CAMELOT RISING

PASSING THE TORCH: THE
INAUGURATION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
Through September 2011

On a freezing cold day in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 1961, a former U.S. Senator from Massachusetts officially became the 35th President of the United States. In celebration of this event’s 50th anniversary, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum presents its latest exhibit, Passing the Torch: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy. Artifacts from the festivities surrounding that seminal 20th-century event are on display— some for the first time—including Jacqueline Kennedy’s Oleg Cassini dress from the inauguration gala, Leonard Bernstein’s original score for Fanfare for the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and many more items that take visitors back to those golden days at the dawn of the Camelot era.
—Scott Roberto

ART OF THE AMERICAS WING
Museum of Fine Arts
465 Huntington Ave. • 617-267-9300

Despite the economy, Boston has seen a marked expansion of its arts scene in recent years. Between the still-thriving-after-four years waterfront home of the Institute of Contemporary Art and the anticipated debut of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s addition in 2012, there is no shortage of fresh energy in the Hub’s visual arts community. Now add to this list the recent completion of the Art of the Americas Wing at Boston’s grand dame of cultural institutions, the Museum of Fine Arts. Designed by architects Foster + Partners, the four-story, glass-steel-and-granite structure finally opens its doors this month. Taking a chronological approach to American art (and we’re talking North and South, not just the United States of), the new wing takes visitors on a floor-by-floor trip through time, from ancient Native American ceramics and Colonial ship models on the first level to works by such 20th-century luminaries as Georgia O’Keefe and Edward Hopper on the upper level. Familiar highlights, like John Singleton Copley’s 1768 portrait of Paul Revere, now sit alongside works that had long been in storage due to lack of space, including the monumental 17 x 12 foot The Passage of the Delaware (1819) by Thomas Sully.
—Scott Roberto

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