Boca Raton Museum of Art Senior Curator Wendy M. Blazer takes us on a video tour of the “Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer”. She discusses how the photos came about, and the impact of young Elvis Presley at the time they were taken:

Click here to find out more about the exhibit

We begin with a history lesson: Elvis was famous. He was the best peformer ever. He loved shiny coats. The end.

Works for me.

So, the kids went to Vegas to meet the very, very Elvis-like Adam Lambert, their mentor for the week. This is a great choice because Elvis’ black leather with some gold lame hiding under his coat. Today, Adam looks like Heat Miser’s goth cousin.  This could be interesting, because the judges keep telling people not to be theatrical, and Adam is all about the theatrics, the different, the screwing the “commercial” and letting the artsy freak flag fly if it fits the mood of the song. Simon’s gonna freak.

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Photos: A look back at Elvis

Thankyouverymuch, King!

Seventy-five years ago today, one Elvis Aaron Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and it’s hard to imagine pop culture — music, movies, fashion, velvet paintings — without him.

So on what would have been his birthday, we offer 75 reasons why Elvis has never really left the building.
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By GLENN GARVIN

BIG SCREEN

Daybreakers stars Ethan Hawke and comes out Friday. (Lionsgate Pictures)

Daybreakers (R) — In the near future, a scientist (Ethan Hawke) tries to find a cure for a plague that has turned the bulk of the human population into vampires, making the remaining few people priceless sources of nourishment for the bloodsuckers.

Leap Year (PG) — Amy Adams stars as a woman tired of waiting for her longtime boyfriend (Matthew Goode) to propose, so she hatches a scheme to make sure they spend Feb. 29 in Ireland, where tradition allows women to propose. Directed by Anand Tucker (Shopgirl).

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Yves Saint Laurent, the highest-earning dead celebrity, according to 'Forbes'. (AP)

According to Forbes magazine, the richest dead celebrity isn’t Michael Jackson.

Although the King of Pop’s estate has been big news since his death in June, the top-earning dead celebrity is French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. Forbes released its ninth annual poll Wednesday.

According to the magazine, Laurent earned $350 million in the past year. Much of his estate was auctioned off at Christie’s in February. Laurent died of brain cancer in June 2008.

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein rank second with combined earnings of $235 million, followed by Jackson with $90 million, Elvis Presley with $55 million and J.R.R. Tolkien with $50 million. Charles Schulz, John Lennon, Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, Albert Einstein and Michael Crichton round out the top 10 list.

Larry Knechtel's career stretched from Elvis Presley to the Dixie Chicks. (Photo courtesy LarryKnechtel.com)

Larry Knechtel, a Grammy award-winning keyboardist who accompanied big-name musicians such as Elvis Presley, Ray Charles and the Dixie Chicks, is dead at 69.

Knechtel, who moved to Yakima in 2003, died Thursday at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital of an apparent heart attack. His death was confirmed by a spokesman for Valley Hills Funeral Home.

Knechtel was born in Bell, Calif., and performed live and in studio recordings with a wide range of artists, including Neil Diamond, Randy Newman, Ray Charles, The Beach Boys, The Doors, Elvis Presley, Hank Williams Jr. and Elvis Costello.

He earned a Grammy award for his arrangement of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” played keyboard on the Dixie Chicks’ Grammy award-winning album “Taking the Long Way” and performed on the Hammond organ for the group’s tour of the same name.
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — In the days after Michael Jackson’s death, Joann Smith couldn’t turn off her TV. She felt she was reliving the pain of her own idol’s death almost 32 years ago — Elvis Presley.

“I said ‘I can’t believe it’s happening again,’” Smith recalled. “It hurt, it really did. Even though I wasn’t a Michael Jackson fan, I could feel the pain because it happened to somebody I had loved, and I know what his family and his fans were going through.”

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The Boca Raton Museum of Art has released its exhibition schedule for the 2009-2010 season:

September 9-November 8, 2009

Gary T. Erbe: Forty Year Retrospective

A showcase of more than sixty trompe l’oeil paintings drawn from private and public collections, by this self-taught artist. Gary Erbe (born in Union City, NJ 1944- ) is internationally recognized for his realistic style of painting and has exhibited throughout the United States. Trompe l’oeil (to fool the eye) is illusionist painting that goes back to ancient Rome, 17th-century Dutch painting, and 19th-century American painting. Erbe works in a painstaking technique building up layers of thin color glazes to achieve the illusion of real depth and volume in his painting. As exercises in virtuosity, many works take up to a year to complete. This forty-year retrospective presents Erbe’s best work depicting pop culture of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s including his collage paintings meticulously recorded from Erbe’s own constructed and arranged tableaux.

September 9-November 8, 2009

Clyde Butcher: Wilderness Visions

Clyde Butcher’s compelling black and white photographs chronicle some of America’s most beautiful and complex ecosystems. For more than thirty years, self-taught photographer Butcher (American, born Kansas City, Missouri 1944- ) has been preserving the untouched landscape on film, and for twenty of those years he has concentrated on Florida. The exquisite beauty of his work draws the viewer into a relationship with nature. His images are captured with 8×10 inch, 11×14 inch, and 16 x 20 inch view cameras. The large format allows him to express in elaborate detail the textures that distinguish the beauty of the landscape. This exhibition presents work from the last twenty-five years ranging from the forests of the Pacific Northwest, to the rocky country of Utah and Colorado, to the woodlands of the Chesapeake region and the wetlands of Florida. This exhibition is organized by the Boca Raton Museum of Art.

September 9-November 8, 2009

Stephen Althouse: Tools and Shrouds

This exhibition debuts a series of 35 large format black and white photographs by Stephan Althouse completed over the last decade. Althouse transforms familiar objects into symbols of human experience and spiritual striving. Born in Washington DC in 1948, Althouse grew up in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he trained as a sculptor. The product of a Quaker education, Althouse received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, and studied sculpture at Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia. The sculptural tradition of making and manipulating subject matter is carried over in his photography, and is further explored in these enigmatic and powerful images. This exhibition is organized by the Boca Raton Museum of Art.

September 9, 2009-July 18, 2010

Late 20th Century Abstraction: Works from the Permanent Collection

Thirty important paintings and works on paper reveal how pervasive abstraction became following mid-century and the many ways in which it continues to be a viable and vital artistic expression. The exhibition will show works representative of color field painting, lyrical abstraction, minimalism, and Op art, represented not only by such canonical figures as Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, and Richard Anuszkiewicz, but also others who played a vital role in the development of abstraction. The exhibition seeks to unveil some of the pluralistic ways in which abstraction developed after 1950 by examining works in the Museum’s collection.

November 17, 2009- January 10, 2010

An Unfinished Conversation: Collecting Enrique Martinez Celaya

Drawn from the private collection of Los Angeles film director Martin Brest, this exhibition of 13 enigmatic works by Enrique Martinez Celaya reveals the artist’s complex cross-disciplinary approach to art-making while it explores themes such as Memory, Witness, Voyage, Exile, Isolation, Loneliness, and Coming of Age as threaded throughout the artist’s body of work.

November 17, 2009-June 13, 2010

Why Tribal? African, Oceanic and Meso-American Treasures

In the first decade of the twentieth century, tribal sculpture was “discovered” by modern artists. These objects — particularly those of Africa, Oceania, and Meso-America — suddenly became a crucial influence to modern art. “Primitivism” influenced the works of Gauguin, the Fauves, Picasso, Brancusi, the German Expressionists, Modigliani, Klee, Giacometti, the Surrealists, and the Abstract Expressionists, as well as contemporary artists and art movements including earthworks, shamanism, and ritual-inspired performance.

January 20-April 11, 2010

The Magical World of M.C. Escher

The unforgettable visual puzzles and impossible structures of the Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) have earned Escher worldwide acclaim. Printmaker, draftsman, book illustrator and muralist M.C. Escher became one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, and his graphic works are recognized worldwide. This retrospective exhibition is one of the most comprehensive and important exhibitions of Escher’s work ever shown in the United States. It will present more than 140 rare original artworks ą including the artist’s original drawings, watercolors, prints, wood blocks, studio furniture, tool cabinet and memorabilia ą from the M.C. Escher Family Collection, previously on loan to the Hague Museum.

April 20-June 13, 2010

Elvis at 21: New York to Memphis

In 1956, a twenty-one-year-old Elvis Presley was at the beginning of his remarkable career. Up-and-coming photographer Alfred Wertheimer (American, 1929- ) was asked by Presley’s new label, RCA Victor, to photograph the “Hillbilly Cat” rising star from Mississippi. Wertheimer traveled with Elvis Presley, capturing the unguarded moments in Elvis’s life during that crucial year, a year that took him from Tupelo, Mississippi to the silver screen, and to the verge of international stardom and his crowning as “The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” These Wertheimer classic images represent the only candid photos of Elvis ever taken. Shortly after, “the Colonel” restricted access to the young singer. From backstage to onstage, from piano benches to Harleys, from on-the-road to screaming fans, Elvis at 21 presents forty large-format photographs that chronicle with cinematic luminosity, a remarkable time when Elvis could sit alone at a drugstore lunch counter.

April 20- June 13, 2010

Remembering Stanley Boxer

New York native Stanley Boxer (1926-2000) is best known for his large scale abstract paintings which have a rich sculptural quality produced by thick, impasto brushwork. This retrospective exhibition features 50 paintings and 13 sculptures dating from 1946 through 2000. Boxer’s paintings were championed by American modernist critic Clement Greenberg (1906-1994), famous for his insistence that painters should eliminate subject matter in their work, aiming instead for the purity of abstraction. Boxer studied at the Art Students League and began exhibiting in New York in 1953. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975, and elected to the National Academy of Design in 1993, Boxer became one of America’s most eminent mid-century abstract painters, with works now held by every major museum in America including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.