Art School

The new dorm tower at Massachusetts College of Art and Design is the most interesting Boston high-rise in years. Even though it isn't finished, it's already an architectural landmark, rising like a multicolored flag above Huntington Avenue. There's a youthfulness about this building, a feeling of play, of experiment. Those are qualities an art school ought to have. College buildings need donors to give them names. For the time being, this one is known as the MassArt Residence Hall.

OPENING MAY 19 PHILADELPHIA Barnes Foundation : Albert C. Barnes's development of a treatment for gonorrhea made him a very wealthy man in the early years of the last century. He used his wealth to amass an art collection now valued at $25 billion. Its holdings include 181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 59 Matisses, and 46 Picassos, as well as works by Degas, Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh, Rousseau, and Modigliani — a Cooperstown of modern art. For many years, the Barnes was located in suburban Philadelphia, with limited access to the public.

For a Hollywood outsider and full-time curmudgeon, director Terry Zwigoff has had a pretty good run. The 1994 documentary "Crumb," "Ghost World" (2001), and "Bad Santa" (2003) are all honest, undiluted expressions of misanthropy, hilarious and even touching in their blanket dismissal of mainstream America culture. Zwigoff's overdue for a turkey, in other words. "Art School Confidential" is it. It looks great on paper. In fact, it did look great on paper when underground cartoonist Daniel Clowes drew the story back in 1991 as a one-off feature in his comic book "Eightball.

The new dorm tower at Massachusetts College of Art and Design is the most interesting Boston high-rise in years. Even though it isn't finished, it's already an architectural landmark, rising like a multicolored flag above Huntington Avenue. There's a youthfulness about this building, a feeling of play, of experiment. Those are qualities an art school ought to have. College buildings need donors to give them names. For the time being, this one is known as the MassArt Residence Hall.

NEW YORK - Dorothea Tanning, a leading Surrealist painter of the 1930s whose path had led her from the small town of Galesburg, Ill., to a whirlwind life in the international art world, died Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 101. Her death was confirmed by Mimi Johnson, a niece. Married for 30 years to Surrealist painter and sculptor Max Ernst, Ms. Tanning became well known in her own right for her vivid renderings of dream imagery. Much later in life, after she had reached 80, she gained a different kind of attention when she began to...

OPENING MAY 19 PHILADELPHIA Barnes Foundation : Albert C. Barnes's development of a treatment for gonorrhea made him a very wealthy man in the early years of the last century. He used his wealth to amass an art collection now valued at $25 billion. Its holdings include 181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 59 Matisses, and 46 Picassos, as well as works by Degas, Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh, Rousseau, and Modigliani — a Cooperstown of modern art. For many years, the Barnes was located in suburban Philadelphia, with limited access to the public.

Heather Wang, a jewelry maker and metalsmith, is inspired by the forms of nature, and often can be found gathering sticks while walking her dog near the Western Avenue Studios, a historic mill building in Lowell. "I love to see a beautiful branch or flower and imagine how to recreate it in silver or gold," she said. Wang, 32, creates whimsical, delicately enameled cherry blossom earrings; modernistic bronze branch necklaces cast from real twigs; and textured silver lace earrings.

In Western Massachusetts for the weekend, Kadir Nelson made a pilgrimage to visit the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. A great fan of the late master of American scenes since attending art school at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., Nelson calls the work of his predecessor "luminous. " "He was telling a story with each painting," Nelson said. In his own way, Nelson is quietly building his own portfolio of historic proportions. At 37, his work already appears in the Capitol in Washington, at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and...

IN 1986 AND '87 I worked as a security guard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. For most of that time I was a night guard. The pay was low and the hours were difficult, but it was a job I truly enjoyed. I had moved to Boston after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, and at first I worked as a gallery attendant. We weren't allowed to draw while on duty, but I always carried a small sketchbook, and when I was alone I'd draw studies of the artworks that impressed me. Among those were Vermeer's "The Concert" and Rembrandt's "The Storm on the Sea of...

At Barney's Grill, a landmark in East Boston, patrons were often treated to more than a large selection of food and spirits. If they were lucky, they were served a recitation of Shakespeare on the side by owner Nicholas Moscaritolo, a man of arts and letters. "I recall with fondness my uncle's penchant for spontaneously regaling a captivated audience of patrons and staff with allegory, song, or one of the Shakespearean soliloquies while tending the grill or bar," said his niece Patti Bonelli of Plymouth, recalling her college days working at Barney's.

Young artists on the cusp of their careers come out of Boston-area art schools every spring, an event marked by thesis exhibitions around the city. Now is the time for viewers to discover emerging talents. In the past, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Boston University have introduced such art stars as Doug and Mike Starn, N.C. Wyeth, and Brice Marden. Maybe one of this year's grads will hit it big, as well.

Heather Wang, a jewelry maker and metalsmith, is inspired by the forms of nature, and often can be found gathering sticks while walking her dog near the Western Avenue Studios, a historic mill building in Lowell. "I love to see a beautiful branch or flower and imagine how to recreate it in silver or gold," she said. Wang, 32, creates whimsical, delicately enameled cherry blossom earrings; modernistic bronze branch necklaces cast from real twigs; and textured silver lace earrings.

PHILADELPHIA - Jan Berenstain, who with her late husband, Stan, wrote and illustrated the Berenstain Bears books that have charmed preschoolers and their parents for 50 years, has died. She was 88. Mrs. Berenstain, a longtime resident of Solebury in southeastern Pennsylvania, suffered a severe stroke on Thursday and died Friday without regaining consciousness, her son Mike said. The gentle tales of Mama Bear, Papa Bear, Brother Bear, and Sister Bear were inspired by the Berenstain children, and later their grandchildren.

In Western Massachusetts for the weekend, Kadir Nelson made a pilgrimage to visit the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. A great fan of the late master of American scenes since attending art school at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., Nelson calls the work of his predecessor "luminous. " "He was telling a story with each painting," Nelson said. In his own way, Nelson is quietly building his own portfolio of historic proportions. At 37, his work already appears in the Capitol in Washington, at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and on...

NEW YORK - Dorothea Tanning, a leading Surrealist painter of the 1930s whose path had led her from the small town of Galesburg, Ill., to a whirlwind life in the international art world, died Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 101. Her death was confirmed by Mimi Johnson, a niece. Married for 30 years to Surrealist painter and sculptor Max Ernst, Ms. Tanning became well known in her own right for her vivid renderings of dream imagery. Much later in life, after she had reached 80, she gained a different kind of attention when...

At Barney's Grill, a landmark in East Boston, patrons were often treated to more than a large selection of food and spirits. If they were lucky, they were served a recitation of Shakespeare on the side by owner Nicholas Moscaritolo, a man of arts and letters. "I recall with fondness my uncle's penchant for spontaneously regaling a captivated audience of patrons and staff with allegory, song, or one of the Shakespearean soliloquies while tending the grill or bar," said his niece Patti Bonelli of Plymouth, recalling her college days working at Barney's.

PHILADELPHIA - Jan Berenstain, who with her late husband, Stan, wrote and illustrated the Berenstain Bears books that have charmed preschoolers and their parents for 50 years, has died. She was 88. Mrs. Berenstain, a longtime resident of Solebury in southeastern Pennsylvania, suffered a severe stroke on Thursday and died Friday without regaining consciousness, her son Mike said. The gentle tales of Mama Bear, Papa Bear, Brother Bear, and Sister Bear were inspired by the Berenstain children, and later their grandchildren.

SYDNEY - Margaret Olley, one of Australia's most beloved artists, who was renowned for her colorful still-life paintings, died Tuesday. She was 88. Ms. Olley was found dead in her Sydney home, said Susanne Briggs, spokeswoman for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where many of Ms. Olley's paintings are displayed. "I have never met anybody so rarely passionate, committed, and yet always retaining a wry sense of the absurd that life inevitably presents to us," the gallery's director, Edmund Capon, said in a statement.

WASHINGTON - As early as 1960, Malcolm Davis began organizing civil rights bus caravans and sit-ins in the South. He helped lead voter registration drives and was confronted by the Ku Klux Klan, all while he was still a seminary student. After he became an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, he moved to Washington in 1967 as the ecumenical campus chaplain at George Washington University. He became a leader in the peace movement and helped organize antiwar marches along with such '60s activists as Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and Abbie Hoffman.

IN 1986 AND '87 I worked as a security guard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. For most of that time I was a night guard. The pay was low and the hours were difficult, but it was a job I truly enjoyed. I had moved to Boston after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, and at first I worked as a gallery attendant. We weren't allowed to draw while on duty, but I always carried a small sketchbook, and when I was alone I'd draw studies of the artworks that impressed me. Among those were Vermeer's "The Concert" and Rembrandt's "The Storm on the Sea of...