Museums

Assistant Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the New York's Museum of Modern Art, Christopher Mount. He's the curator of "Different Roads: Automobiles for the Next Century" thru September 21st. The exhibition presents nine contemporary automobiles which represent the next generation of cars.

Also one of the car's designers, Chuck Pelly. He is the President and CEO of Designworks/USA, international design consultants specializing in transportation and product design.

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews two art shows of important 17th century painters: one by the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford thru March 14th, and a Caravaggio exhibit at Boston College through May 24th.

Photographer Fazal Sheikh. (Fuz-ill) (Shake) In his new book "The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan" published by Scalo, Sheikh weaves portraits and stories together to document their experience. His 1996 book "A Sense of Common Ground,"(Scalo) presented a series of photographs taken of African refugees.

Kirk Varnedoe is the chief curator for the Jackson Pollock exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It shows November 1, 1998-February 2, 1999. Pollock is widely considered the most challenging and influential American painter of the twentieth century and one of the primary creators in modern art since 1945. Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. Varnedoe has written the accompanying book "Jackson Pollock"

Critic Lloyd Schwartz comments on his visit to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to see "Monet in the 20th Century" - the largest exhibit ever assembled of Monet's late paintings done in the last 25 years of his life. Boston is the only American city to be showing the exhibit. (It runs thru December 27th and then goes to London).

Political cartoonist Dan Perkins, otherwise known as Tom Tomorrow, the creator of the weekly syndicated cartoon strip "This Modern World." It stars Sparky the Wonder Penguin. Perkins discusses the strips he's created having to do with the Clinton scandal. "This Modern World" appears regularly in "The Village Voice," "U.S. News and World Report," "The Nation" and other publications nationwide.

Plympton's work can be seen on MTV has a new feature length film, "I Married a Strange Person." Unlike computer animators, Plympton draws every frame of his films by hand. Each feature length film has 30-thousand individual drawings. Simpson's creator Matt Groening calls Plympton a God. The American Museum of the Moving Image in New York presented a retrospective of his work this month.

Segal talks about his work which is being featured through October at The Jewish Museum in New York City. It is his first major exhibition in North America in 20 years. He is best known for his free standing sculptures depicting everyday people in urban settings.

We'll hear from two people who worked on a new Maisin (My-sin) tribal art exhibit "Tapa Style" now showing in Philadelphia. The goal of the exhibit is to promote Maisin culture as an alternative to selling logging rights to their portion of a rainforest in Papau New Guinea. John Wesley Vaso is a Maisin tribal leader. Larry Rinder was the curator for the exhibit and is Director of the Institute for Exhibitions and Public Programs at the California College of Arts and Crafts.

Singer Michael Stipe with the band R.E.M. He has a new book of photographs "Two Times Intro: On the Road with Patti Smith" (Little, Brown & Company)

We remember Linda McCartney, with an excerpt of her September 23, 1992 interview with Amy Salit. McCartney died Friday of cancer.

Artist Chuck Close. He's been called "the most methodical artist that has ever lived in America" and the "reigning portraitist of the Information Age." He creates jumbo size faces on canvas (8 or 9 feet high), copying them from photographs. They are painted in a dotted faux pointillist style. In 1989 Close suffered a stroke which left him paralyzed from the neck down, gaining partial use of his hand with a brace, he learned to paint all over again. There's currently a retrospective of his work exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Curator of the Archives and Collections at the International Center Of Photography in New York, Miles Barth. He curated an exhibit of the work of tabloid photographer, Weegee, whose real name was Arthur Fellig. Wegee eventually became one of the most celebrated news photographers of the century. His photographs taken with an on-camera flash, were of New York's seamy side from 1930s to the 1960s, of murders, suicides, and accidents. The exhibit is now touring the U.S.

Artist, writer, folklorist, photographer Roger Manley was the guest curator of two exhibits at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore: "The Tree of Life" (w/a companion catalogue) and "The End is Near!" The museum opened in 1995. Using the Native American tradition of a personal vision quest as it's model for the kind of work it wants to present, the museum is dedicated to showing and promoting the work of self-taught, intuitive artists. (The phone number for AVAM is 410-244-1900). Manley will discuss visionary art.

Photographer David Plowden. He's spent forty years chronicling the changing face of America. His new book "Imprints: A Retrospective" (Little, Brown & Co.) encompasses that work. Plowden's work is at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian and The Library of Congress.

Cartoonist Dan Piraro. Since 1985, his "Bizarro" cartoons have been featured in papers such as the Boston Herald, the Seattle Times, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. When his publicist would not pay for a promotional tour of his book "Bizarro #9" (Andrews McMeel). Piraro asked his fans if they might be able to provide him with lodging, transportation, and food as he traversed the country. He's since written a book about this experiences on the road: "Bizarro Among the Savages" (Andrews McMeel).

One of America’s leading architects, Richard Meier, talks about what it was like to undertake the architectural commission of the century, the building of the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He’s just written “Building the Getty”

Fashion historian Valerie Steele. Her new book outlines changes in the fashion world through the past half century, noting how the economy, global climate, and sexual politics affected designers' creations as well as the styles we wore. The book is called "Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to Now" (Yale University). Steele is Chief Curator at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.