sheer genius

Kriston brings the news that Joan Snyder has won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.  "Way to play the long game," he writes, noting that other, male, painters had earned riches from expressionistic painting while she and other female artists who had been there before were ignored.  I'd say that on a lesser but still significant note congratulations are also in order to the Danforth Museum of Art, which organized Snyder's retrospective that also appeared at the Jewish Museum in New York.  The International Association of Art Critics's New England chapter gave the Danforth's Director (and exhibition curator) Katharine French a second place finish for best show in the region devoted to a single artist during 2006.  French has done ambitious shows at the Danforth, as well as at Montserrat College of Art where she was before, but it still staggered me at the time that an exhibition important enough to deserve a fairly major New York venue was appearing locally at a small suburban museum housed (if memory serves) in a former school building.  In retrospect it's looking more and more like the Danforth scored a curatorial knockout with that show, and good for them: way to punch above your weight.