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Masterpieces and Missteps

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The artists of the Bloomsbury circle were at once radical and conservative, intellectually adventurous and promiscuously imitative. The group centered around the writers and thinkers Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, who dominated English high society around the early years of the last century; the circle sometimes included other luminaries such as T.S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell and E.M. Forster. A current exhibit at the Johnson Museum, A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections, features the often overlooked visual artists who informed the group’s development as a hotbed of sexual and ideological libertinage as well as the bedrock of upper-crust cultural strictures.

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Fine Print: Etchings at the Johnson

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What do a 17th-Century Dutch printmaker, the Edict of Nantes and two present-day Ithacans have in common? Quite a bit, actually. So do the political commentary and a urine sample from Louis XIV. Their unifying thread is on display at the Johnson Art Museum’s new exhibition, Romeyn de Hooghe: Virtuoso Etcher, a show of de Hooghe’s etchings in subject matters ranging from the commercial to the political.

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Arts in the Ith

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So. You’re in Ithaca. You’re in college. What to do now?
When prelims, lab reports and snow aren’t getting you down (read: seldom), there’s a lively arts scene right outside your doorstep to keep you sane. From barn-burning bashes in Barton to art appreciation in the Johnson, there’s something for every taste. Cornell may be known for its cows and gorges, but it’s no slouch when it comes to music, theater, film and fine art.

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Arts & Entertainment

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Dear starry eyed-freshman:
Do you like music? Movies? How about burlesque dancers strutting their stuff on the Slope? If so, you’re in luck. The Pussycat Dolls may not strike Ithaca every year (thank god), but there’s plenty else to keep your eyes, ears and mind entertained on campus and around town. To get a taste, check out these review excerpts from last year — everyone from Girl Talk to Junot Diaz to Don Giovanni was in town, and we were there to get you the story. Appetite sufficiently whetted? Get ready for the likes of Ani DiFranco and Built to Spill this fall, and check out the concert on the Arts Quad on Aug. 29 (artist to be announced). It’ll be the start of another great year in Ithaca arts culture. And homework and tests and all that other boring stuff. Whatever.

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Quick Moving, Slow Seeing

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Barbara Maria Stafford, a professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, has been instrumental in bridging ideas from the sciences and social thought into the humanities: Her work focuses on how neuroscience and other recent developments in cognitive theory can help explain the unique visual knowledge we gain through artworks. Such is her far-ranging, trans-disciplinary appeal that she attracted an audience of students and scholars from fields as diverse as fine arts, literature, political science, philosophy and biology to her lecture in Goldwin Smith’s Lewis Auditorium yesterday entitled Slow Looking, co-sponsored by the departments of art history, architecture, art, urban and regional planning and chemical biology.

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Open The Gates: NYC’s Memory of Color

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“We live in a terrible century of banalization and trivialization, of repetitious things; all our world is surrounded by…bombastic things. And we the humans like to experience something unique, once in a lifetime, if never again. All our works have this quality that if you miss them, you will never see them.”

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Layers Upon Layers: Paper and Image

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This week’s art show in Hartell Gallery is no easy view — there’s a lot to see and dissect, from works on paper to sculpture and even sculptural works on paper. The viewer simply can’t absorb the entire installation in one turn around the room. Elliot Hess grad’s M.F.A. thesis show is challenging but not inaccessible; the conscientious viewer will not walk away empty-handed.

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How We Roll: Printing at the Johnson

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Minna Resnick is a local artist who has been printmaking and drawing for over 30 years. She was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980, one of many other honors she has received throughout her career. Her work is currently displayed at more than 50 public and private collections, both nationally and abroad. She has taught and lectured at many colleges across the nation, and was even an art instructor at Cornell for a few semesters.