Boston loves Impressionism and always has. For the first time, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, invited the public to choose works for a special Impressionist exhibition. Choosing from a different themed group each week, fans voted for their favorite paintings from a selection of fifty works...
“Permission To Be Global/Prácticas Globales” debuts in New England 60 contemporary Latin American works from the collection of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, founder of the CIFO Art Foundation in Miami. Featuring sculpture, painting, photography, video, installation, and performance...
Design drawings are among the hidden treasures of the MFA’s collection, and this exhibition displays nearly 30 works on paper, each representing a different artist, architect, or designer in an alphabet of design from the 16th through the 20th centuries. A is for Ashbee: a design for a ring...
Photographers known as the Pictorialists, who worked around 1900, were part of the first international movement in the history of the medium. Their mission was to prove the artistic merit of photography by strengthening its connections with the fine arts. To this end they made images that sought to...
Take sides in an intense debate among leading authorities on Italian art and learn the possible answers to the question: What makes a Caravaggio? “Visiting Masterpieces: Caravaggio and Connoisseurship” introduces visitors to the art of judging whether a Caravaggio is, in fact, a...
Following the Boston Marathon tragedy on April 15, 2013, Bostonians felt an outpouring of support from across the country and around the world. T-shirts proclaimed ‘Boston Strong,’ a public memorial grew in Copley Square—and flags were sewn and sent to Boston with words of hope...
A native of Kyoto, and known for his unconventional techniques and irreverent humor, Shōhaku depicts a dragon swooping down through whirls of clouds and mist, and swishing its scaly tail in a rhythmic symphony of rich shades of ink that extends across the thirty-five-foot-long composition. The...
Photographers working in Europe during the period between the two World Wars made some of the most memorable images in the medium’s history. Their goal was to infuse their medium with a fresh and distinctly “modern” style. Influenced by Cubism, Constructivism, Dadaism, and...
Some 50 lively drawings and watercolors by leading 17th-century Dutch artists from the superb Maida and George Abrams Collection bring to life the faces, figures, pleasures, pastimes, and labors of Dutch people. Works by Rembrandt, Hendrick Avercamp, Abraham Bloemaert, Jacques De Gheyn II, Jan...
Beginning on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January 20), an outdoor installation of Argentinean artist Amalia Pica’s Now, Speak! concrete lectern encourages impromptu performances by all MFA visitors and passersby. The lectern was inaugurated by the MFA’s Teen Arts Council, who read...
.result_listing.jpg "Maria Auxiliadora da Silva, Chuva Sobre São Paulo (Rain over Sao Paulo), 1971")
For the first time the MFA presents a selection of works by 20th-century Brazilian artists of African descent. Rarely studied in the United States, these painters and sculptors drew on indigenous, European, and African traditions, and found inspiration in all aspects of Brazilian life—...
In the 20th century, printmaking in Japan became not just a way of producing popular images but a fine art form. No longer constrained by the requirements of commercial publishing, artists were able to exploit the color woodblock process as far as their imaginations could take them, and to...
During the last decade, the exciting shapes and technical finesse in Japanese contemporary ceramics and baskets have attracted new audiences among Western enthusiasts. Recently attention has centered on more abstract works produced by modern ceramic and bamboo artists, including pioneering female...
From pinking shears to pink ribbons, the color pink is associated with fashion and femininity; perhaps no other color has as much social significance and gender association. The fascinating exhibition “Think Pink” explores the history and changing meanings of the color as its popularity...
American art of the 1940s and ’50s was dominated by the gestural style known as Abstract Expressionism. In love with spontaneity and happy accidents, and favoring inspiration from the subconscious, artists invented a highly original American art language that triumphed internationally....
As author and illustrator of The Birds of America, John James Audubon (1785–1851) traveled thousands of miles throughout the United States and Canada to seek out and draw North American birds in their natural habitats. In the book’s enormous pages—each more than three feet high...
Contemporary art has a dynamic home at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, located in the MFA’s dramatic I. M. Pei-designed building. The wing features seven galleries introducing innovative approaches to contemporary art within the context of...
What is a gem? "Jewels, Gems, and Treasures: Ancient to Modern," the first exhibition in the Museum's new Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation Gallery, examines the various roles and meanings associated with a wide range of gem materials. Drawn from the MFA...
The centerpiece of the MFA’s historic expansion is a spectacular new wing for the Art of the Americas collection, which will double the number of objects from the collection on view, including several large-scale masterpieces not displayed for decades. Learn more about the new wing.