Come share your energies at the 5th monthly Peña Rebelde at the encuentro 5 movement space on September 10th at 7 p.m., a gathering of souls in verse and rebellion. Gabrilla Ballard-Thakore, a recent transplant to Boston from New Orleans, will share her singer-songwriter creations. Gabrilla's music, an imaginative hybrid of her musical inspirations--from Bob Marley to Nina Simone - will delve into where she comes from and where she's going, not only as a musician, but as an activist and mother.

Ernesto “Eroc” Arroyo is a Boston emcee, one of the city’s key revolutionary rappers and “jipjoperos.” Eroc will be featured August 13th for the Peña Rebelde, a musical/poetical gathering taking place the 2nd Saturday of each month.

In November, according to Wikipedia and the mainstream media, G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, removed David Wojnarowicz's short silent film "A Fire in My Belly" from the exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery. The move came after some bleats of protest from the Catholic League, right-wing talk radio, and the ironically named Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio). Pathetic of the Smithsonian to cave so easily to such censorious sentiments, but cave they did.

It’s harvest time in New England and not only at the farms and orchards. Area museums, too, have set out a bountiful feast.

New Englanders are privileged to get the first look at “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City” at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), Salem, MA before it travels to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in January. The extraordinary objects have never been out of China. Even travelers to the Forbidden City could not enter the pavilions to see these objects.

“Art for All, British Posters for Transport,” the exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT is aptly named. Certainly, posters are the most democratic form of art. Plastered on walls in public places, they’re available to everyone, as is the Yale Center for British Art, which charges no admission.

Posters are decorative eye-candy. And this is one sweet show. But posters are also a powerful economic, social and political tool. The image is the message. Its appeal is basic. It can be understood quickly and by anyone.

“Countdown to Zero makes old terrors radioactively new again.”


“A hair-raising look at nuclear proliferation from the producers of An Inconvenient Truth.”


“A nuclear wake-up call about the real threats we face and the urgent need for action.”


These press comments (respectively from Entertainment Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, and The Huffington Post) describe a terrific film, Countdown to Zero, that is coming to the Kendall Square Theater on July 30th. It's terrific in both senses: wonderful and terrifying, for it is about nuclear weapons.

An exciting international multimedia art show opened in the U.S. last Wednesday at the UMass Boston Harbor Gallery, and I headed over to take some photos - since, fair disclosure, I'm part of the Caerleon Sims/Virtual Art Initiative group staging the event (although I have no work on display). According to lead organizer Prof. Gary Zabel of UMB, "Through the Virtual Looking Glass is the collective name for exhibitions of virtual art that are taking place in April 2010 in five real world galleries and other spaces in as many countries, specifically, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, and the United States. Australia will also participate in the April events virtually, while hosting a real world exhibition at a time later this year."

For more than a century, African art has challenged the western imagination. How and why does an embroidered apron, for example, made in the 1970s by an unidentified, young South African woman, merit a place in a world-class museum? The answer may be found in “Object, Image, Collector: African and Oceanic Art in Focus,” the fascinating exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, through July 18. The exhibition traces the evolution of African artifacts from object to art.



“The impact of photography in promoting this shift has been neglected,” says Curator Christraud Geary. Photographs– the “image” referred to in the show title – are a key to understanding how utilitarian objects came to be regarded as art.

They were meant to be together so when I learned that the Guggenheim Museum was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its landmark building with an in-depth retrospective of the Russian avant-garde artist Wasilly Kandinsky, I knew I had to go.

“The Angel in The Architecture,” trumpeted The New York Times headline for the review of the Guggenheim show, which runs through January 10. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the building especially for the museum’s founding collection of Kandinsky’s non-objective work.

BOSTON/North End - This month, the city of Boston invites art lovers to spend a long weekend in the North End experiencing the best of the Boston Arts Scene. Starting Friday, Sept. 11, the annual Boston Arts Festival will return to historic Christopher Columbus Park for a three-day celebration of local arts and entertainment. The event will feature work from over 60 visual artists and a number of scheduled musical and dance performances. The outdoor festivities will run each day from noon until 6 p.m.