Friday’s Art Notes

‘Herring and Philosophy Club’, 2006 by Maira Kalman. Various Illuminations, a retrospective of Kalman’s narrative art work, opens today at the Jewish Museum in New York. Collection of Ellen and Roger Grimes. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum.

We’ll have an interview with Maira Kalman and a slide show of her works in the coming weeks.

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Bob Dylan has been given permission to play concerts in China, as long as he plays songs that have been pre-approved by the government, via Rolling Stone.

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Jennifer Egan won the National Book Critics Circle Award Thursday night for her experimental novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, via The New York Times.

Jeffrey Brown talked to Egan about her book back in July.

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An upcoming exhibit organized by the Smithsonian Institution is under fire from archaeologists who dispute the manner in which artifacts were recovered from a Javanese shipwreck, via The New York Times’ Arts Beat.

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Meanwhile, the Smithsonian is sending a curator to Madison, Wisc., to collect the signs made by citizens protesting the elimination of collective barganing rights for state employees, via CNN.

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The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has returned a traditional headdress to a clan of the Tlingit tribe in Alaska that its had in its collection since the 1950s, via the Richmond Times-Dispatch.