Welcome to The ARTery

Welcome to The ARTery, Boston’s newest arts website. We hope it’s the first of many visits.

The ARTery continues WBUR’s commitment to covering the richness of New England’s arts offerings, from Symphony Hall or the Museum of Fine Arts to the Honk Festival in Davis Square or a hip-hop group we’re excited about. Former Boston Globe television and theater critic Ed Siegel will be a critic at large for the site and arts writer Greg Cook (and an artist in his own right) will be filing regular reviews, features and news stories.

As you can see on today’s page, we have reviews of  the Anders Zorn exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Huntington Theatre Company's imaginative new production of "A Raisin in the Sun," SpeakEasy Stage Company's production of Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Clybourne Park," and George Saunders' best-seller, "Tenth of December." There are reports on the Boston Flower and Garden Show, an Irish rock band Enter the Haggis and the Danish Dance Theatre, both visiting the area. One of our contributors reacts to the closing of a beloved Longy program in Cambridge. You can also click on any of the icons to take you to the area’s best Sights, Sounds, Screens, Stages, Words and Experiences.We’ll also bring you the best from WBUR-FM — check out Andrea Shea's report on this summer's Outside the Box arts festival — along with the latest news and features from NPR. There will be other contributors as well – some you know, some you’re meeting for the first time. Many of them are people who work in the arts world, others write about the arts, some do both.

The focus is local and we’ll have the latest listings from our friends at ArtsBoston, as well as our own To Do list. But the scope reaches beyond New England. We’ll continue to bring you all the latest arts stories from NPR. And occasionally we’ll read or see something ourselves that we think you should know about, such as HBO’s exemplary miniseries, “Parade’s End.”

And let us know what excites you about the arts in the area. We want The ARTery to be as interactive as possible. Leave a comment in the box below or at the end of any of our posts. Hopefully you’ll be a little more sophisticated than Seth MacFarlane, but in any case we want you to have fun when you visit The ARTery. We’re certainly enjoying bringing it to you.