Editor’s Note: High Season for the Arts

Exciting things are happening all over the country this fall, including a show of Impressionist works like “Portrait of the Artist” by Vincent van Gogh at San Francisco’s de Young. Credit: © RMN (Musée D’Orsay)

I’m making a list and checking it twice, but Santa Claus doesn’t have a thing to do with it. My focus is fall arts, and the list is an item-by-item rundown of the new exhibitions and art shows I want to see.

In a sense, the fall arts season actually is a lot like Christmas, only without the wrappings and bows. Museums roll out major exhibitions, show promoters announce new dates, and arts groups unfurl plans for memory-making events that put the public and artists together. It’s like a gift that keeps on giving.

This year, museums themselves are getting into the act in a big way, inaugurating new galleries, new wings and entirely new buildings to house their collections. In New England, it’s the highly anticipated unveiling of a glittering new wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Farther south, it’s the addition of a sprawling new space at Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. And in Charlotte, N.C., it’s the Mint Museum’s up-and-up move in October: uptown and into a new five-story space in the city’s business district.

Out west, both the Crocker Art Museum and the Oakland Museum of California have brand-new spaces to show off. In western Canada, all eyes are on the undulating new metallic confection designed for the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton. Even in Alaska, the Anchorage Museum, already the state’s largest, has just gotten 80,000 square feet larger with a new addition.

The fall arts exhibitions lineup is equally enticing: from van Gogh in San Francisco to the Bresler Collection of turned and carved wood in Washington, D.C. One event we encourage you to take special note of is American Craft Week, a 10-day celebration of handmade decorative and functional objects that (as of this writing in late July) already includes craft retailers and arts groups in 43 states and Nova Scotia, all hosting events between Oct. 1-10 to promote great American crafts.

AmericanStyle is a major sponsor, and new participants are signing up every day, so be sure to keep checking the American Craft Week website (www.americancraftweek.com) for updates prior to the Oct. 1 kick-off. Then get involved. As the organizers spell out in their invitation, if you create, sell, display, promote, collect or just plain love American craft, come join the celebration!

Hope Daniels
Editor-in-Chief