In one of Valerie Hird’s large, untitled drawings, five women inhabit the paper like uneasy roommates. Each woman’s gaze guides the viewer’s eye through the picture. Each individual refers to the others while remaining distinct. This sense of separate yet shared experience permeates Hird’s exhibition of “The Maiden Voyages Project” at the Flynn Center’s Amy E.... Read more

The late 1960s movement in Italy called arte povera (literally, “poor art”) rejected traditions of elegance in favor of funky art-making that relied on ordinary, even unsightly materials. Of course, those artists were consciously choosing to use dirt, rags, leaves and similar elements rather than canvas, oil paint and all the other supplies they could have purchased at local art stores.... Read more

In Neal Rantoul’s photographs, corduroy hills of tawny wheat slink into the horizon, all curving texture under the western sky. This landscape is Rantoul’s muse. The accomplished and meticulous photographer has returned time and time again to this farmland near rural Pullman, Wash., since it first beguiled him in 1993.... Read more

American forces did nothing to protect Iraq’s ancient treasures, nor did they show much respect for the country’s contemporary culture, when they invaded in 2003. A different ethic was evident 200 years earlier when another powerful nation tried to conquer a different Islamic land.... Read more

The influences of a few modern painters — Piet Mondrian and Helen Frankenthaler, for example — are readily evident in many of the individual works in Catherine Hall’s uneven show at the 215 College Gallery. But another of the artists she cites as influential, the great Gerhard Richter, resembles her not so much stylistically as in the versatility and virtuosity this Burlington artist has displayed throughout her four-decade career.... Read more

The most popular place in Hardwick these days is not the pizza place, the bookstore or even Claire’s Restaurant. The numero uno venue is a hole-in-the-wall cellphone store. Tiny school kids, pimply teenagers, stressed-out adults — I’ve seen them all there, begging for Blackberries and the like. It’s the first thing every kid with cheapskate parents saves up for, and the last thing anyone over 12 wants to live without.... Read more

An academic museum that strives to please the general public faces a core contradiction: It must cater to scholars and students while making its shows accessible to locals who lack degrees in art history.... Read more

The BigTown Gallery’s current exhibition, “On the Landscape: A Feminine Eye,” features five commanding artists who share a subject and a gender. Rather than drawing these works together under a feminist rubric, however, gallery owner and curator Anni Mackay selected them for their quality. On view are works by mature, internationally known contemporary artists who happen to be women.... Read more

The nude female figure is an iconic subject in Western art. It’s right up there with landscapes, portraits of patrons and captains of industry, still lifes of flowers and fruit, and genre painting.

As Warren-based painter Billy Brauer puts it, “Some people like mountains; some people like covered bridges. I think women are beautiful.”... Read more

This year’s Art Hop was representative of “true Vermont style — raw and exuberant,” says juror Sarah Chaffee. The hundreds of works on display in more than 50 venues were also “wildly varying in quality,” adds the director of the McGowan Fine Art gallery in Concord, N.H.... Read more