Current and Upcoming Exhibitions at the MFA

The following exhibitions are currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston:

In Your Face: October 21, 2012 - February 3, 2013
A provocative inside look at some of today’s most elusive and exclusive subjects through the lens of renowned fashion and portrait photographer and Vogue and Vanity Fair contributor Mario Testino. Known for the elegance, beauty, style, irreverence, and contradiction of his images, Testino gives us a career retrospective arranged in compelling visual stories.

British Royal Portraits: October 21, 2012 - June 16, 2013
Shortly after photographer Mario Testino went to England from his native Peru in 1976, he took his first photograph of British royalty, an impromptu shot of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and her grandson, Prince Edward, as they passed by crowds gathered in London’s streets to celebrate the marriage of HRH the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. It was the first of many photographs Testino has taken of members of the House of Windsor during the course of his significant career.

Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Royalty on Paper: October 21, 2012 - June 16, 2013
This exhibit features examples of the various ways in which European rulers and their aristocratic followers have been represented on paper from the sixteenth century to 1900.

Chinese Lacquer, 1200-1800: November 16, 2012 - September 8, 2013
Chinese lacquer, derived from the sap or resin of trees native to China, has been made for more than 2,000 years. Technically challenging and time-consuming to create, lacquer was considered a luxury material, on par with gold and silver, and was created for the Imperial court and wealthy elite, as well as scholars and eventually the merchant class.

Divine Depictions: November 16, 2012 - June 23, 2013
The official philosophy of Korea’s Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) was Confucianism. Buddhism was suppressed during this period, but in practice, many, including the royal family, continued to believe in Buddhism and to support temples financially. Many temples moved out of the towns to remote mountain locations during the Joseon Dynasty, but these paintings are evidence of the high quality of Buddhist art produced during this nominally Confucian era.

The Postcard Age: October 24, 2012 - April 14, 2013
In the decades around 1900, postcards were Twitter, e-mail, Flickr, and Facebook, all wrapped into one. A postcard craze swept the world, as billions of cards were bought and mailed, or just pasted into albums. Many famous artists turned to the new medium, but one of the great pleasures of postcards is how some of the most beautiful and interesting cards were made by artists whose names we barely know. This unprecedented exhibition traces how big historical and cultural themes of the modern age played out on the postcard's tiny canvas.

Daniel Rich - Platforms of Power: September 29, 2012 - March 31, 2013
Remembered by SMFA faculty and staff as a particularly disciplined student, New York painter Daniel Rich has spent a decade investigating the link between architecture, nationalism, and political power. Rich works from Google images, newspapers, and his own photographs. His labor-intensive and complicated system of hand-cutting stencils, color mixing, masking, and using a squeegee create incredibly smooth surfaces on his painstakingly precise acrylic paintings.

Artful Healing: September 15, 2012 - February 18, 2013
This exhibition features a range of works from participants in the MFA's Artful Healing program, which brings the MFA collection and Museum educators to three partner institutions - Massachusetts General Hospital, Children’s Hospital Boston, and Dana Farber Cancer Institute - to improve environments through art-making, promote healing, and inspire hope in patients, families, and staff.

Ori Gersht - History Repeating: August 25, 2012 - January 6, 2013
Ori Gersht is a conduit between the past and the present. With the latest digital technology, Gersht’s work poetically revisits sources ranging from 19th-century romantic landscape painting to the Holocaust, which imbue his work with a compelling tension between beauty and violence, memory and history. In twenty-five works, including large-scale photographs and films dating from the late 1990s to today, Gersht examines the evolving relationship between cultural, political, and art histories.

Cats to Crickets: July 21, 2012 - February 18, 2013
Urban commoners in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan, known as the Floating World, enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle that included the pleasure of the companionship of pet animals. Many woodblock prints of fashionable beauties show them accompanied by elegant, pampered pets that symbolize luxury and sensuality. Formerly a prerogative of the nobility, pets were now available to newly affluent commoners as well.

Art of the White Mountains: July 14, 2012 - July 7, 2013
Beginning in the first decades of the nineteenth century, artists and writers were drawn to the pristine beauty of north New Hampshire's natural wonders: majestic peaks in the Franconia and Presidential ranges crowned by Mount Washington, the highest summit in the northeast; Crawford, Pinkham.

Edward Weston: Leaves of Grass: April 21, 2012 - December 31, 2012
In 1941, the Limited Editions Club of New York invited photographer Edward Weston to illustrate its deluxe edition of Walt Whitman's epic poem Leaves of Grass. The commission inspired Weston and his wife, Charis, to take a cross-country trip, throughout the South, the Mid-Atlantic states, New England, and back to California.

The Allure of Japan: March 24, 2012 - December 31, 2012
A fascination for all things Japanese swept the United States in the period around 1900. An influx of Japanese goods and emissaries into America sparked a wave of interest in a foreign culture once seen as impossibly remote. Artists and collectors gathered Japanese objects, studied Japanese traditions, and integrated Japanese styles and techniques into their own work.

Art of the Americas Wing November 20, 2010 - December 31, 2016
The centerpiece of the Museum of Fine Art's historic expansion is a spectacular new wing for the Art of the Americas collection, which will double the number of objects from the collection on view, including several large-scale masterpieces not displayed for decades.