John Blee’s “Spring Awakening” art show now up at Il Decor in Back Bay

CulturePeel has teamed up with the beautiful Back Bay Italian furniture showroom Il Decor to demonstrate how art can pair with design to bring spaces to life. Our “Spring Awakening” show of John Blee’s abstract expressionist paintings is now up at 10 St. James Street. John Blee’s work is in the collections of the Museum of…

Pippip Ferner at Co|So on Newbury Street

Years ago, when the tiny airplane I had boarded in Denmark made its way through the clouds to descend into a proportionately tiny airport perched atop a Norwegian mountain, what immediately struck me about the landscape below – and continued to thrill throughout that and every visit – was its extraordinary depth and scale. The…

Kingston Gallery in SoWa captures the diversity of the Boston art scene

If you want to get a broad and fairly complete sense of the type of work Boston artists are creating at this very moment, you can: visit Newbury Street’s countless galleries, spend a First Friday night at SoWa artists’ studios (SoWa = area South of Washington St. in the South End), meander around Tremont Street,…

Blowing Boston’s ICA out of the water

Mere moments after enthusiastically adding Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art to my cultural to-do list, I came across an article in Boston Magazine that drained the majority of my anticipation. In The ICA: Exhibitionists?, Rachel Levitt Slade critiques everything from the museum’s unapproachable exterior to the shows themselves, which she says lack substance and long-term…

Stepping into the world of Asian art on the Cape

Reading Cynthia Freedland’s “But is it art?” with its insights into some of the most controversial pieces produced in recent years (Damien Hirst’s dead shark and Serrano’s Piss Christ among them) has made me wonder: who are today’s top-ranking contemporary artists, and is all their work equally…bizarre and unconventional? The answer I found surprised me:…