be among the first to experience the stunning orchid displays and nostalgic works of art of Pixels + Petals, An Orchid Exhibition. Enjoy live music in our subtropical conservatories and a curated artisan vendor market. Included with general admission.
On Fridays and Saturdays, February 14 – March 15 from 6 – 8, enjoy Orchids After Dark (21+). Experience the retro charm of Pixels + Petals, An Orchid Exhibition after-hours. Enjoy live music, drinks, and light bites while exploring our stunning orchid displays and curated ambience. Ticket price includes one free beverage and a unique night out. Members: $20, Non-Members: $30
Often called the unicorns of the sea, narwhals have fascinated people across cultures for centuries. These highly recognizable creatures spend their lives in the Arctic waters of Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia. Dive deeper into the world of these unique ocean dwellers and learn about their changing arctic ecosystem through firsthand accounts of scientists and Inuit community members. Hear soundscapes of the Arctic and narwhal vocalizations and touch an 8-foot-long cast of a real narwhal tusk. This family-friendly exhibition in The Dotty Brown Art & Nature Center is part of Peabody Essex Museum’s Climate + Environment Initiative.
Narwhal: Revealing an Arctic Legend is organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. This exhibition at PEM is made possible by Carolyn and Peter S. Lynch and The Lynch Foundation. We thank Jennifer and Andrew Borggaard, James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes, Chip and Susan Robie, and Timothy T. Hilton as supporters of the Exhibition Innovation Fund. We also recognize the generosity of the East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum and the support and guidance of the Art & Nature Center Visiting Committee.
In partnership with MASS MoCA, The Rose Kennedy Greenway features artist Jeffrey Gibson. Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, Colorado Springs, CO; lives and works in New York) grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, Korea, and the U.K. A mid-career multidisciplinary artist, he is a citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half Cherokee, whose practice includes sculpture, painting, printmaking, video, and performance. Gibson earned his Master of Arts in painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1998 and his Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. His work is in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian; National Gallery of Canada; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Gibson is a past TED Foundation Fellow and a Joan Mitchell Grant recipient. He is a recipient of the 2019 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Bard College and lives and works near Hudson, New York. In 2024, Gibson represented the United States at the 60th edition of La Biennale di Venezia. He is the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States with a solo presentation in the national pavilion. To read the artist’s statement and for more information and map, visit http://www.rosekennedygreenway.org/art-exhibit/jeffrey-gibson
New Hampshire artist @pamelatarbell will be featured in the Massachusetts Audubon visitor’s center at Habitat Center, 10 Juniper Road in Belmont.
Tarbell’s series “Ode to the Birdhouse” sets familiar motifs into colorful layers, resulting in kaleidoscopic visual compositions. Oil pigments set the boldly colored shapes into their own hypnotic space on the canvas, while also bolstering the contrast between overlapping patterns.
Next time you visit, stop by this stunning exhibit to get inspired before you head out into nature! The exhibit will be open Tuesdays-Sundays.
SOLSTICE: Reflections on Winter Light is an annual event at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge that includes an outdoor journey through large-scale light and sound artworks, and an indoor experience with live music and candle lighting. Guests are invited to walk through the light-filled landscape and explore the Winter Solstice atmosphere, and to reflect on moments of change as the year ends and a new cycle begins. Connect to a landscape of exceptional beauty, consider an intention for the new year, or commemorate the memory of a loved one. Let the Solstice light your way as you encounter the unique spirit of Mount Auburn.
Rory McEwen: A New Perspective on Nature presents the vibrant career of the renowned Scottish artist, Rory McEwen (1932-1982). Focusing on his remarkable paintings of plants, the exhibition reveals McEwen’s lifelong enquiry into light and color in portraying his unique concept of the natural object. Over the course of his career, with his all-embracing perspective of modern art, McEwen developed a distinctive style, painting on vellum and using large empty backgrounds on which his plant portraits seem to float. In his paintings he forged his own personal interpretation of 20th century modernism, portraying individual flowers, leaves and vegetables as subject matter, “as a way of getting as close as possible to what I perceive as the truth, my truth of the time in which I live.”
Rory McEwen: A New Perspective on Nature presents 85 watercolors on vellum and paper, representing a wide range of the artist’s work, along with many of the well-known 17th and 18th century masters who influenced him—including Robert, Redouté, Ehret, Aubriet as well as early illuminated manuscripts and folio volumes. McEwen’s work is also presented alongside the works of numerous contemporary artists who in turn continue McEwen’s artistic legacy. It includes works on loan from the Collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Mellon’s Oak Spring Garden Foundation Collection, the Shirley Sherwood Collection and the McEwen Family Estate Collection, as well as works from numerous private collections, most of which have never before been seen by the American public. McEwen’s work is found in private and public collections across the globe, including the British Museum; Victoria and Albert Museum; Tate; National Gallery of Modern Art, Scotland; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Hunt Institute, Pittsburgh; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The exhibition, Rory McEwen: A New Perspective on Nature, is presented by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in association with Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (London) and Oak Spring Garden Foundation (Virginia); tour management by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA.
Americans’ relationship with animals transformed during the Gilded Age (1870-1914). With a focus on Newport history, the Preservation Society of Newport County’s exhibition at Rosecliff, 548 Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, explores how this exciting, tumultuous period shaped the role of animals in our modern world. In the late 19th century, Americans moved in large numbers from farms to cities, losing touch with a rural way of life and with the closeness to nature and animals that defined it. Nostalgia for a lost kinship with animals pervaded urban, industrial America. At the same time, many were encountering new, “exotic” species through a boom in foreign travel, marine exploration and imperial expansion. More everyday Americans enjoyed natural history pursuits like birdwatching. Pet keeping surged. And while captive animals thrilled spectators at zoos and circuses, which both had their heyday in the Gilded Age, activists launched the nation’s first animal rights movement.
Newporters played a vital, though often contradictory, part in these developments. They fought at the vanguard of the animal rights movement yet set the era’s fashion for furs and feathers as residents of its most stylish summer resort. Newporters pampered their pets but expanded industries like the railroads that ravaged wildlife habitats.
Wild Imagination brings together a menagerie of animal-themed artworks and other objects, from paintings, sculptures, photographs and fashions to fancy dog collars and sea creatures blown in glass. These pieces reflect profound and lasting changes in human-animal relations. They also reveal the individual stories of wondrous creatures that continue to capture our imagination. For hours and complete information visit https://www.newportmansions.org/events/wild-imagination/
Join the Arnold Arboretum on November 2 at 1 pm for an art reception celebrating the opening of Intimate Vistas: Images of Tree Bark. Photographer Marc Goldring’s work has always centered on finding the mysterious in the commonplace and bringing attention to objects and features which we otherwise might not have noticed at all. In this show, Marc attends to the bark of trees. He brings the camera in close to look at the details of the extraordinary variety of textures, colors and shapes of the bark of trees. Familiar or relatively exotic, the tree’s bark tells a story about the life of the tree, both of the species and of the particular individual. In this way we can better connect to, and understand on a visceral level, these common yet alien beings.
Intimate Vistas will be available for viewing in the Hunnewell Lecture Hall through late February 2025. Free, but register for the reception at www.arboretum.harvard.edu
The Harvard Graduate School of Design exhibition Changing Climates explores how built environments can be transformed into urban ecologies. Producing an enhanced micro-climate, each of these ecologies has the capacity to augment the resilience of the urban condition under the challenges of the climate crisis.
A city can be understood as the juxtaposition of many artificial micro-climates. Buildings change wind patterns and sunlight exposure, while streetscapes modify runoff and soil permeability. For each man-made micro-climate, a comparable natural condition can be found. The study of its living organisms informs the introduction of vegetation as an agent of change into the artificial environment.
The city thus becomes a second nature and an active laboratory. Similar to plants that have gradually transformed their environment, and life in general that has been shaping the form of the earth, these urban ecologies have the force to transform the very nature of the city into a living organism. The built environment becomes an intelligent interface between an uncertain meteorology and an underused geology. Positioned between the above and the below, cities develop into a true zone of life.
In this October 31 lecture in the Piper Auditorium of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Bas Smets will explore how these new urban ecologies can be conceived and constructed through a selection of projects featured in the exhibition. Varying in both scale and program, these projects show how to develop solution-based design through science-based research.
A reception will follow in the Druker Design Gallery. Free and open to the public. Complete information may be found at www.gsd.harvard.edu.
