Murray Whyte

3 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Murray Whyte |Billy Baker

IPSWICH — “Welcome to the most exclusive pub in the world,” said Eamon Murray, the fuzzy-haired bodhrán player for the Irish band Beoga, speaking into the mic. He wasn’t exaggerating. On Friday night, Beoga was warming up the small crowd assembled here, in “The Old Phone,” a pop-up Irish pub built in an Ipswich parking lot for the evening’s main event: superstar Ed Sheeran.

3 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Murray Whyte

In 1890, the French critic and poet Gabriel-Albert Aurier cast Vincent van Gogh among “Les Isolés” — a hermetic, socially stunted brand of artist for whom human company was little more than interruption to the thrumming genius of their solipsism. Surely no gadabout, van Gogh took issue with it all the same, though the brooding loner cliché has stuck fast to him.

4 weeks ago | bostonglobe.com | Murray Whyte

On a chilly February afternoon at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Jill Medvedow, its long-time director, walked into a gallery and stepped 27 years backward in time. A few hours later, “Believers: Artists and the Shakers” would open with a roster of many of the same artists Medvedow had hosted at her first-ever exhibition as the ICA’s new director in 1998. That show, “The Quiet in the Land,” was about the Shakers, too, and the symmetry is no coincidence.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Murray Whyte

Sarah Sze, the New York-based installation artist who represented the United States at the Venice Bienniale of Art in 2013, is the inaugural winner of the $100,000 Meraki Artist Award. The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston will administer the new prize, which will be awarded annually for at least the next 10 years.

1 month ago | bostonglobe.com | Murray Whyte

In 1901, Edvard Munch’s “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones),” a chillingly enigmatic 1892 painting of a man and woman — Husband and wife? Lovers? Complete strangers? — poised on a rocky beach with their back to the viewer was en route to an exhibition meant to capitalize on the artist’s burgeoning reputation. But engine failure on the small frigate that was carrying it caused the boat to explode, sending it, and the painting, to the bottom of the sea. It was never seen again.