Morgan Paine is used to the reaction.

Frederick is a frequent muse for artist John Connors, who relocated to the city in 1993 from Arlington, Va. "By day, I'm a design director, and by night, I'm more into fine art," Connors said, flashing his red and black business card. "I'm into minimalism in my design life."

Simple recreation becomes serious business in Graham Nickson’s painted world. Solemn and self-absorbed, the beachgoers in his gargantuan compositions appear to be enacting very private, puzzling rituals of bathing and calisthenics.

HARTLAND Painter George Tooker, a part-time resident of this Upper Valley town since the late 1950s, has been awarded the nation's highest honor for artistic excellence. ... - By Ed Barna Correspondent

Inside the Suffolk County House of Correction, the towering, 1,900-bed prison next to the Southeast Expressway, the scenery is as uninspiring as one would imagine: cement-block walls, orange jumpsuits, guards with German shepherds.

Tomás Rivas teases remarkable effects from ordinary sheets of drywall. The artist from Santiago, Chile, carves, peels and shapes scrolling lines and plant motifs culled from classical Greek and Roman architecture as well as neoclassical sources. And he is perfectly happy to reveal how it's all done.

A remarkable Bay Area institution has influenced many successful local artists and is now the subject of an exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California.

The American sculptor Martin Puryear, the subject of a 30-year retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, makes spare, sometimes elegant objects that are ambitiously constructed yet formally glib. Mr. Puryear (b. 1941) borrows from the traditions of African, minimalist, and modernist sculpture, and from woodworking, ship building, and basket weaving. He is a talented craftsman — a postmodern ...

The Orange County Artists Guild Open Studio Tour continues Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sunday, noon-5 p.m. www.orangecountyartistsguild.com . 932-3438.

New shows, lectures and events On Saturday, one of the critical conceptual artists of the 1970s, Tom Marioni, will be in town to give a lecture at Reed College's Eliot Hall. The San Francisco artist who founded the now-defunct Museum of Conceptual Art and helped champion social "artworking" -- "The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends Is the Highest Form of Art," for example -- will talk about his ...

Attesting to the raw power and harsh beauty of Steven Parrino's best work, a sweeping show now on view at Gagosian's uptown flagship more than lives up to the postmortem discussion of the artist's studio practice, multifaceted collaborative activities, and tragic death at the age of 46 in early 2005. Even in its embrace of damage and failure, the work is poised, and completely self-assured. The ...

Add a little artistic illumination to your decor with contemporary or antique sconces. Unlike lamps, sconces take up minimal space. They also offer optimal lighting for small areas. Better yet, sconces can add as much character to the wall as a favorite painting.

Joy is everywhere in Alan Shields' art. It can be seen in the carnival colors, the glittering beads, and the tie-dyed textures that he used to exhilarating effect in pieces that dangle from the ceiling or squat on the floor. And it can felt by viewers who roam around and beneath his work, adjusting their perceptions and soaking up new sensations.

Six years ago, artist Robert Ferrandini had a stroke that paralyzed his right painting hand. When he recovered sufficiently to return to his art, Ferrandini taught himself to paint with his left hand. The fruit of that effort is up in a fascinating show at Gallery NAGA.

Robert Storr is the first American director of the Venice Biennale.

By GAILE ROBINSON Areas of nothing are often called negative space. The space around each letter in this sentence is considered negative space, as is the space between the reader's eyes and the newspaper page. But the area that appears to be nothing is something, a very dynamic something. Space, especially negative space, intrigued artists in the mid-20th century. Among those who were most ...

A new exhibition traces the intersection between images and sounds from the Velvet Underground and beyond.

Selective listings from art critics of The New York Times.

Mohamed Rawas is one of Lebanon's best-known artists, and his work provides a vital link between an older, more traditional generation of painters and a younger, more critically and conceptually inclined group of artists experimenting in video, performance and photography.

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